On Wednesday of this past week the gospel of the day was taken from the Ash Wednesday mass. Jesus was reminding his listeners that we need to do our spiritual practices such as prayer, fasting and almsgiving for the right reasons, and not for an external audience, not to win the praise or admiration of others. He was making a distinction between performative religion and transformative religion.
One for the first Corpus Christi masses I concelebrated as a newly ordained priest concluded with a procession through the streets of Johannesburg early on one of the coldest mornings of an early Winter. The students were still asleep, no shops were open, and the streets were deserted. Ten minutes into holding onto a cold metal monstrance, with a cold wind blowing through the canyons of our city centre, I began to ask who I was doing this for? Out of habit or tradition? To give witness, and if so, to whom? Was I helping to transform people’s lives or was I just performing my religion? Are things that we do as individuals or even as a community that are performative and not transformative?
Transformative religion or transformative spiritual practices are those which we consciously and deliberately do to grow in our relationship with God, to become more Christ-like. To return to the gospel, Jesus said that there is a spiritual purpose to prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and to achieve those purposes we need to be mindful of our desires and of our intentions. We can do good things but not draw any benefit from them because we do not know why we are doing them.
I would like to propose that each one of us do a spiritual inventory, that is, write out what kind of things we do in the realm of church and prayer, and then identify what kind of benefit we would like to achieve from that particular practice. We may find that we are doing things out of habit, with no spiritual benefits. That is not to say that we necessarily stop doing that thing, but we could do them differently or change our mindset towards them by doing them more intentionally.
