Remember the post about the people in Albany who do the Stations of the Cross in clown gear?
When you think you have seen it all… a reader comes around with this sort of thing (edited). This is from St. Louis and the Washington University Catholic Student Center.
To be fair, it is juxtaposed with a lecture by Peter Kreeft and an ad for confessions.
A student sent me this text. I found the advert on the website of the Student Center.
Yoga Stations of the Cross Tonight!
Wednesday, March 23rd, 7:15pm, CSC Commons
Join us for a contemporary meditative experience of the Stations of the Cross that involves body movement, prayer, meditative music & pictures, and reflections. This CSC original combines traditional images and reflections of the Stations of the Cross with a unique way of feeling the suffering of Christ’s Passion in your own body through Yoga poses that spur a prayerful experience.
All are welcome to attend, please bring your own yoga mat. No experience necessary, there will be a brief instructional time at the beginning to go through the yoga poses before beginning the prayerful experience.
Also, join us for Pi Pizza tomorrow from 11:30-1:30!
The CSC Staff
The physical dimension of yoga is not so objectionable… though … with Stations of the Cross…. iust don’t know. That doesn’t seem right to me.
Holy Church has warned us about the spiritual dimensions of yoga in a document about various “new age” phenomena.
Yoga, zen, transcendental meditation and tantric exercises lead to an experience of self-fulfilment or enlightenment. Peak-experiences (reliving one’s birth, travelling to the gates of death, biofeedback, dance and even drugs – anything which can provoke an altered state of consciousness) are believed to lead to unity and enlightenment. Since there is only one Mind, some people can be channels for higher beings. Every part of this single universal being has contact with every other part. The classic approach in New Age is transpersonal psychology, whose main concepts are the Universal Mind, the Higher Self, the collective and personal unconscious and the individual ego. The Higher Self is our real identity, a bridge between God as divine Mind and humanity. Spiritual development is contact with the Higher Self, which overcomes all forms of dualism between subject and object, life and death, psyche and soma, the self and the fragmentary aspects of the self. Our limited personality is like a shadow or a dream created by the real self. The Higher Self contains the memories of earlier (re-)incarnations.
I think it is a bad idea to join to something like Stations of the Cross an activity which has a clearly non-Christian connotation, a connotation as a matter of fact which has spiritually harmful implications for those involved with it on a spiritual level.
Clowns Stations … Yoga Station… what’s next? Dancing with the Stations?
I now begin the countdown clock for someone to post her defense of yoga.
In the meantime, check out today’s 5 minute LENTCAzT.
