Small and great alike, all are greedy for gain; prophet and priest, all practice fraud.  They would repair, as though it were nought, the injury to my people: “Peace, peace!" they say, though there is no peace.  They are odious; they have done abominable things, yet they are not at all ashamed, they know not how to blush. Jeremiah 6:12-15

The trusted advice of religious elders is a key component in the discernment of spiritual things. Any discernment process should include a point of reference outside oneself, whether a person in authority or an expert source on a particular subject.  If we want to buy the right car we consult car-buying guides, talk to our mechanic and ask people who own the car we want to buy. It only makes sense. 

The same is true in spiritual matters. We need to take the time to study an issue before embracing something wholeheartedly, and be willing to always reconsider. After all, the stakes are much higher in matters of the soul. But what happens when our trusted religious experts have fallen into error themselves through culpable ignorance or denial?

As usual, the Holy Spirit has been teaching me what the topic of my next report should include. This report deals with how denial prevents the opportunity for true discernment.

June is retreat time for me.  This June I decided to attend a weekend retreat and arrived at a local retreat house to find a noted Catholic priest, national writer and speaker planning a weekend of healing sessions with a Reiki master. When I gently spoke to him, warning him of the dangers of Reiki, he told me repeatedly that the healing would be fine, that I simply needed to let go, trust and “look into the light”. As his background is in psychological healing, I had the distinct impression I was being sized up as an alarmist and in need of psychological healing myself (aren’t we all?).  So, I left that retreat and went instead to a second retreat two weeks later. 

This time the retreat seemed to go well until I had a private talk with the priest/leader about a particular cross in my spiritual life.  He told me that the Cross only happened at the beginning of the spiritual journey. He told me I needed to descend from my ego into my deepest Self, which was God, and lift myself up by the bootstraps.  He began to kick me in the shins numerous times (I wish I were wearing boots), telling me to get moving and change.  Numerous kicks, mind you, and not so gently ones at that. The priest talked the remainder of the retreat about self-help while orthodox retreatants grew saddened as they recognized much New Age jargon.

Then, shortly thereafter, I received an e-mail from a popular orthodox Catholic leader quoting another leader of a cult movement within the Church. I responded that he should look into this movement more closely as I had spent a year of my life living with members of the cult as a college student and had first-hand experience witnessing their cultic psychology and practices as well as their abuse of personal friends.  I was accused by this young, eager and devout leader of libel, exaggeration, and various other sins and character faults.  That the movement was orthodox and well accepted were the two criteria that justified my condemnation as uncharitable and perhaps malicious.

And so, “there we have it”, as the befuddled Emperor Franz Joseph humorously intones in the film, “Amadeus”. In a short four weeks, I had experienced three distinct episodes involving Catholic spiritual leaders, from liberal to conservative, who had embraced contemporary ideas and fallen into serious error due to the lack of discernment caused by ignorance or denial.

Why serious? The sin of culpable ignorance on the part of someone with care or influence over many souls is, of course, serious. If we cannot trust our shepherds, then whom can we trust?

And what does this have to do with the New Age? These leaders were relying on standard psychology or proven method or orthodox movements. How are they “New Age”?

The key characteristic of all three situations is the sin of denial.

Someone once said that denial is the only sin. That’s not true, of course, but it might be rephrased as follows: denial of evil is a sin against the Holy Spirit when it a refusal to be open to correction. This denial is a willful one of even the possibility of sin, simple error or evil itself, and is a kind of arrogant presumption.    

Socrates was sentenced to death simply because he challenged the presumptions of his day with thoughtful questions, asking his colleagues to merely prove their points. Jeremiah spoke against the leaders of his day who wanted to “make nice” as an Italian relative of mine used is say.  When confronted with the evils of their day, they chose the easy way out – assuring themselves and others that things were not so bad. They had a psychological, political and financial investment in the status quo.  After all, if God was about to destroy Jerusalem because of its sins and the sins of its leaders, what did that make them? Their blindness rested on the need to defend their self image. They had identified with their own ideas and vices.

At this time, when the human potential movement and New Age spirituality have so infiltrated our awareness and our characters, denial is the chief characteristic of Catholic movements and philosophies that are false. On the liberal side, sin and evil are passé and the “Self”, which is now god, need only will itself to perfection through psychological insight and self-help models. On the “orthodox” side, the pursuit of spiritual perfection leads to a rigidity that emphasizes spirit over matter (the old gnostic heresy). Orthodox communities have fallen into a false sense of perfectionism, desire for purity and separateness, and cultic black and white thinking.  In the eagerness to embrace tradition, a lack of training in philosophy and discernment coupled with naïve devotionalism, have led to intemperance and exaggeration. Some new orthodox are even turning to special communities, home schooling, herbal healing, midwifery and doomsday novels - none of which are bad in and of themselves.  But, these dear folks remind me so much of my New Age friends of the 70's and 80's who were “into” Edgar Cayce, planetary changes and natural healing. They are the very definition of New Age. Other orthodox leaders in healing ministries have fallen prey to mind techniques, hypnotherapy, energy channeling and group process work. They know more than we, but, they should know better.

What are maladjusted, uncharitable people like you and me to do in the face of the New Age deluge of error now embraced by Ph.D. theologians, psychologists and popular cult leaders? A friend of mine who rivals Jeremiah in her frankness and bothersome cajoling regarding the heresies of the day told another friend she was “tired of playing bishop”.  Her friend replied, “Where would the Church be without people like Catherine of Siena who was not afraid of telling the Pope he was wrong?”  While we work out our own salvation in fear and trembling, we continue to speak for the Truth who will set us all free. Oh, and we speak softly and buy thick boots.

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