My Philosophy of Spiritual Formation

Definition
I define spiritual formation as the process of being formed by God into the very image of Christ as we are immersed in the streams of a wide orthodoxy, diving into intimacy with others and the Trinity. Or as Robert Mulholland succinctly expresses it, Spiritual formation is the “process of being conformed to the image of Christ for the sake of others." To put it in terms more familiar to the church, spiritual formation describes how discipleship happens.

Jesus said he came to bring life and life to its full (John 10:10). Living in the kingdom of heaven means living that eternal kind of life now. There is within us the desire for the depths of relationship with Christ that make this full, abundant life possible.

Deep calls to deep
at the thunder of your cataracts;
all your waves and your billows
have gone over me. Psalm 42:7 (NRSV)

Spiritual Lessons from Kung Fu Panda

Kung Fu Panda offers some lessons for spiritual formation for those with eyes to see. Here are some things to look for:

• Indirection

In Kung Fu Panda, Shifu cannot train Po directly. Po is out of shape and has never studied kung fu. He is not quick to learn. Shifu however discovers that to reach food Po can do amaizing things. So instead of getting Po to concentrate on kung fu, he gets him to concentrate on getting the food.

As Dallas Willard says, the spiritual life burns grace like a jet burns fuel. Without grace we cannot address the things that need transformation in our lives. We cannot address these needs head on. Instead through Spiritual Disciplines we place ourselves in a position where God can pour grace through us transforming us into something new.

• Freedom through discipline

After training, Shifu tells Po that he is free to eat the dumpling. It can't be that easy can it? Po has to use all of his skills to get the dumpling from Shifu.

Richard Foster writes in Life With God,

Again, Spiritual Disciplines involve doing what we can do to receive from God the power to do what we cannot do. And God graciously uses this process to produce in us the kind of person who automatically will do what needs to be done when it needs to be done.

This ability to do what needs to be done when it needs to be done is the true freedom in life. Freedom comes not from the absence of restraint but from the presence of discipline. Only the disciplined gymnast is free to score a perfect ten on the parallel bars. Only the disciplined violinist is free to play Pagannini's "Caprices." This, of course, is true in all of life, but it is never more true than in the spiritual life (18).

Saints of service

At first thought one might place Mother Teresa in the Social Justice stream of Christianity. As I think on her life though, I see a mix of influences, Holiness and Contemplative, but the most predominate being the Incarnational life.

“The Incarnational Stream of Christian life and faith,” says Foster, “focuses upon making present and visible the realm of the invisible spirit. This sacramental way of living addresses the crying need to experience God as truly manifest and notoriously active in daily life” (237).

In his appendix, Foster lists Mother Teresa as an example of Social Justice, but I find her actions more directed toward making the love of God manifest to the poor, making His Kingdom felt, than addressing the underlying causes of injustice. She made this sacramental way of life an entry point to the life of the Spirit and experienced it hand in hand with the contemplative life, calling her sisters “Contemplatives in the wold,” all the while demanding a high standard of holiness, determined to offer saints to Jesus.

Mother Teresa seemed always to hear Jesus calling her beyond herself. From her “second vocation to the poor,” to her abandoning her preferences and comforts to become a world media figure she was growing and stretching always. In her later years she perhaps took so hard a line on holiness she may have bordered on legalism were in not for her persistent love.

Mother Teresa would readily recognize the grace of God in her life from an early age. As young Agnes Bojaxhiu, daughter of Drana, grew up, her mother was a constant source of Formation for her. “At least once a week Drana would visit an old woman who had been abandoned by her family, to take her food an clean her house. She washed and fed and cared for File, an alcoholic woman covered with sores as if she was a small child” (Spink 7). Agnes accompanying her mother to visit File would create a powerful model for her as she later ministered to the poorest of the poor, lonely and forgotten. Her visits to the shrine of the Madonna of Letnice as a child would provide a conteplative basis for her life. She would identify herself always with the contemplative Thérèsa of Lisieux.

She was completely grounded in the institutional Catholic Church, first receiving formation in the Loreto order then creating the Missionaries of Charity as a Catholic Order. She was completely devoted to Catholic orthodoxy and the Pope, yet she ministered to, and cooperated with people from every creed.

Teresa always saw the political workings as the hand of God. She did not get involved in politics except to call for peace and love, trusting the leaders to do their duty in the end. She saw the crumbling of Communism as an opening door to spread tender love to the poor in those lands. Her ministry was not restricted to those who agreed with her, even staunch atheists would cooperate with her in Cuba, the Soviet, and other places.

In a wold of growing affluence and separation from the poor, her ministry to the poorest of the poor as though each one was Jesus in “distressing disguise” was and remains a prophetic word. She did much to proclaim the kingdom of God without preaching or giving an “altar call.”

Is there a difference between a saint and an ordinary person with an extraordinary desire and willingness to serve God? Mother Teresa was in her energy and determination a human dynamo, perhaps an extraordinary human power, but her formation in the selfless way of Christ, her consistent treatment of each individual as Christ in disguise shows her to be a saint. We are all called to such saintliness.

Elaine Martin is another such saint. Her faithfulness and fruit show her devotion to God. Her life of service to people shines as an example of the compassionate life. She grew up in a Lutheran home and appreciated her mother’s efforts to instill in her a spirituality.

It wasn’t until she went through a divorce that she began seeking a deeper relationship with God. Through a divorce support group at a church she found the depths she sought, along with the in-filling of the Spirit. The loneliness of the single life, the pain of divorce and concern for her family has been a challenge for her. She moved back to the Sebewaing area to be with her father before he died, caring for him, and praying him to Christ.

Over the years she has felt God call her to “come along side” individuals needing care and support. She has been a live in aide for many people. As a single woman she is surprised by the way God works, over recent years the people she has been directed to have been men. Sometimes her supportive relationships have raised eyebrows but she has remained faithful to do what God has called her to do.

She is a free spirit, at home anywhere with God. She goes where ever the Spirit directs her, so no one church has had a claim on her, though she lists many that have had a strong impact on her spiritually.

She is a prayer warrior and offers her devotion to God along with the person she is serving. She often makes use of the daily scriptures from the Book of Common Prayer we print in our bulletin, reading and praying with her neighbor each day. She is in her seventies and her neighbor, who she is serving is in his eighties. She remains vigorous and her service and support have been meaningful to me as her pastor.

Mother Teresa also challenges me. The service of the poorest of the poor, not just as though they were Christ, but actually seeing the suffering Christ in them, is a thought is forming and shaping me. I am wrestling lately with how meet the needs of the blue collar culture I am in. Mother Teresa challenges me to love them, though I gravitate to the intellectual and liberal postmodern crowd, she challenges me to see Christ wearing the blue collar garb of the workers in Sebewaing. Lord help me find ways to serve like Elaine and make of me a saint in the mold of Mother, with eyes only for you.

Service and hospitality

“Self Righteous service comes through human effort. It expends immense amounts of energy calculating and scheming how to render the service. Sociological charts and surveys are devised so we can “help those people.” True service comes from a relationship deep inside. We serve out of whispered promptings, divine urgings. Energy is expended but it is not the frantic energy of the flesh.”¹

Hospitality gives service a personality. It is warm and emotional in its connection to the basic human needs. As the disciple learns to understand his or her own dependence on God for basic needs, he and she also learns the beauty of providing for those needs in others. In essence hospitality is extending the borders of the heart, of the family to encompass the neighbor and stranger, the enemy and the friend.

“Our ‘dwelling pace’ may be physical: a room, apartment, or house. It may also be a metaphor for mental and motional ‘space.’ We can invite others into our inner world of thoughts and feelings, sharing gifts of the heart and mind. Gracious inner space gives others room to play, question and converse; room to be heard and understood; room to reveal themselves as they choose.”

I can’t understand the image of Christ as stranger. How could he come to those beloved disciples on the road to Emmaus unrecognized? How could he be naked, poor, imprisoned, and we not see him there? How could he, my dear heart, be the stinking, cursing, drunk and homeless? Could he be my neighbor John who riding is bicycle home from the bar, at two AM, went over the handlebars and broke his nose? Could it have been Jesus I drove home with tears in his eyes and pain in his body? It is hard for me to see Jesus there, not because I don’t think he would stoop so low, but because I love him and don’t want to see blood pour from his nose or tears from his eyes. What would it mean to see my Jesus in all those around me? Is he there in people I know, and who don’t even know him, or just in strangers? Does he visit in the familiar as well as the strange? Perhaps he does, perhaps his incarnation is both in us as his hands and feet and in the fleshly suffering of those around us. Perhaps his paschal mystery continues in all who are hurting, naked and abandoned, just as his advent happens in us as we engage them in service and hospitality.

Seeing our neighbors and strangers as Jesus can be difficult precisely because we cannot see Jesus as coming to us in the form of a sinner.

“What does it take to see to see in every other person a sister or brother? If we cannot truly accept our weaknesses as well as our gifts, we will be unable to love others in their brokenness and giftedness.

“We are speaking again of humility. A humble heart is hospitable. It accepts people as they are - a mix of familiar and unfamiliar, good and bad. Acceptance leaves others free to be themselves in our dwelling place. It does not require them to be like us. Our guest may be friend or total stranger, mentally impaired or emotionally estranged, different in race, faith, social circumstance, or political perspective. Hospitality means giving all guests the freedom to reveal themselves as they choose. A guest should not need to fear personal attack, rejection, or conversion efforts on the part of the host. Freedom is the medium of human exchange in true hospitality.”²

God is the great Host, his hospitality for us is unmatched. There are beautiful days when I am aware of God’s grace pervading my day - those times when he lays out a feast for my soul. I have experience reading books and feeling warmth fill my body, or praying the psalms and weeping at his goodness to me, or walking the fields at my grandparents’ farm knowing he was there ministering to me in the breeze. I am left with an overwhelming sense of gratitude � overwhelming in it’s emotion, humility and a small sadness. Thompson describes it in her travels in Scotland, and in her friend’s trip to Mexico, as they received the hospitality of the locals. “My friend felt a mixture of wonder, gratitude guilt and humility.”³ That is just what I feel when God lavishes his grace on me.

Maslow meets Johari

I have often wondered how to get people to open up, to explore the depths of our relationship together and our relationship with God. Could it be that I haven’t given enough room to those around me? Have I not invited them in to a house of hospitality even when I visit their houses or talk at the restaurant?

What if the way to get people to open up is by opening up yourself. This is what the Johari window describes as self disclosure. We can also provide room by meeting the felt needs, working our way up the Maslow pyramid, giving people room to hunger for more - more us, more God. A time may then come when they will gladly give up those needs to become a deeper disciple and know their true fulfillment comes from God. He has a way of overwhelming Maslow’s pyramid.

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1 Foster, Richard J. Celebration of Discipline. HarperCollins, 1978. Pg 128.

2 Thompson, Marjorie J. Soul Fest. Westminster John Knox Press. 1995. Pg134.

3 Thompson Pg126.

Formational Reading

"When we read a book [or a blog post], three intrinsic ... rules govern our study. The intrinsic rules may, in the beginning, necessitate three separate reading but in time can be done concurrently. The first reading involves understanding the book: what is the author saying? The second reading involves interpreting the book: what does the author mean? The third reading involves evaluating the book: is the author right or wrong? Most of us tend to do the third reading right away and often never do the first and second readings at all. We give a critical analysis of a book before we understand what it says. We judge a book to be right or wrong before we interpret its meaning. The wise writer of Ecclesiastes says that there is a time for every matter under heaven, and the time for critical analysis of a book comes after careful understanding and interpretation."

-Richard J Foster,
Celebration of Discipline
Chapter 5: The Discipline of Study

Frogs

This morning Foster went around with a pencil as a wand turning us all into frogs. When Ella turned him into a frog, he had a frog performance worthy of home video.

He reminded me of Richard Foster's treatment of study.
"The handiwork of the Creator can speak to us and teach us if we will listen. Martin Buber tells the story of the rabbi who went to a pond every day at dawn to learn "the song with which the frogs praise God."

The silent power of God

What is the purpose of pentecostal power? If it is mystical, then what is the purpose of contemplation? It desires to do. Foster calls the charismatic stream the power to do while the holiness tradition is the power to be. Being strongly rooted in the Pentecostal tradition, I can wonder if we’ve even begun to tap into a power to do. Looking at the bigger picture we can see we’re doing, the Assembly of God is growing by leaps and bounds especially world wide; at home much slower, but we are still the fastest growing denomination. Still when we look at local narratives we don’t always see it fleshed out. Am I any more empowered to do than my brothers who pastor other churches and do not claim the pentecostal experience?

Rolhieser tells of Daniel Berrigan’s response to the question of God’s presence in today’s world.

He simply told the audience how he, working in a hospice for the terminally ill, goes each week to spend some time sitting by the bed of a young boy who is totally incapacitated, physically and mentally. The young boy can only lie there. He cannot speak or communicate with his body nor in any other way express himself to those who come into his room. He lies mute, helpless, by all outward appearance cut off from any possible communication. Berrigan then described how he goes regularly to sit by this young boy’s bed to try to hear what he is saying in his silence and helplessness.

After sharing this, Berrigan added a further point: The way this young man lies in our world, silent and helpless, is the way God lies in our world. To hear what God is saying we must learn to hear what this young boy is saying.

This is a powerful image of finding God in the silence, of finding the power that “lies muted, at the deep moral and spiritual base of things.”

Foster reminds me that for William J. Seymour, the renewal of the sign of Pentecost signaled divinely initiated racial reconciliation. Just as the original day of Pentecost had people from all regions of the Roman world hearing their own language, and has been seen as reversing the disintegration of Babel, this new Pentecost could bring integration reversing the babble of segregation. If this was God’s intent, and I believe it likely was, we quickly throw our monkey wrenches into it. Charles Parham quickly dismissed as sinful the worshiping together of black and white brothers. And the Assemblies of God became the white Pentecostals as the Church of God in Christ became the black. Some of this may have had to do with the strength of Wesleyan holiness with its view of sanctification as a second work of grace in black spirituality, but I’m sure the majority of the issue wasn’t theological but racial.

So if Azusa street was to usher in a power to do reconciliation, have we failed? I asked myself this yesterday as I pondered. If the power of my pentecostal experience is supposed to be a conduit to flow to those around me has it failed? As a fellowship have we embraced the Pentecostal power to change?

“Ask Zollie Smith if we failed.” The still voice came to my mind. Zollie Smith is the first black man to be on our national executive leadership team, moving from Executive Presbytery to be Director of Home Missions this year. It took a hundred years but God isn’t through yet! It is interesting how God chose the Charismatic Stream to effect Social Justice in his church. Zollie inspires me, not because of who he is, but because he shows who we are becoming as a church. Like Barack Obama challenging our concepts of race in presidential politics simply because he’s there, God is challenging the world through us because we are here.

So if the power of the Spirit is meant to make me a conduit of God’s power, to change me so powerfully by his presence in my life that my life changes the world with it’s presence, what will that look like? Lord God use me, let that power that underlies all that exists flow through me to the world around. Flow river flow. Spring up oh well of eternal desire!

Abba Antony and Faust

His first temptation experience we are told, happened because the devil “wished to cordon him off from his righteous intention” and so he paraded before Antonius a host of memories about what he was leaving behind: “the guardianship of his sister, the bonds of kinship… the manifold pleasures of food,” and the like. At first all of this raised “a great dust cloud of considerations” in Antonius’s mind. But his resolve stood firm. Next the devil “hurled foul thoughts” at him, but Antonius “overturned them through his prayers.” So the devil, “resorted to titillation,” but Antonius, “seeming to blush, fortified the body with faith.” So turning to more blatant sexual temptation the devil decided to “assume to form of a woman and to imitate her every gesture,” but Antonius “extinguished the fire of his opponent’s deception.” Back and forth they went, Antonius winning round after round until the devil “fled, cowering at the words and afraid even to approach the man.” Concerned that we understand whose power was behind these victories, Antonius’s biographer writes, “This was Antonius’s first contest against the devil – or, rather was in Antonius the success of the Savior.” Well it may have been “his first contest,” but it was far from his last. -Richard J Foster

How different is St. Antony from Goethe’s Faust! In heaven God gives Mephistopheles permission to test Faust, just as he did Job. But this Faust doubts the existence of Heaven or Hell and accepts Mephistopheles’ friendship as a test to the power of his own convictions about the nature of the world. He is willing to accept all the power and delight Mephistopheles has to offer without accepting the reality of the spiritual world he came from. Mephistopheles parades the same sort of temptations before Faust as the devil did before St. Antony. Faust fails, quickly overcome by the beauty of a woman, drunk on a vile elixir of lust. He damns his soul to eternal punishment, while costing the life of Gretchen and her brother. He watches from hell as Gretchen is escorted to heaven, completing his own personal hell.

It is sobering the battle to come as we draw near to God. It is only those “who believe he is and rewards those who earnestly seek him,” who can please him, who can overcome the enemy. In Invitation to a Journey, Mulholland talks about the Awakening, the Purgative, Illumitive and Unitive way.

Lord God, if in drawing to union with you I must pass through the dark night of the senses, and the dark night of the soul as saints have through ages past, Lord let it be. Though tears come to my eyes at the thought of not feeling your closeness—of sensing with Jesus on the cross your abandonment, still I will love you!

Defining Spiritual Formation

Rolheiser suggests that Private prayer, private morality, social justice, mellowness of heart, and involvment in a concrete community are “nonnegotiable essensials” to the formation of classic Christian Spirituality.

These remind me of Foster’s streams of Christian tradition, Contemplative (private prayer), Holiness (private morality,) Justice, Charismatic (mellow heart?), Evangelical, and Incarnational (Rolheiser would certainly see this to include having community).

Even we Pentecostals don’t go so far as to say that the Charismatic stream is essential for salvation. But then that isn’t the point; we’re not talking about a moment of justification, but a process of being formed. Perhaps each of these traditions is an absolute, nonnegotiable essential. Perhaps it is precisely those differences that sometimes divide us that in the end are the key elements to wholeness. I like this thought, and I think it is truly what Foster is getting at. The Evangelical stream isn’t singled out by Rolheiser, though I am sure the Word and it’s incarnation are central to his Catholic theology.

In keeping with these essentials, I would define spiritual formation as “Being formed by God into the very image of Christ as we are immersed in the streams of a wide Orthodoxy unto depth of intimacy with Trinity and Man.”

spiritual formation based congregations.

Foster has some great thoughts on how to build a congregation that is centered on spiritual formation.

My second point is simple enough to say though exceedingly difficult to practice: Spiritual problems demand spiritual answers. We simply can never solve a spiritual problem with a programmatic answer. It is vital in any congregational setting to be working with God on the spiritual nature of the community. Is pride pervasive throughout? Then spiritual disciplines of Service are called for. Is nervous, anxious over commitment evident everywhere? Then disciplines of Solitude and Silence can help. Is there a lack of trust in God? Then experiences of Prayer and Fasting are needed. Are we taking ourselves too seriously? Then multiplied opportunities for Celebration need to break forth!

Times come in the life of any congregation that in order for us to be attentive to God we have to become firmly anti-programmatic; that is, we learn to stop doing things. At such times we are to discover ways, as a people together, to follow the counsel of François Fénelon, “Be silent, and listen to God. Let your heart be in such a state of preparation that his Spirit may impress upon you such virtues as will please him. Let all within you listen to him. This silence of all outward and earthly affection and of human thoughts within us is essential if we are to hear his voice.”