In ecclesiastical circles today one often hears the lament, “The faith is evaporating.” Despite an unprecedented “pastoral approach”, the faith of many Christians in fact appears to be” growing cold” or even, to put it colloquially, to be “evaporating”. There is talk of a great crisis of faith, among the clergy no less than among the laity.
This loss of faith, which is so often lamented in the West, stands nevertheless in contrast to a seemingly paradoxical fact: This same Western world is simultaneously producing an immense stream of theological and, above all, spiritual literature, which swells year after year with thousands of new titles. To be sure, among them are many ephemeral fads created solely to be marketed. Yet numerous classical works of spirituality, too, are being critically edited and translated into all the European languages, so that the modern reader has available to him a wealth of spiritual writings that no one in antiquity would even have dreamed of.
This abundance would really have to be taken as the sign of an unprecedented flourishing of the spiritual life — were it not for the aforementioned loss of faith. This flood of books, therefore, is probably rather the sign of a restless search that still somehow does not seem to reach its goal. Many, of course, read these writings, and they may also marvel at the wisdom of the Fathers yet in their personal lives nothing changes. Somehow the key to these treasures of tradition has been lost. Scholars speak in this regard of a break in tradition, which has opened up a chasm between the present and the past.
Many sense this, even if they are unable to formulate the problem as such. A feeling of discontent grips ever-larger circles. People look for a way out of the spiritual crisis, which many then think they have found (appealing to a very broad notion of ecumenism) in an openness to the non-Christian religions. The extremely wide assortment of “spiritual masters” of various schools makes easier that first step beyond the boundaries of one’s own religion, in a way that the readers do not suspect. Then, too, those who are searching hungrily encounter a gigantic market of literature, ranging from the” spiritual” through the “esoteric”. And many think that they have even found there what they had looked for in vain within Christianity, or else what was supposedly never there in the first place.
It is by no means our intention to do battle with this sort of “ecumenism”. We will only formulate a few questions at the end and briefly sketch the answer that the Fathers might well have given. This book is concerned with giving a genuinely Christian answer to the spiritual search of many believers. And a “practical” one, at that: that is, it should point out a “way” — rooted in Scripture and the original tradition — that enables a Christian to “practice” his faith in a manner that is in keeping with the contents of the faith!
For there is a very simple answer to the perplexing question, why the faith of an increasing number of Christians is “evaporating” despite all efforts to enliven it — an answer that perhaps does not contain the entire truth about the causes of the crisis, but which nonetheless indicates a way out. The faith “evaporates” when it is no longer practiced—in a way that accords with its essence. “Praxis” here does not mean the various forms of “social action” that perennially have been the obvious expression of Christian agape. However indispensable this “outreach” is, it becomes merely external, or (as a flight into activism) even a subtle form of acedia, of boredom, whenever there is no longer any corresponding “reach within”.
~Gabriel Bunge, Earthen Vessels: The Practice of Personal Prayer according to the Patristic Tradition
