Oh, THAT word

A presentation, especially one an hour long, is an exercise in storytelling.  Your audience can't flip back a few pages to figure out what you are talking about if you are not clear, if you have not brought everyone with you by telling a story.  You can sometimes get away with breaking it up into small pieces so that the immediate perspective is obvious. (This is one of the errors that Power Point enables.)  You have to  tell a story that makes sense all the way through.

Like any other form of storytelling, backstory is an issue.  This is all the material you work out that underlies what you are presenting -- the hidden skeleton beneath the visible skin.  This could be biographies of main characters.  (Of course, the ultimate backstory builder was J.R.R. Tolkien - the formal backstory to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings is several volumes headed by the magnificent Simarillion.)  But you can't spend your time talking fascinating backstory instead of the story you are trying to tell.

One of my backstory issues is how far to go in the triplet of concepts that make up my definition of spirituality, designated by their Greek names:

• Eros -- desire
• Doxa -- knowledge, understanding or opinion
• Praxis -- a or action.

More about all three and how they fit together later.  But we have to deal with the top term, eros. 

Eros is the Greek word for desire, and is often used in connection with sexual desire, hence the term erotic. In fact,  many people find it difficult to grasp that larger meaning, but get stuck and zero in on that one concern.  They miss the point.

One of the best current writers on spirituality is Fr. Ron Rollheiser.  He makes this point in his 1982 essay Spirituality An Erotic Urge:

 ... When in fact someone in all sincerity believes that they are too full of life and eros, restlessness and complexity, to live the spiritual life they are being sucked in by a viral heresy which would have us believe that eros, the drive for life, is fundamentally irreligious. That is always a serious and costly mistake because eros is the very basis of the spiritual life and everyone, absolutely everyone, must live a spiritual life. 

What we do with the eros inside of us, be it heroic or perverse, is our spiritual life. The tragedy is that so many persons, full of riches and bursting with life, see this drive as something that is essentially irreligious, as something that sets them against what is spiritual. Nothing could be further from the truth. Our erotic pulses are God’s lure in us. They are our spirit! We experience them precisely as “spirit,” as that which makes us more than mere mammals. However, again and again, in my ministry and in my friendships I am confronted with persons who sincerely believe that they are unspiritual when, in fact, they are deeply spiritual persons. Unable to form a vision within which they can integrate their drive for life, celebration and sexuality, into a commitment which includes church-going, Christian sexual morality, prayer and involvement in a Eucharistic community, they are forced into a false dilemma: They must choose between a Christian commitment (which appears as erotic suicide) and a life partially away from Christian community, sacraments, prayer and morality, but within which they feel they can be fully human, sensual, sexual and celebrating. This dilemma, within which the church is seen as a parasite, sucking life’s pulse out of its subjects, then allows society’s amorality to parade itself as being ultimately life-giving and the true defender of eros.

Our discussion of spirituality must begin with eros, even if the term bothers or scares us.