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).

Pentecostal Foodstuff

“For us, therefore, religious experience is to spiritual direction what foodstuff is to cooking. Without foodstuff there can be no cooking. Without religious experience there can be no spiritual direction” (Spiritual Direction in Practice 8).

Barry and Connoly give the work of spiritual direction as drawing out those times in life when God is interacting with the person they are directing. This means that the directee has to have had some kind of religious experience to draw on. Some prayer to discuss, maybe not even formal prayer, but the opening of the heart to God and experiencing him.

This got me thinking of the conversation I had with Dallas Willard. He wrote that the ecstatic experiences we Pentecostals cherish don’t build character. They are for something else, namely ministering to the body of Christ.

But they do provide religious experiences to draw on. A dutch reformed pastor who is on retreat with me related the story of a friend who went to the Toronto Airport Vineyard church during it’s famous revival. He went with his Ph.D. adviser as a sort of anthropological experiment. He even reluctantly went to be prayed over, being goaded by his adviser to study it. Those praying over him prayed some very specific things (like we experienced when we experimented with Spirit directed prayer during our January retreat). He was even “laid out” by the Spirit.

He now has that experience of the Spirit moving in his life to remember and know that it is real.

Perhaps those goose-bump moments and the excitement they produce do not by themselves develop character, but build faith and become the foodstuff for later spiritual direction.

What are the gifts of the Spirit for?

In the Great Omission, Dallas Willard suggests that experiences of excitement that come with Pentecost do not form character. They are good for many things, but they do not fundamentally change us.

I wrestled with that idea this week. For some time I have been trying to figure out why we have the pentecostal experience. It seems those involved in the Pentecostal Revivals at the turn of the last century were also grasping to understand these things.

Richard Foster suggests that William J Seymour thought the new Pentecost meant racial reconciliation. Unfortunately the work of reconciliation is left undone, but the Pentecostal experience went on.

Others thought that the gift of tongues was for missionary work and thought that they didn't need to learn a language to speak to the people in another land. So they went and many discovered that it didn't usually work that way.

In the end we settled out with the Pentecostal baptism meaning the soon return of Christ. Many churches took out mortgages with no intention of repaying them because Christ was coming back soon. Well its been 100 years and he hasn't come.

Pentecostal experience is waining in our churches and small wonder. Why should we be baptized in the Spirit? All of these reasons haven't worked out too well. We say it is an empowerment for ministry, but then we also commonly make out that ministry along with discipleship is something optional to Christianity. It then follows that the Baptism in the Spirit is not meant for everyone.

In wrestling with this I wanted to bring the mystical back into it. The full on working of the Spirit experienced in Pentecostal Baptism (total immersion in Him) is a wonderful and intimate thing. So often in Pentecostal tradition, we have seen the working of the Spirit functionally and pragmatically. I was hoping I could make the things of the Spirit about spiritual formation. But along comes Dallas Willard suggesting that those experiences do not effect formation of character to Christlikeness.

Today Dallas sat next to me at lunch, greeting me, "hey Aquaman!" (I was wearing an Aquaman t-shirt). I sat just listening to the conversation around me as I had the previous days Dallas sat near me. Perhaps the explanation of who Aquaman is and his interaction with my family emboldened me to pose the question.

Dallas suggested that the manifestations of the Spirit's working remind us that the Kingdom of Heaven is here. He also noted that the gifts of the Spirit aren't for empowerment for ministry in general but are to meet specific needs in the body. Their use by all Christians, makes the body able to minister to each other through prophesy, words of wisdom, healing and the like. While those goosebump experiences do not form the character of the one being so used, the gifts can help to build others in the body as they are ministered to. They are also not to be isolated from the fruit of the Spirit which are entirely about character formation.

In the end it is more functional and practical than even pentecostal have commonly made it, but it is also more profound and foundational.

God's intention for each of us is that we grow to the place where he can empower us to do what we want.

Knowledge

Our ability to represent things as they are, on an appropriate basis of thought and experience.

Truth

A thought or statement is true if what it is about is as that thought or statement represents it.

Coventry Cathedral Prayer

Hallowed be Thy Name in Industry:
God be in my hands and in my making.

[REFRAIN:]
Holy, Holy, Holy; Lord God of Hosts;
Heaven and earth are full of thy glory.

Hallowed be Thy Name in the Arts:
God be in my senses and in my creating.

[REFRAIN]
Hallowed be Thy Name in the Home:
God be in my heart and in my loving.

[REFRAIN]
Hallowed be Thy Name in Commerce:
God be at my desk and in my trading.

[REFRAIN]
Hallowed be Thy Name in Suffering:
God be in my pain and in my enduring.

[REFRAIN]
Hallowed be Thy Name in Government:
God be in my plans and in my deciding.

[REFRAIN]
Hallowed be Thy Name in Education:
God be in my mind and in my growing.

[REFRAIN]
Hallowed be Thy Name in Recreation:
God be in my limbs and in my leisure.

[REFRAIN]

Unceacing spiritual beings with eternal destinies in God's Universe

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendours. This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn. We must play. But our merriment must be of the kind (and it is, in fact, the merriest kind) which exists between people who have, from the outset, taken each other seriously—no flippancy, no superiority, no presumption. And our charity must be real and costly love, with deep feeling for the sins in spite of which we love the sinners—no mere tolerance, or indulgence which parodies love as flippancy parodies merriment. Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses. If he is your Christian neighbour, he is holy in almost the same way, for in him also Christ vere latitat, the glorifier and the glorified, Glory Himself, is truly hidden.

- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

"We are not human beings having a spiritual expereince we are spiritual beings having a human experience" -T.D. Chardin

Spritual Formation and Spiritual Frustration

I have been hearing some frustration in the posts by my classmates lately (mine included). I think by and large that goes along with Spiritual formation. Like my friend Pam says the contemplative life is like a path tangled with roots. It is a difficult way. How do we get others to come along with us? How do we really do social justice? How do we really allow God’s power to work through us in supernatural charisms? How do we start? Who do we blame when the Body isn’t as beautiful, sweet smelling, as the incarnate Christ should?

In War and Peace, Tolstoy makes a case that it wasn’t Napoleon or Alexander who determined the course of history, it wasn’t their genius or that of their generals that determined their battles success. It was the hearts of the men, each fueled by the flow of history that determined the war.

As a staff pastor I thought, “if only the the pastor got behind my vision, if only he announced the intergenerational sunday school class from the pulpit, I could succeed.” As I a senior pastor I am learning how little structures and programs affect the hearts of the masses. I can hold out church planting as a last hope... “if only the church’s DNA was different, if only it was hard wired to love the way of discipleship...” If only.... some how I think these hopes are just as hollow unless I can find the place to start. “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I can move the world.”

Skimming through The Great Omission by Dallas Willard, I ran across this quote.

What to do now!
Convert the world? No.
Convert the church? “Judgement,” it is famously said, “begins at the house of God.” It has the divine light and divine provisions, and because of that is most responsible to guide humankind.
But “no” again. Do not “convert the church.”
Your first move “as you go” is. in a manner of speaking: Convert me.

The place to start is in me. The great hope is in me! (and greater is he who is in me than he who is in the world.)