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One can begin one’s [spiritual] quest by attending to the desires of the heart, both personal and communal. The Spirit is revealed in our genuine hopes for ourselves and for the world. How brightly burns the flame of desire for a love affair with God, other people, the world? Do we know that to desire and seek God is a choice that is always available to us? – Elizabeth Dreyer
Longing for More: An Invitation to Spiritual Transformation
The reason we are not able to see God is the faintness of our desire. – Meister Eckhart
When was the last time you felt it—your own longing, that is? Your longing for love, your longing for God, your longing to live your life as it is meant to be lived in God? When was the last time you felt a longing for healing and fundamental change groaning within you?
Your desire for more of God than you have right now, your longing for love, your need for deeper levels of spiritual transformation than you have experienced so far is the truest thing about you. You might think that your woundedness or your sinfulness is the truest thing about you or that your giftedness or your personality type or your job title or your identity as husband or wife, mother or father, somehow defines you. But in reality, it is your desire for God and your capacity to reach for more of God than you have right now that is the deepest essence of who you are.
The stirring of spiritual desire indicates that God’s Spirit is already at work within us, drawing us to himself. We love God because he first loved us. We long for God because he first longed for us. We reach for God because he first reached for us. Nothing in the spiritual life originates with us. It all originates with God.
When James and John (and later on their mother) answered Jesus’ question about desire by asking that they be granted positions of prominence in Jesus’ kingdom—one on his right and one on his left—it exposed false ambition that was detrimental to them and to the community of disciples. Similarly, there are desires within us that work against the life of the Spirit within us—desires rooted in selfish ambition, pride, lust, fear, self-protection and many other unexamined motives.
Opening up our desire in God’s presence—even when we’re not sure which parts are true and which are false—is humbling, but it gives God a chance to help us sort it all out.
The depth of desire has a great deal to do with the outcome of our life. Often, those who accomplish what they set out to do in life are not those who are the most talented or gifted or who have had the best opportunities. Often they are the ones who are most deeply in touch with how badly they want whatever they want; they are the ones who consistently refuse to be deterred by the things that many of us allow to become excuses.
The more authentic our desires, the more they touch upon our identities and also upon the reality of God at the heart of our being. Our most authentic desires spring ultimately from the deep inner wells where the longing for God runs freely. – Phillip Sheldrake, Befriending Our Desires
Jesus’ interactions with the people he came in contact with during his life on earth make it clear that desire, and the willingness to name that desire in Christ’s presence, is a catalytic element of the spiritual life. It is one of the most powerful motivators for a life lived consistently with intentionality and focus.
If you choose to journal, it might help to begin with the statement “God, what I most need/want from you right now is…” and then let your thoughts flow. Listen for Christ’s response.
Solitude: Creating Space for God
(Check out my summary of Richard Foster’s writings on Solitude here.)
The soul is like a wild animal—tough, resilient, resourceful, savvy, self-sufficient. It knows how to survive in hard places. But it is also shy. Just like a wild animal, it seeks safety in the dense underbrush. If we want to see a wild animal, we know that the last thing we should do is go crashing through the woods yelling for it to come out. But if we will walk quietly into the woods, sit patiently by the base of the tree, and fade into our surroundings, the wild animal we seek might put in an appearance. – Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness
Silence deepens our experience of solitude, because in silence we choose to unplug not only from the constant stimulation of life in the company of others but also from our own addiction to noise, words and activity. It creates a space for listening to the knowings that go beyond words, and feeling no pressure at all to put the depths of the human soul into words.
The most essential question in solitude is: How have I been wanting to be with God, and how has God been wanting to be with me?
It’s tricky to get the soul to come out, as Parker Palmer so eloquently acknowledges.
Unfortunately, a lot of our religious activity is very noisy as well; oftentimes we’re just an organized group of people crashing through the woods together, making so much noise that there’s not a soul in sight.
Since we can access voicemail, e-mail and the Internet from anywhere, many of us work six or seven days a week. Technology was supposed to help us lead saner lives, but instead it has led us to expect more of ourselves and try to cram more in. Exhaustion sets in when we are too accessible too much of the time.
While technology promises that we will be more connected and able to “reach out and touch someone” anytime we want, over time it results in a kind of fragmentation. No wonder we feel disconnected from God: we are rarely able to give him our full attention in solitude and silence.
Barton’s spiritual director said, “Your soul is tired and battered. You can’t do anything until you rest, and it may take longer than you think.” Solitude had to be a place of rest before it could turn into anything else. This is the way it is for most of us. Most of us are more tired than we know at the soul level. We are teetering on the brink of dangerous exhaustion, and we really cannot do anything else until we have gotten some rest.
The other disciplines are a wonderful smorgasbord of spiritual sustenance, but we really can’t engage any of them until solitude becomes a place of rest for us rather than another place for human striving and hard work.
Another reason we are so tired is that we are always working hard to figure things out rather than learning how to cease striving, how to be with what is true in God’s presence and let God be God in the most intimate places of our life—which is, in the end, the only thing that will change anything. We’re busy trying to make stuff happen rather than waiting on God to make stuff happen.
In Exodus 14, the Israelites are literally backed into a corner. The Red Sea is in front of them and the Egyptians are gaining on them from behind, intent on taking them back into captivity or destroying them. Moses responds firmly, “Do not be afraid, stand firm, and see the deliverance that the Lord will accomplish for you today; for the Egyptians whom you see today you shall never see again. [And here is Barton’s favorite part.] The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still” (Exodus 14:13-14). One of the fundamental purposes of solitude is to give us a concrete way of entering into such stillness, so that God can come in and do what only God can do.
What does it mean for you to be still and let God fight (or work) for you?
Scripture: Encountering God Through Lectio Divina
(Check out my summary of Richard Foster’s writings on Study here.)
The Word of Scripture should never stop sounding in your ears and working in you all day long, just like the words of someone you love. And just as you do not analyze the words of someone you love, but accept them as they are said to you, accept the Word of Scripture and ponder it in your heart, as Mary did. That is all… Do not ask “How shall I pass this on?” but “What does it say to me?” Then ponder this word long in your heart until it has gone right into you and taken possession of you. – Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together
Barton recalls, “Somewhere along the way I figured out that you could get really good at studying and memorizing verses, filling in the blanks of Bible study guides, checking chapters off a reading list, coming up with creative approaches for Bible study and message preparation. In my circles, you could get major brownie points for such things. Although I wouldn’t have known how to talk about it then, slowly but surely the Scriptures were becoming a place of human striving and intellectual hard work. Somehow, I had fallen into a pattern of using the Scriptures as a tool to accomplish utilitarian purposes rather experiencing them primarily as a place of intimacy with God for my own soul’s sake.”
The sad truth is that many of us approach the Scriptures more like a textbook than like a love letter. In Western culture in particular, we are predisposed to a certain kind of reading. We have been schooled in an informational reading process that establishes the reader as the master of the text. Our emphasis is primarily on mastery, that is, controlling the text for our own ends—gathering information, interpreting or applying the information, proving our point about something, gaining a ministry tool or solving a problem.
When applied to Scripture, this approach does not serve the deeper longing of our heart—the longing to hear a word from God that is personal and intimate and takes us deeper into the love that our soul craves.
When we engage the Scriptures for spiritual transformation, we make it our top priority to listen to God relationally rather than seeking only to learn more about God cognitively. Rather than rushing on to the next chapter so that we can complete a reading or study assignment, we stay in the place where God is speaking to us, contemplating its meaning for our life and for our relationship.
Like the little boy Samuel, we approach the Scripture with utter openness and availability to God: “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening” (1 Samuel 3:9).
Robert Mulholland points out that in our culture there is generally little danger of neglecting the cognitive, rational, analytical dynamics of our being, for these are so hyper-developed in our culture and in our normal modes of learning that we are not going to have to worry about getting them out of balance… Yes, we must love God with all of our mind; however, we must remember that the injunction to love God with all of our mind comes a little further down the road in Jesus’ list; loving God with all of our heart and all of our soul precedes loving God with all of our mind.
We need a way of approaching Scripture that will move us very concretely from our overreliance on information gathering to an experience of Scripture as a place of intimate encounter.
We need a different way of being with Scripture that allows God to initiate with us (beyond all the ways we seek to control such things) and also creates space for us to respond fully (beyond all the ways we hold ourselves so tight). Lectio divina provides us with just such a way. Lectio divina (translated “divine [or sacred] reading”) is an approach to the Scriptures that sets us up to listen for the word of God spoken to us in the present moment. Lectio divina is a practice of divine reading that dates back to the early mothers and fathers of the Christian faith.
Lectio divina is rooted in the belief that through the presence of the Holy Spirit, the Scriptures are indeed alive and active as we engage them for spiritual transformation.
Lectio involves a slower, more reflective reading of Scripture that helps us to be open to God’s initiative rather than being subject to human agendas—our own or someone else’s.
Lectio divina is experienced in four movements. We might think of them as moves rather than steps because it reminds us of dancing. Choose a passage of Scripture no more than six to eight verses in length. Begin with a time of silent preparation (silencio) in which we become quiet in God’s presence and touch our desire to hear from God. Read the chosen passage four consecutive times, each time asking a different question. Each reading is followed by a brief period of silence.
1. The first move is to read (lectio). In this move, we read the passage once or even twice, listening for the word or the phrase that strikes us.
2. The second move is to reflect (meditatio). We read the passage a second time, and this time we reflect on the way our life is touched by this word. We might ask, “What is it in my life that needed to hear this word today?”
When our response has been played out in all of its fury, angst, or exuberance, we come to a place of rest in God. Here there are no expectations, demands, no need to know, no desire but to be in the Divine Presence, receptive to what God desires to do with us. – Marjorie Thompson, Soulfeast
3. The third move is to respond (oratio). Is there an invitation or a challenge for us to respond to? What is our response to God’s invitation? This is the first and unedited response to what we have heard.
4. When our response has subsided, we read the passage one last time, and this time the invitation is contemplatio—to rest in God. We are like the weaned child in Psalm 131 who has received what it needs from its mother and can now rest with her in peace and quiet. Here we rest with God and enjoy his presence, realizing that God is the One who will enable us to respond faithfully to whatever invitation we have heard from him.
Practice
Preparation (Silencio). Take a moment to come fully into the present.
- Read (Lectio): Listen for the word or the phrase that is addressed to you. Turn to the passage and begin to read slowly, pausing between phrases and sentences.
- Reflect (Meditatio): How is my life touched by this word? Ask, What is it in my life right now that needs to hear this word?
- Respond (Oratio): What is my response to God based on what I have read and encountered?
- Rest (Contemplatio): Rest in the Word of God. In this final reading you are invited to release and return to a place of rest in God.
You can move into a time of waiting and resting in God’s presence, like the weaned child who leans against its mother (Psalm 131:2).
Resolve (Incarnatio): Incarnate (live out) the Word of God. As you emerge from this place of personal encounter with God to life in the company of others, resolve to carry this word with you and to live it out in the context of daily life and activity.
Prayer: Deepening Our Intimacy with God
(Check out my summary of Richard Foster’s writings on Prayer here.)
Prayer is like love. Words pour at first. Then we are more silent and can communicate in monosyllables. In difficulties a gesture is enough, a word, or nothing at all—love is enough. Thus the time comes when words are superfluous…The soul converses with God with a single loving glance, although this may often be accompanied by dryness and suffering. – Carlo Carretto
If there is one thing for certain, it is that we do not know how to pray.
Simply put, prayer is all the ways in which we communicate and commune with God. The fundamental purpose of prayer is to deepen our intimacy with God.
The experience of having our prayers go cold, as distressing as it is, signals a major transition in the life of prayer and thus in our relationship with God. It signals an invitation to deeper levels of intimacy that will move us beyond communication, which primarily involves words and concepts, into communion, which is primarily beyond words. This transitional place in the life of prayer can be frightening, because it requires us to let go of what we have known in order to open ourselves to something new.
In most cases, the reason we prefer to talk about prayer and read about prayer but don’t actually pray has more to do with our ambivalence about intimacy than with anything else. Why does this ambivalence arise? Instinctively we know that intimacy requires something of us.
As long as we continue to reduce prayer to occasional piety we keep running away from the mystery of God’s jealous love.
Prayer means letting God’s creative love touch the most hidden places of our being and prayer means listening with attentive, undivided hearts to the inner movement of the Spirit of Jesus, even when that Spirit leads us to places we would rather not go.
Perhaps the deepest reason we are ambivalent about the intimacy of true prayer is that intimacy always leads us to a place where we are not in control. There are many terms that seek to capture this dynamic—silent prayer, centering prayer, contemplative prayer, interior prayer, prayer of the heart. Each one carries a slightly different nuance, but they all are attempts to capture the same thing: the movement beyond words to an intimacy that requires no words.
The reason this kind of prayer is so satisfying is that it is about knowing God experientially rather than just knowing a lot about God.
Be still before the Lord and wait. Be still and know that He is God. “In silence, my soul waits for you and you alone, oh God.” This is a prayer of self-emptying that enables us to receive whatever it is that God wants to give. We come to him with empty hands and empty heart, having no agenda.
How can we possibly expect anyone to find real nurture, comfort and consolation from a prayer life that taxes the mind beyond its limits and adds one more exhausting activity to the many already scheduled ones? – Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Way of the Heart
We discover that prayer is truest when it has passed beyond words into the realm where the Holy Spirit groans for us with utterances that are too deep for words.
The silence becomes a time when we listen for the prayer that the Holy Spirit is praying deep within us as he moves between the depths of our human experience and the divine will, interceding for us beyond words.
When you pray, do not try to express yourself in fancy words, for often it is the simple repetitious phrases of a little child that our Father in heaven finds most irresistible. Do not strive for verbosity lest your mind be distracted by a search for words. Single words by their very nature tend to concentrate the mind. When you find satisfaction in a certain word of your prayer, stop at that point. – John Climacus
Barton reflected, “When I first started entering into silent prayer, it was all so new to me that the phrase ‘Here I am, Lord’ was the simplest and truest way I could express my desire to be with God.”
Intercessory prayer is more about recognizing that we do not know how to pray for others—or ourselves for that matter—but the Holy Spirit knows. Since we understand that the Holy Spirit is already interceding for us before the throne of grace, we can bring a name or a need, express it simply and in the silence experience our own groaning and Holy Spirit’s groaning for that person. We can listen for the prayer that is already being prayed for that person before the throne of grace, and without struggling hard to put things into words, we can enter into God’s caring love for that person and wait with them and for them in God’s presence. This is a wonderful way to release our burdens to God at the end of the workday.
Any approach to the spiritual life that sets up false or awkward distinctions between prayer and life, or prayer and the other disciplines, seems to unnaturally rip apart elements of life that belong together or to unnecessarily complicate something that is in its essence quite simple. And so it happens that all of life becomes prayer.
Practice
Imagine Jesus calling you by name and asking, “________, what do you want?”
Then, you respond, “God, what I most want from you right now is…”
Choose your favorite name or image for God as you are relating to him right now, such as God, Jesus, Father, Creator, Spirit, Breath of Life, Lord, Shepherd—whatever best captures your sense of who God is to you at this point in your relationship. “My most meaningful name for God is…” Now combine your name for God with the expression of your heart’s desire. Place it where it is easiest to say in the rhythm of your breathing.
Once you have chosen your breath prayer, pray it into the spaces of your day—when you are waiting, when you are worried and anxious, when you are needing some sense of God’s presence.
Honoring the Body: Flesh-and-Blood Spirituality
(Check out my previous post summarizing Pastor Steve Reynolds Bod4God here.)
The Christian practice of honoring the body is born of the confidence that our bodies are made in the image of God’s own goodness. As the place where the divine presence dwells, our bodies are worthy of care and blessing… It is through our bodies that we participate in God’s activity in the world. – Stephanie Paulsell
The Scriptures indicate that it is possible to glorify God in our bodies rather than merely glorifying the body, which seemed to be the focus of the surrounding culture.
All the great themes of Scripture affirm the significance of the body as a place where the presence of God can be known and experienced. The incarnation itself—Christ’s choice to take on flesh and inhabit a human body—forever elevates the experience of embodiment to the heights of spiritual significance.
The central sacrament of our faith—the ritual and substance around which all Christians gather—is bread and wine that commemorates Jesus’ life and death in a body made of flesh and blood.
The spiritual discipline of honoring the body helps us find our way between the excesses of a culture that glorifies and objectifies the body and the excesses of Christian tradition that have often denigrated and ignored the body.
As you start to honor your body, first learn learning how to care for it more intentionally. Begin by slowly shifting your living patterns, eating better, drinking more water, getting more rest rather than resorting to the short-lived benefits of caffeine, and work your way slowly into a more active lifestyle that includes walking, running and biking. Most quickly recognize amazing changes. First of all, you will have more energy and experience a real lift in your spirits.
Some of your spiritual practices will coincide quite naturally with your physical disciplines. Times of running and walking will become moments of turning your heart toward God. Spiritual disciplines do not all have to be practiced while one sits quiet and still.
Most times, our body is the first to know if we are overcommitted, stressed, uneasy or joyful, and when we need to attend to something that is causing us pain or disease. Paying attention to what gives our body and our spirit a sense of life or drains life from us can help us stay connected with God’s guiding presence.
Kneeling or even lying prostrate on the floor can give physical expression to the posture of our heart or lead us into a more prayerful, humble stance before God. Praying with our hands open can be a way of expressing our openness to God and our willingness to receive whatever he wants to give. When words become inadequate to express our joy and praise, we pray with our body by lifting our hands or moving or dancing. Walking meditation is also a powerful way of connecting with God.
What is the condition of your body these days? Have you been caring for it consistently—eating right, sleeping enough, exercising, attending to medical issues and concerns—or have you been ignoring it or even abusing it in some way? Sit with your awareness and talk to God about it. Listen for His response.
Self-Examination: Bringing My Whole Self Before God
Many avoid the path of self-knowledge because they are afraid of being swallowed up in their own abysses. But Christians have confidence that Christ has lived through all the abysses of human life and that he goes with us when we dare to engage in sincere confrontation with ourselves. Because God loves us unconditionally—along with our dark sides—we don’t need to dodge ourselves. In the light of this love the pain of self-knowledge can be at the same time the beginning of our healing. – Andreas Ebert
Self-examination is a practice that facilitates spiritual awakening—an awakening to the presence of God as God really is and an awakening to ourselves as we really are.
This is perhaps the most familiar passage articulating the soul’s invitation to God to guide the self-examination process:
The real issue in self-examination is not that we are inviting God to know us (since He already does) but that we are inviting God to help us know ourselves.
Like a small child who “hides” by covering her eyes, thinking that if she can’t see you, you can’t see her, we think that if we don’t acknowledge what is true about us, maybe God won’t notice it either!
While the truth that we cannot escape God’s all-seeing eye may weigh us down at times, it is finally the only remedy for our uneasiness. If we wish to hide from the penetrating gaze of holy love, it is because we know it falls on what is unholy and unloving within us. Only under God’s steady gaze of love are we able to find the healing and restoration we so desperately need. – Marjorie Thompson, SoulFeast
The examen of consciousness involves taking a few moments at the end of each day to go back over the events of the day and invite God to show us where he was present with us and how we responded to his presence. We might ask ourselves, “How was God present with me today? What promptings did I notice? How did I respond or not respond?”
As we review our days in this manner, we will notice times and places where we got a glimpse of God-with-us but failed to respond. Perhaps we were moving too fast to really notice, or we were stubborn or lazy or felt it would require too much of us. Observing such a missed opportunity might fill us with regret, but this honing of our awareness opens up the opportunity for us to make a different choice next time.
The Psalms also point to the fact that healthy self-examination includes receiving and celebrating the goodness of who we are as created beings.
More than any other character in the Bible, David’s life illustrates the self-examination process—the movement from total lack of awareness to self-awareness, confession of sin, forgiveness, cleansing and real life change.
The move from seeing God more clearly (examen of consciousness) to seeing ourselves more clearly in the light of God’s presence is a natural one. We call this the examen of conscience. It is similar to the examen of consciousness in that it involves reviewing your day or your week, only this time asking God to bring to mind attitudes, actions and moments when you fell short of exhibiting the character of Christ or the fruit of the Spirit.
The examen of conscience involves three elements that are subtle and yet distinct:
- Noticing something that went wrong in a behavior or an action. It might be a vague sense of something that wasn’t quite right (for instance, a subtle resistance to doing something loving for another person), or it could be a wrong that was more clear-cut (such as an angry outburst).
- Being willing to name our failure for what it is and also to name what was going on inside us, seeking some understanding of the inner dynamics that caused the behavior.
- Being willing to acknowledge and take responsibility not only for the outward manifestations of our sin but also for the inner dynamics that produced the sinful or negative behaviors. Confession is the endgame in the self-examination process, but it is the part we shrink from the most. Confession requires the.
Confession, when practiced fully, is personal (between you and God), interpersonal (with a trusted friend or confessor, with the person you have hurt or offended) and corporate (in the context of worship in community). The interplay among these three keeps confession healthy and productive.
Practice
Review the day. Identify the major events of the day (or the week, if you are doing the examen weekly), including your spiritual practices, meals, appointments, interactions with others, significant events at work. Reflect on each of the events, noticing where God seemed to be loving you, speaking to you, guiding you or showing you something new about himself.
Give thanks. Thank God for each part of your day, for His presence with you in the midst of it, for those moments when you sensed a growing freedom from sin and a greater capacity to love God and others.
Confess. Using Psalm 139:23-24 as your prayer, invite God to bring to mind attitudes, actions or moments when you fell short of exhibiting the character of Christ or the fruit of the Spirit.
Discernment: Recognizing and Responding to the Presence of God
Discernment in its fullness takes a practiced heart, fine-tuned to hear the word of God and the single-mindedness to follow that word in love. It is truly a gift from God, but not one dropped from the skies fully formed. It is a gift cultivated by a prayerful life and the search for self-knowledge. – Ernest Larkin
Discernment is first of all a habit, a way of seeing that eventually permeates our whole life. It is the journey from spiritual blindness (not seeing God anywhere or seeing Him only where we expect to see Him) to spiritual sight (finding God everywhere, especially where we least expect it). Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits and best known for developing a set of spiritual exercises intended to hone people’s capacity for this discipline, defined the aim of discernment as “finding God in all things in order that we might love and serve God in all.”
We become familiar with God’s voice—the tone, quality and content—just as we become familiar with the voice of a human being we know well. It is possible for us to become so attuned to subtle spiritual dynamics that we are able to distinguish between what is good (that which moves us toward God and His calling on our life) and what is evil (that which draws us away from God).
God’s will for us is generally for us to pursue that which gives us life and to turn away from things that drain life from us and leave us debilitated.
In Deuteronomy God addresses the whole company of Israel and says, “I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” (Deuteronomy 30:19-20).
As we make it our habit to notice and respond to that which gives us life, receiving guidance becomes routine in the day-to-day decisions of life as well as in the larger questions of our life. It keeps us in touch with that which is truest about God, ourselves and our world so that we can make life-giving choices.
The need to perceive a deeper meaning for our lives is not just a midlife phenomenon. According to brain specialist Joseph Chilton Pierce, a brain spurt occurs in early adolescence related to the capacity for idealism. An adolescent’s greatest developmental need is for adults whose model of a meaningful life encourages this idealism. If this capacity for idealism is not encouraged, the young person experiences profound frustration.
When we move into adulthood without having discovered a deeper sense of meaning and purpose for our existence, our disillusionment can settle into a profound (and sometimes very subtle) cynicism and emotional detachment that are quite antithetical to the hope, passion and energy that are basic to our Christian faith.
There are at least three beliefs that are crucial for a right practice of discernment:
- Belief in the goodness of God. Discernment requires interior freedom, a state of wide-openness to God and the capacity to relinquish whatever might keep me from choosing for God.
- Belief that love is our primary calling. Ask yourself, “What does love call for in this situation? What would love do?”
- Belief that God communicates with us through the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit is given to help us know the demands of love in our situation.
The practice of discernment assumes a deep-seated theological belief in God’s presence and action through the Holy Spirit in the midst of my daily experience. The practice of discernment begins with a prayer for indifference: “I am indifferent to anything but God’s will.” This is a state of wide-openness to God in which we are free from undue attachment to any particular outcome and capable of relinquishing whatever might keep us from choosing for love.
We want “God’s will, nothing more, nothing less, nothing else.” The movement toward indifference is the threshold between two worlds: the world of human decision making and the world of discerning the divine will.
Discernment is risky, and there are no guarantees; we can never be absolutely sure that we have discerned everything correctly. We are, after all, limited and fallen. But what we can know for sure is that God is with us, that the desire to please God does, in fact, please him, and that he will never leave us or forsake us. That is the most important thing we need to know.
When you have come to a sense of peace about a particular choice or direction, enter into it knowing that God is with you and that he will complete the work he has begun in you.
“My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself. And the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in everything I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire and I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore I will trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.” – Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
Sabbath: Establishing Rhythms of Work and Rest
(Check out my previous posts on Sabbath Rest and Keeping the Sabbath Wholly.)
In his book Sabbath, Wayne Muller wrote, “If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath—our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.”
Do not be anxious about tomorrow, said Jesus. The worries of today are sufficient for today. Whatever remains to be done, for now, let it be. It will not get done tonight. In Sabbath time we take our hand off the plow, and allow God and the earth to care for what is needed. Let it be…
Sabbath keeping is more than just taking a day of rest; it is a way of ordering one’s life around a pattern of working six days and then resting on the seventh. It is a way of arranging our life to honor the rhythm of things—work and rest, fruitfulness and dormancy, giving and receiving, being and doing, activism and surrender. The day itself is set apart, devoted completely to rest, worship and delighting in God, but the rest of the week must be lived in such a way as to make sabbath possible.
One book about a woman’s conversion to Judaism described her experience with sabbath: “Shabbat is like nothing else. Time as we know it does not exist for these twenty-four hours, and the worries of the week soon fall away. A feeling of joy appears. The smallest object, a leaf or a spoon, shimmers in a soft light, and the heart opens. Shabbat is a meditation of unbelievable beauty.”
The point of the sabbath is to honor our need for a sane rhythm of work and rest. It is to honor the body’s need for rest, the spirit’s need for replenishment and the soul’s need to delight itself in God for God’s own sake.
Here are several principles that undergird the whole sabbath experience:
- The heart of sabbath is that we cease our work so that we can rest and delight in God and God’s good gifts.
- It is important to establish a regular rhythm if at all possible. The human being, body and soul, responds to rhythms and is accustomed to living in rhythms—night and day, three meals a day, the seasons of the year. Part of the restfulness of sabbath is knowing that it is always coming in the same interval, so that we’re not making decisions about it every week. After seven days without rest, we are at risk of becoming dangerously tired.
- Sabbath keeping is not primarily a private, self-indulgent discipline. It is and always has been a communal discipline, or at least a discipline that people enter into with those closest to them.
Shaping Sabbath Time: What to Exclude
Work. What constitutes work for us? We must commit ourselves to not doing these things on the sabbath. We also need to pay attention to whether a particular activity triggers our activism, our need to be productive in order to feel worthwhile, or our feelings of indispensability. Yard work may be restful for some, but for others it is one more thing to check off the to-do list, and that is not what sabbath is about.
Buying and selling. If we are out buying, selling and engaging in the world of commerce, it means someone has to work and we are contributing to it. It also feeds our consumerism—an aspect of life in our culture that needs rest on the sabbath.
Worry. There are more kinds of work than just physical work. There is also the emotional and mental hard work that we are engaged in all week long as we try to figure out everything in our life and make it all work. The sabbath is an invitation to rest emotionally and mentally from things that cause worry and stress.
Shaping Sabbath Time: What to Include
The simple answer on what to include in your sabbath is whatever delights you and replenishes you. Resting the body. What are the activities that rest and replenish your body? The invitation of sabbath time is to replace the time you would normally spend working with activities that you find restorative: a nap, a walk, a bike ride, a long bubble bath, eating your favorite foods (no dieting on the sabbath), sitting in the sun, lighting candles, listening to beautiful music, lovemaking.
Replenishing the spirit. Another invitation of the sabbath is to pay attention to what replenishes the spirit and choose only those activities that renew you and bring you joy.
Restoring the soul. Perhaps the deepest refreshment is the invitation to renew the soul through worship and quiet reflection.
Of course, you will want to include worship in community, but it is also good to incorporate some aspect of worship that is more personal to you and to your family into your sabbath observance. On your own you may be able to spend some extra time in silence and prayer, take a slow, meditative walk, read a book that God has been using in your life, journal about your week, or do an extended version of the examen of consciousness with particular attention to those things you are grateful for.
Do not make sabbath keeping a weighty exercise. Explore it with delight, as though you and God are learning together how to make the day special for both of you.
“The sabbath was made for human beings, not human beings for the sabbath” (Mark 2:27).
Based on your desire and situation, decide to try one sabbath. You don’t have to change your whole life—yet. Just look on your calendar for one day of the week that is realistic for you and your family to set aside for sabbath. Then just see where it starts to lead you.
A Rule of Life: Cultivating Rhythms for Spiritual Transformation
We long to see our lives whole, to know that they matter. We wonder whether our many activities might ever come together in a way of life that is good for ourselves and others. Lacking a vision of a life-giving way of life, we turn from one task to another, doing as well as we can but increasingly uncertain about what doing things well would look like. We yearn for a deeper understanding of how to order human life in accord with what is true and good. – Craig Dykstra and Dorothy Bass, Practicing Our Faith
Many of us try to shove spiritual transformation into the nooks and crannies of a life that is already unmanageable, rather than being willing to arrange our life for what our heart most wants. We think that somehow we will fall into transformation by accident.
Christian tradition has a name for the structure that enables us to say yes to the process of spiritual transformation day in and day out. It is called a rule of life. A rule of life seeks to respond to two questions:
- Who do I want to be?
- How do I want to live?
Actually, it might be more accurate to say that a rule of life seeks to address the interplay between these two questions: How do I want to live so I can be who I want to be?
An effective rhythm of spiritual practices will be very personal. No two individuals will have exactly the same rhythm, because no two people are alike. For instance, a relatively unstructured, spontaneous personality will need to be careful not to craft a rhythm of life that feels too structured and confining. A person who is more structured and enjoys closure will probably like having things mapped out in more detail.
Our rhythm of spiritual practices also needs to be ruthlessly realistic in view of our stage of life. Spiritual transformation takes place as we embrace the challenges and opportunities associated with each season of our life.
An effective rhythm of spiritual practices will also be balanced among the disciplines that come easily to us and those that stretch us. Once we have identified a basic rhythm of spiritual practices, it is important that we enter into it with a great deal of flexibility.
What practices will you seek to engage in on a daily basis? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly? Where will you engage in these disciplines? What time of the day/week/month/year? What schedule changes will you need to make in order to consistently choose these life-giving disciplines?
Once we have crafted a plan that is concrete and specific, we commit ourselves to it prayerfully out of our desire for God rather than a sense of duty or obligation. Then we periodically take time to notice.
Every time we go through a major life change (getting married, having children, taking on a new job, retiring, moving, having surgery), we do well to reevaluate so as to make adjustments that are realistic for our new situation.
Technology is not evil; it is how we use technology that determines whether it is a force for good or for ill in our lives.
Early morning is a special time of day, when we are in a more rested and undefended state than we are at any other time. Barton reflects, “At one time I noticed myself slipping into the habit of turning on the cell phone as soon as I wake up and checking my e-mail before I even had my first cup of coffee. Slowly and imperceptibly, these habits were robbing me of moments that used to be for silence, prayer and being present to God. More recently I have been establishing a discipline of no technology before 9:00 a.m., choosing instead to preserve that time for quiet preparation for the day ahead.”
How do you want greet God in the morning? Do you want to begin the day with technology or with quiet listening?
The way we transition from the working day into the evening hours is also very important, because if we do not really transition, our work can bleed into every nook and cranny of our life. Those of us who work away from home can become much more intentional about marking a clear ending to the workday when we shut down computers, work cell phones and pagers. We can use the ride home to review the day and call it done. We can join God in his pattern of working and resting and say, “The work of this day is enough, and it is good.”
For true silence, we do better to unplug completely. Because life in contemporary culture requires us to move at high speeds and to be accessible nearly all the time, we need more extended times of solitude in which the RPMs of body, mind and soul can slow down. Most of us really need one day a month in solitude, completely unplugged not only from people but also from computer and phones, to maintain enough inner quiet to hear God and allow him to touch us in the deeper places of our being.
Consider Barton’s simple rule of life (that she points out took her years to settle into with clarity):
- Daily. Barton’s daily rhythm includes solitude and silence (with no technology) from 7:00 to 9:00 in the morning. At 9:00, she transitions into the workday. In the late afternoon or evening, she unplugs from work-related technology and transitions to evening time by going on a bike ride (when possible) and using that time for the examen.
- Weekly. Barton’s weekly rhythm includes commitment to Sunday as the sabbath for herself and her family. On this day, the family disconnects from work and work-related technology to rest, exercise, cook special food, and enjoy each other and friends, choosing activities that are both worshipful and pleasurable.
- Monthly. Barton sets aside one day a month for solitude, completely unplugged. She also receives spiritual direction once a month and combines it with her solitude day if possible.
- Quarterly/half-yearly. At least once a quarter, Barton enters into some sort of extended retreat with others, usually from the Transforming Center.
- Yearly. Barton’s family takes a vacation of one to two weeks for rest and recreation.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of community in the spiritual transformation process. This is not the same thing as the Christian busyness that often accompanies church life; it is about quietly sharing the journey with others who are also drawn to deeper levels of spiritual transformation that enable them to discern and do God’s will.
Taking a closer look at the relational rhythm of Jesus’ life, we notice that within the small group of twelve there were three disciples with whom he was especially intimate. These three He invited to be with Him in His most private moments of grief and agitation in the Garden of Gethsemane. Within your commitment to the larger faith community, the church, seek to identify at least one other person, if not several, who shares your desire for God and is willing to walk the path of establishing spiritual rhythms with you.
The path to spiritual wholeness lies in my increasingly faithful response to the One whose purpose shapes my path, whose power liberates me from the crippling bondages of my previous journey, and whose transforming presence meets me at every turn in the road. – Robert Mulholland, Invitation to a Journey
Practice
Schedule some retreat time or some extended solitude at home to reflect on your experiences with the spiritual disciplines you have explored.
What are you beginning to understand about your minimum daily/weekly/monthly requirements for ongoing spiritual formation? What you have observed? What concrete activities do you want to engage in as ways of offering yourself to God steadily and consistently?
Ask God for His guidance in putting together a rhythm of spiritual practices that will meet your desire for life-giving connection with him and authentic spiritual transformation.