A Letter to Fellow
Compañeros
from Frs. Ed McMahon & Pete
Campbell
By way of personal introduction, Ed was
born in 1930, entered the California Province of the Society of Jesus
in 1953. Pete was born in 1935 and entered the novitiate in
1952. We were both ordained in 1965 and left in 1978, continuing
to remain priests. After 25 years as Jesuits and 50 years of team
research, we believe that what we have discovered is both consistent
with goals of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises and offers a more
contemporary model for ongoing, healthy Christian spirituality.
It begins to lay down a far more solid foundation within the human body
itself, using concrete body-learnings which support healthy
personal growth and community development as well as their experiential
integration into living out our Christian faith.
Both of us have doctoral degrees in the
psychological study of religion from the University of Ottawa,
Canada. While working with individuals and small groups in Canada
during our early years of research, we began identifying what
contributes to human health and wholeness within religion and religious
practices—as well as what easily degenerates into pathology.
Working with the Canadian Leadership Conference of Major Superiors
and the Canadian Catholic Health Association, in the 1960’s and
‘70’s, along with students in the graduate school at the
University, we recognized that Christian spiritual renewal required far
more than a mere superficial tinkering around the edges with
liturgical and catechetical changes. It needed the development of
an entirely new perspective on spirituality and the body’s role
in spiritual growth.
We began to realize that a profound, organic
process of psychological transformation arising from within the
human organism itself needed to be unearthed and better
understood. We recognized from our early doctoral research, that
the magnificent documents of Vatican II, powerful and inspiring though
they might be, were still in themselves incapable of renewing the Body
of Christ spiritually, because the theologians and bishops who created
them had not yet rediscovered or learned how to integrate the lost
body-connection within Christian spirituality—St. Paul’s: “... it
is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me ...” (Gal
2:20 RSV)
This realization led us to dedicating
our lives to an ongoing research project through experiments in
pastoral care. We have learned from years of experience how our
recently published workbook, Rediscovering the Lost Body-Connection
Within Christian Spirituality, can help put together a more
embodied pedagogy of St. Paul’s Christology, developed through the
unfolding of a simple, inner body-process of emotional health and human
wholeness. Such experience can emerge from within today’s more
evolved understanding of what it means to be human, while at the same
time still remaining totally dependent upon and open to the felt
faith-experience of God’s grace as integral to the process. It
offers a more adapted, compatible way for companioning twenty-first
century Christians of all ages through the Spiritual Exercises of St.
Ignatius. It enables Christians to tap into their own body’s
knowing, their felt-senses (to use a technical psychological
term) in order to discern the graced inner movement of God’s
Presence in their lives. Such experience differs
radically from one’s intellectual grasp of the theological concepts
of Grace, Trinity, Redemption, etc...
Our workbook offers the reader a
personal experience of how a spirituality, based upon this more
organic pedagogy, can be fostered and nurtured within Christian
communities. The felt-sense for being an integral part of
something greater than ourselves emerges from an experience known
within the body. It offers the essential foundation for
creative, healthy, peace-filled community at all social levels
beginning first—inside ourselves! At the same time, such visceral
awareness anchors our sense for the common good—the vital,
organic ground from which productive social development can move
forward into justice, equality, diminished violence and peace.
We have found that before Christians
can truly understand and foster life-giving social environments, they
must first grow into a clearer understanding and develop the
body-habit of caring for the workings of their own inner
environments. That has been and still remains to this day the
missing link in most pastoral care, religious education and
formation! For this reason, our lifelong research has turned our
attention toward better understanding the body’s pivotal role in
spiritual development, while at the same time discovering and
implementing simple, practical steps needed to bring such body-knowing
into everyday Christian living.
To put it briefly: How can we ask
children, students, parishioners, seminarians or novices to develop a
healthy, loving relationship “in Christ” if, at the same time, we don’t
companion them in discovering this same caring, healthy relationship to
their own bodies and feelings as living membranes within the
Body of the Whole Christ? The two of us slowly began to realize
that in religious life we had more often than not put the cart before
the horse. This realization came home to us when reading a
striking observation of psychologist, Abraham Maslow when he commented:
“I often meet people who are so compulsively other-centered that they
scarcely know what’s going on inside themselves.”
The process we have developed is based
upon an organic, whole-person experience which has matured well beyond
the dualistic cosmology and philosophy of the 1500’s and includes the
body’s role in healthy spiritual development. This
well-researched process of congruence within the person offers
a far more physically balanced and accessible foundation for a
psychologically healthy Christian spirituality. We have
discovered both a theoretical model as well as practical steps toward
developing a sound, new relationship to our own body and feelings that
can enable Christians of all ages to tap into their own body’s
knowing. Please refer to our workbook’s Body Learnings and
subsequent chapters exploring each learning for a more detailed
description of a Christian Bio-Spirituality based upon this more
organic pedagogy.
As we pursued doctoral research into
the psychological study of spirituality and religion in the 1960’s we
found professional support through our personal contacts with Drs. Carl
Rogers, and Eugene Gendlin who developed what he called the
Focusing process. During this period, we also began to form a
better understanding of what we felt had been missing throughout our
Jesuit novitiate and tertianship training, as well as within our annual
and 30 day retreats. It was the lack of an effective integration
of specific body-learnings which we have now summarized more
clearly within our current workbook. By spelling out the
practical steps needed for a person to mature and grow into such
body-learnings, we began to recognize their potential contribution to
an even deeper exploration and understanding of the Ignatian Discernment
of Spirits. The lived experience of these body-learnings brings the
mystical vision of Ignatius right into the 21st century—especially for
those nurtured within the Ignatian tradition.
The seed for “Finding God in all
things” germinates within a healthy, loving relationship for one’s
own body and feelings which then becomes the incarnating matrix
for discovering our own bodies and selves within the Body of
Christ. As we summarize in the subtitle to our book: “The
Missing Link for Experiencing Yourself in the Body of the Whole Christ
is a Changing Relationship to Your Own Body.” The Contemplatio
ad Amorem can now be seeded throughout a life-long, developing
habit of maturing wholeness within our own body—“in Christ”—by
developing what we call, “the habit of noticing and nurturing your
important feelings.”
This profoundly human matrix, from
within which Ignatius began the Society’s own spirituality, must now,
in our experience, mature to include a sound, practical process
of healthy, emotional integration, experiencing God’s presence within
the loving presence we are able to bring into our own inner awareness
of noticing and nurturing our important feelings. Our workbook
offers a resource supporting just such integration. Within the
current evolution of religious education and formation, including those
who do “spiritual directing,” many have still not fully grasped
what needed actions have become necessary for the Church to move
forward beyond outmoded patterns from the past that no longer work for
us. It is too easy to sprinkle holy water over old patterns and
habits of control, “process-skipping” away from
developing any new habit of availability for grace in an organic way.
(cf. Chapters 13-16)
Therefore, many years ago while still
Jesuits, we reformulated the question this way: “What
psychologically sound process within the human organism itself
do we need to identify and access within each person as it impacts all
our relationships, in order to begin reconstructing a new,
incarnational spirituality within our own bodies as living, life-giving
cells within the Body of the Whole Christ?”
For this reason, instead of simply
pulling together another analysis of the problem or identifying missing
links that were being ignored, we chose something more practical for
individual personal use as well as for small groups. We have
lived with and explored this process for many years, constantly
learning from what worked and what didn’t, offering programs and
training in how to share this process with others. Finally,
twelve years ago we realized that the systems we were trying to work
within—such as weekend workshops or six day retreats—offered
insufficient time for the forming of this habit in the body that could
begin replacing old habits of “process-skipping”—cf. Chapt. 14.
So, we stopped working out of retreat
centers and moved, instead, into a more urban setting, offering 12,
once a week, 2 hour evening sessions out of our home before finally
moving to a local medical doctor’s health clinic where we had more
space and privacy for small group sessions. We now have 10
trained BioSpiritual Focusing companions in our current local area, who
help us with 20 new people every Fall during our three month
program. By spreading the sessions out over a longer period, each
participant has sufficient time to absorb the text, reading from their
own copy of our book and practicing the exercises at home. This,
along with weekly support within our small group sessions helps to
begin developing a new habit of noticing and nurturing
important feelings—the doorway into so many hidden stories within our
own bodies that need listening to “in Christ.”
Now, over a decade later, we feel
justified in publishing this workbook as an initial model, we believe,
for renewing a more complete Christian BioSpiritual perspective which
St. Paul, St. John and St. Ignatius attempted to pass on within
cultures as addicted to process-skipping as our own. What a
difference it would have made for us and many of you, our classmates,
both within and outside the Society, if we could have had this workbook
in the novitiate to continue using throughout our lives. Even
now, it can serve as a resource to be made available to students within
Christian universities and high schools, Newman Clubs at state colleges
and within neighborhood or parish groups. Our goal in all
this has been to help each reader begin sensing their living faith as
integral to the very experience of their own maturing emotional growth
as a more whole person.
A Spanish translation of this workbook
has already been completed by our Catholic BioSpiritual community in
Mexico City and should be available by June. The contact person
is: Gloría Montemayor, Galeana 83-1 San Jeronimo, Lidice,
D.F. 10200 MEXICO. email: <guemont@yahoo.com>. We have also mailed a copy
of the workbook to our classmate, Ed Thylstrup, S.J. in Taiwan.
The Taiwan Jesuits have already translated into Mandarin one of our
earlier books, BioSpirituality: Focusing as Way to
Grow—Loyola Press (1985). We told Ed that we also give them
permission to translate and publish our current book as well, using any
royalties to further their ministry in that province.
Finally, we sincerely hope this
workbook may become a resource for any among you who might be drawn to
it for personal use or within whatever ministries and outreach you may
have developed. It can be ordered on the web from our
distributor, Itasca Books. The link address for our webpage on
their site is:
Itasca Books: (phone)
1-800-901-3480
email)
<orders@itascabooks.com>
Finally, if any of you do work through
the book and want to get together next February 2012 at the annual
Compañeros meeting in Santa Cruz, we are open to sharing with
you in any way that might be useful. Just let Dave Van Etten know
by October so we can put it on our calendar.
With Warmest Regards in Christ,
Ed & Pete
Rev. Edwin M. McMahon, Ph.D.& Rev.
Peter A. Campbell, Ph.D.
12660 Red Chestnut Lane #25, Sonora, CA
95370—(phone & fax) 209-694-8667
(email) <pcampbel@inreach.com> (N.B. only one “L” in
Campbell)
