We stand now looking back at a Western World and a Modern Church where we find the death of virtue, the death of truth, the culture of death and the rise of a sensuous delectation that flowers into a love of authoritarianism, belligerance and war which has all followed on from the death of the Soul in Modern Man. In the words of W B Yeats:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. [from the poem ‘The Second Coming’]

So let us consider briefly the Journey of the Soul as laid out by mystics, the Rites of Initiation and doctors of the Church who always remind us that we are to be storehouses of the true, the good and the beautiful for we are made in the image of God where the world must serve God as the body must serve the soul: “For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” [Mark 8:36]

The stages of RCIA reflect the call of the soul to journey through Purification, Illumination and Union and reveals the spiritual nature of the soul. A journey of self-discipline founded on the soul regaining its mastery over the body and so be able to give of itself in a denying of ego and self that brings about that permanence of virtuous character, that selflessness of spirit and that beauty of a holy soul united to a body stilled by a graced strengthened will. All of course made possible by the power of the Holy Spirit which is given to all who remain in a state of grace and given to us constantly and daily by Our Lord Jesus Christ.

There are times in our lives when we need time out from the busyness of the world’s demands so that we can reflect; and we do so through retreats, pilgrimages and ascetical practices found in spiritual places like Lough Derg, Croagh Patrick, the Desert, Mountain retreats, Holy Islands, Monasteries and Parish Retreats. In such spiritual places we find space and time for solitude that affords a spiritual disciplining of body, heart, mind and soul that:

• stills the senses - so we fast from the sensory distractions that can please the eyes but coarsen the heart;

• stills the passions – so we fast to still the appetites and desires so as to rule them;

• stills the distracted mind (‘monkey’ mind) – so we fast from constant mental stimulation that quietens a mind that often jumps about from one thing to another;

• stills the frenetic need for other people’s company – so we spend alone time in that solitariness that enables us to be with God and listen to what he wants personally to say to us in the fast from noise in the silence of solitude;

• stills therefore the appetites, the desires, the passions, the sensory, the rationalisation and the will of our corporeality that often times holds captive our soul - so that the powers of the soul come into their own and are strengthened and made more present to us as we discover the very mystery of our inner life.

In 1976 the ancient rite of the early Church for initiation into Christ and his Church was restored called the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA). The process was to be used at first for the unbaptised, but with the recognition under Pope St John Paul II that many Catholics had been Sacramentalised but very few had been evangelised or even catechised, the Pope called for a New Evangelisation. New Evangelisation had to start with Catholics themselves, for we cannot evangelise if we have not been evangelised ourselves and we cannot teach and hand on the faith if we have not been catechised ourselves!

So, the RCIA process becomes now the basis also for lapsed-Catholics, one-hour-a-week Catholics and for non-serving-Catholics. Consequently, from 1976 we have the following Structure of this process:

Precatechumenate [Pre-Evangelisation to Evangelisation]: Here a person comes to the Church as an Enquirer to explore: they are helped to consider obstacles and wounds both intellectual and moral such that it includes dealing with objections and obstacles to Faith (Apologetics) and dealing with wounds, attachments and misunderstandings (Spiritual healing).

Rite of Acceptance into the Catechumenate: Here a person, after the Rite of Acceptance, becomes a Catechumen (= one who listens and learns) who has accepted Our Lord Jesus Christ as true God and true Man and wishes to sit at the feet of Our Lord to learn from Him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Rite of Election into Purification and Enlightenment [Sacramentalisation]: Here a person, after the Rite of Election, is made one of the Elect (= one who is called and chosen) who is called to focus through reflection, conversion, commitment and preparation for the Sacraments.

Rite of Initiation into the mysteries of faith = Mystagogia: Here a person is initiated into the fullness of life in Christ through Baptism, Confirmation and the Eucharist and becomes a Neophyte.  The Neophyte begins a life-long process of living the Gospel, practicing the Faith and embracing ever more deeply the Sacraments such that there is a continuous:

Purification from sin (using the Sacrament of confession and acts of penance);

Illumination of the mysteries found in both Word (Scripture) and Sacrament which enlightens the daily events of their lives;

growing in Union with God’s love through adoration, meditation, contemplation and works of mercy (corporal and spiritual) as servants and witnesses to Christ in the home, in the parish, in the workplace and in the cultural life of family, friends and social fellowship - the work of the Lay Apostolate.

‘There is no sound tree that produces rotten fruit, nor again a rotten tree that produces sound fruit. For every tree can be told by its own fruit; people do not pick figs from thorns nor gather grapes from brambles’ [Luke 6:43-44]. So what are we to make of the State of the Catholic Church today? The hopes of the Second Vatican II have not brought us what John Henry Newman called a ‘Second Spring’ for the Catholic Church. Is it because for this renewal we have put our trust in structures, courses and programmes which consistently fail to deliver? Is it because we thought that modernising, vernacularising and simplifying the Catholic Faith would bring forth the fruit of renewal? Is it because we thought that if we brought the Church up to date everyone would clamber to come in? Did we think that if we engage the culture then we could engage the world and bring it all to God? If we did think these things then behold it did none of these things and indeed we do seem to have been the people who did think they could pick figs from thorns and gather grapes from brambles. Clearly what Vatican II said was not what we did and what we did was to sow and grow thorns and brambles, systems and programmes, organisations and institutions where there was no room for the soul, only the collective, and so there has been little to no fruit!

How many dioceses and parishes reduced RCIA to a one year conveyor belt? There are so many First Holy Commnion and Confirmation courses that have succumbed to the mechanised, depersonalised and factory model where people are sacramentalised but never really evangelised or catechised. Instead we give a collective emotionalism of feeling good together but very little of the pain of the truth challenging us and setting us free in a real, personal transformation that brings healing and conversion? Feelings have replace not just intellect but also the soul and unless we learn this we are going to be trapped in a descending vortex of intellectual, moral and spiritual mediocrity.

Our prayer life needs to be the place where our interior life and centre is sown, grown and blooms. It needs silence as all things grow in silence; it needs stillness so that the mind and the heart are not distracted by the senses, the passions and our physicality; and it needs solitude where and when we spend time alone with God. But prayer is also a journey of the soul and it begins but does not end with vocal prayer which requires of us, if we wish to discover the 9 levels of prayer, the 3 principles of prayer: that the mind be attentive, that the heart be devotional and the will be submissive. Without these three principles prayer can be a gabble of words, said with no thought and no heart and done if and when we feel like it and so be without any submission of the will to time, place and comportment.

Our Lord challenges us to go and find the centre of human life, that disicipline of the Spirit, whereby a disciple discovers the soul in human existence and draws from it the good things that God wants to pour into us, rather than the bad things that the world wants to fill us up with:

A good man draws what is good from the store of goodness in his heart; a bad man draws what is bad from the store of badness [Luke 6:45].