"Spirituality of Subtraction"

from Richard Rohr's "Price of Peoplehood "



The notion of a spirituality of subtraction comes from Meister Eckhart, the medieval Dominican mystic. He said the spiritual life has much more to do with subtraction than it does with addition. Yet I think Christians today are involved in great part in a spirituality of addition. The capitalist worldview is the only world most of us have ever known. We see reality, experiences, events, other people, things - in fact, everything - as objects for consumption. The nature of the capitalist mind is that things (and often people!) are there for me. Finally, even God becomes an object for our consumption. Remember the bumper sticker "I found it"? The Holy One becomes "it," a pronoun, a thing. Even the Lord becomes a consumer object that I can privately possess. Now that is surely heresy in any religion. You almost wonder if true spirituality is even possible in this culture. Everything gets turned around so that we're in the driver's sear: God, the Bible, the sacraments, the Church, people and prayer. Everything is there to foster my own ego and its need to feel good about itself.