Peter Campbell and Ed McMahon

http://westcoastcompanions.org/Campbell-McMahon.html

A Letter to Fellow Compaeros 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 practicesas well as what easily degenerates into pathology. Working with the Canadian Leadership Conference of Major Superiors and the Canadian Catholic Health Association, in the 1960s and 70s, 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 bodys 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 spiritualitySt. Pauls: ... 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. Pauls Christology, developed through the unfolding of a simple, inner body-process of emotional health and human wholeness. Such experience can emerge from within todays 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 faithexperience of Gods 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

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Peter Campbell and Ed McMahon

http://westcoastcompanions.org/Campbell-McMahon.html

enables Christians to tap into their own bodys knowing, their felt-senses (to use a technical psychological term) in order to discern the graced inner movement of Gods Presence in their lives. Such experience differs radically from ones 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 firstinside ourselves! At the same time, such visceral awareness anchors our sense for the common goodthe 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 bodys 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 dont 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 whats 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 1500s and includes the bodys 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 bodys knowing. Please refer to our workbooks 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 1960s 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 centuryespecially for those nurtured within the Ignatian tradition. The seed for Finding God in all things germinates within a healthy, loving relationship for ones 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 bodyin Christby developing what we call, the habit of noticing and nurturing your important feelings. This profoundly human matrix, from within which Ignatius began the Societys own spirituality, must now, in

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Peter Campbell and Ed McMahon

http://westcoastcompanions.org/Campbell-McMahon.html

our experience, mature to include a sound, practical process of healthy, emotional integration, experiencing Gods 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 didnt, 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 withinsuch as weekend workshops or six day retreatsoffered insufficient time for the forming of this habit in the body that could begin replacing old habits of process-skippingcf. 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 doctors 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 feelingsthe 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: Glora 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 GrowLoyola 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: http://www.itascabooks.com/index.cfm?page=Detail&isbn=978-1-934690-37-6 Itasca Books: (phone) 1-800-901-3480

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Peter Campbell and Ed McMahon

http://westcoastcompanions.org/Campbell-McMahon.html

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 Compaeros 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)

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