Individual And Corporate Spirituality

The bishop of Belley, Jean Pierre Camus, wanted to know if Francis de Sales was really as holy as he seemed to be. So he drilled a hole in the wall of his bedroom in the episcopal residence to spy on him.

What did Camus discover? Only that Francis was the same in secret as he was in company. He saw the saint creep out of bed early and quietly in the mornings so as not to wake his servant. He saw him pray, write in his journal, read the office, answer some letters, then pray again. The beautiful manners, the unruffled compassion, the courtesy and humility were all on display through the peephole as they had been in the pulpit or at the dinner-table.

Francis de Sales lived a life of congruence: he was what he seemed to be. His life with God, his personal serenity, his love for others: they were all in harmony…

‘Spirituality’ asks, in essence, ‘how does one get to be that way?’

At the end of A Faith to Proclaim, Presbyterian James Stewart writes: ‘I know the terms our forbears used – such as “meditation” and “contemplation” – are much disparaged in this hectic age; we are not shining examples of the immutable peace that is God’s gift… somehow we have to recapture the things for which these words stood. In honour to our (ministry) vows and our vocation we are bound to discipline ourselves to make time to company with Jesus…’

Spirituality (from its 17th century French usage) is mainly about how I relate to God. ‘Spirit’ in the Bible equals breath, life. The opposite of spirit is not matter, but death. ‘Spiritual’ worship is the offering of all we are to God (Romans 12:1). It’s about my ‘desire’, how I pray (the very best index of who I really am). So Spirituality is about the work of God’s Spirit, enlivening, enlightening and empowering us to become holy, or ‘saints’, so that our desire is to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength, and love others as ourselves. The Eastern Orthodox prefer to call it ‘mystical theology’ which they define as ‘loving knowledge’ or ‘wisdom or knowledge that is found through love’ (William Johnston).

Spiritual Formation is the process whereby the Spirit of God applies the Word of God to the mind and heart of the child of God, so that his or her whole life is continually being formed into the likeness of the Son of God. It’s ‘growing firm in power with regard to your inner self’ (Eph. 3:16). It’s the maturing of the Christian towards union with Christ.

Traditionally, there have been three branches of knowledge about God (or ‘theology’): dogmatic or systematic theology (concerned with truth about God), moral theology (godly, obedient behaviour), and spiritual theology (devotion to God). Around the world in the last three decades there has been a remarkable – and gratifying – resurgence of interest in spiritual theology and the spiritual disciplines.

Assumptions of Christian Spirituality include * God is doing something before I know it; * Love and prayer are gifts; * The aim of spiritual formation is not happiness, but love, joy, peace – and courage and hope; * Prayer is friendship with God, a response to his love; * Prayer is subversive: it’s an act of defiance against the ultimacy of anything other than God; * We are always beginners in the life of prayer (‘to seek to pray is to pray’).

Christian Spirituality describes our relationship with a creative God, as we learn to share the joy of his aliveness. So we are not just concerned with the ‘interior life’, the ‘journey inwards’. Our love should extend to the whole of creation, and permeate all our moments and our days. Evelyn Underhill talks about our forming ‘part of the creative apparatus of God’ as he loves the world through us. (1) For Gutierrez, Spirituality means ‘following Christ’, implying, he says, (a) an obedient acceptance of the call to follow him and (b) a creativity which this new way will demand. (2)

INDIVIDUAL SPIRITUALITY: HOW TO BE A SAINT

A small group of students was talking in an English University’s senior common room. One wanted to be a skilled surgeon, another a famous diplomat, another a representative sportsman, and still another prime minister of Britain. One chap was quietly listening to his friends’ dreams, and when asked his ambition he said, ‘Well, this may sound strange after all that, but the only thing I want to be is a saint.’

Graham Greene says of one of his characters in The Power and the Glory: ‘He knew now that at the end there was only one thing that counted – to be a saint’. Being a ‘saint’ is the only thing that matters for anyone…

In the New Testament all Christians are ‘saints’. One of them – at Philippi – was a goaler. Some at Corinth had been thieves, adulterers and drunkards. Others – at Colossae, for example – had been dominated by lustful and greedy passions. But, says Paul, ‘you have been purified from sin – you have been dedicated to God’. (3) Jesus taught, however, that some are ‘greater’ in the kingdom than others. (4) The rich young ruler was invited to ‘enter life’, and later in the conversation, ‘to be perfect’. (5) Paul, in his writings, seems to distinguish between those who have ‘received the Spirit’ and those who are ‘filled with the Spirit’.

Very early in the church’s history Christian ‘heroes’ and ‘heroines’ – martyrs and confessors – were widely admired, and came to be called ‘saints’. Their tombs were often turned into altars. Over the centuries a complicated process of canonization developed.

The Saint and the Pharisee

In general there are two dominant religious mind-sets – those of the ‘saint’ and the pharisee. We all have something of each in us, and the potential to be either. Both may be ‘orthodox’ theologically, even ‘evangelical’. Both pursue ‘goodness’ but by different means, for different ends: pharisees are ‘good’ people in the worst sense of the word! Saints (like Jesus) emphasize love and grace, pharisees law and (their interpretation of) ‘truth’. Saints are comfortable with ‘doctrine’, but for the pharisee doctrine becomes dogma, law becomes legalism, ritual (the celebration of belonging) becomes ritualism. The saint lives easily with questions, paradox, antinomy, ambiguity, mystery; pharisees try to be ‘wiser than God’ and resolve all mysteries into neat formulas: they want answers, now. The saint listens, in solitude and silence; the pharisee fills the void with sound. For the saints it’s ‘rising by dying’, for the pharisees ‘rising by doing’.

With Jesus, acceptance preceded repentance, with the pharisees it was the other way around. The saint, like Jesus, says first ‘I do not condemn you’. Pharisees find that difficult: they’d prefer ‘go and sin no more’. Jesus welcomes sinners; sinners get the impression they’re not loved by pharisees. For the pharisee, sins of the flesh and ‘heresy’ are worst, and they are experts on the sins of others. For the saint, sins of the spirit – one’s own spirit – are worst. Saints are ‘Creation-centred’; pharisees ‘Fall-centred’. (6)

For the pharisee ‘my people’ = ‘people like me’; for the saint ‘my people’ = all God’s people. Pharisees are insecure (needing ‘God-plus’ other things); the saints are secure (needing ‘God only’). The pharisees’ audience is other people: their kudos provides a measure of security (psychologists call it ‘impression management’; Jesus calls it hypocrisy); the saints’ only audience is God: their inner and outer persons are congruent.

Pharisees hate prophets (‘noisy saints’) and their call to social justice; saints love justice. Saints aren’t into writing creeds very much, which is why the two things most important for Jesus – love and justice – rarely appear in them.

So saints remind you of Jesus; the pharisees of the devil (demons are ‘orthodox’). Saints see Jesus in every person: they haven’t any problem believing we’re all made in the image of God (= Jesus) although they’re realistic about that image being marred by sin. Saints are spread through all the churches: the closer they are to Jesus, the closer to, the more accepting they are, of others. ‘Ambition’ for them means ‘union with Christ’: they call nothing else ‘success’. They have a cavalier disregard for status, wealth or power. In their prayer they mostly ‘listen’, ‘wait on the Lord’; the pharisee needs words, words, words. Pharisees have a tendency to complain about many things; for the saints life is ‘serendipitous’: they have a well-developed theology of gratitude. Pharisees are static, unteachable, believing they have monopoly on the truth; saints are committed to growing. (Nature, it is said, abhors a vacuum; the Spirit abhors fullness – particularly of oneself). Jesus was full of grace and truth; Peter says grow in grace and knowledge: pharisees aren’t strong on grace, but for saints ‘grace is everywhere’.

The religion of the saints is salugenic, growth-and health-producing; that of the pharisee is pathogenic. Only one thing is important: to be a saint.

So saints remind you of Jesus. They also act as ‘Christs to others’ (as Luther put it). They produce the fruits of the Spirit of Jesus in their personalities: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, humility, and self-control. As they live nearer the light of God, the darker the shadows of sinfulness become. So they are not sinless – far from it, they would tell you – though they may be blameless. They pray as much for their enemies as well as their friends: ‘the one who does not love one’s neighbour hates God’ said John of the Cross; ‘you love God just as much, and no more, as you love the person you love least’, said another mystic. They delight in doing humble tasks for others, unseen often, but known to God. They keep the ‘great commandment’ – loving God and others – better than the rest of us. God is their ‘absolute absolute’: they believe that those who have God and everything else have no more than those who have God only; and those who have everything else and not God have nothing.

For saints, all of life is ‘sacramental’. God is everywhere, in everything. Knowing God, loving God, obeying God, is all that matters. They have thus acquired a deep inner serenity and strength. Their lives are truly ‘centred’.

W.E. Sangster, the great Methodist exponent of Christian Spirituality, wrote: ‘One of the saddest consequences of church disunion is the ignorance in one communion of the saints in another. Not only does it lead good people to say ‘There are no saints but ours’ but it robs all of the inspiration of all… Truth is many-faceted: God has his servants in all branches of his church: as we draw nearer the cross we draw nearer to one another. The things which divide the saints are small in comparison which the things which unite them.’ (7) A saint, said Sangster, answers the question the world most wants to know: we can be changed!

But how can one be this sort of person when times are troubled or life is frantically busy? Perhaps church history has failed us here. Before the Reformation saints seemed to be largely world-forsaking, living mostly in monasteries or deserts. But since then, as John Baillie has written, ‘The main development of Reformation thought estimates very lightly the acquisition of holiness during this present life.’ (8) Post-Reformation Western Christianity has been largely individualistic; the clergy have often been seduced into believing that their worth is measured by performance: our significance lies in what we do rather than who we are. Both tendencies are unfortunate.

How to Pray

How we pray is the best measure of who we really are. Prayer is to spirituality what food is to hunger. We know that the subject ‘How to Pray’ was in John the Baptist’s curriculum for his disciples. Until recently most of our seminaries have not taught their students how to pray. There may be lectures about ‘the theology of prayer’ or exegesis of biblical texts on prayer, but not practical instruction about how to pray. Fortunately, that’s beginning to change.

I remember the first book on prayer I ever read – ‘The Kneeling Christian’. The evocative way it began is still fresh after forty years. ‘God wondered,’ said the ancient prophet. Imagine that! Why would God wonder about anything? ‘God wondered that there was no intercessor…’ The book was an urgent summons to what used to be called ‘prevailing prayer’. ‘Little prayer, little power: more prayer, more power, much prayer, much power’ it thundered.

But I have to confess that The Kneeling Christian failed to motivate me to pray more effectively. It actually increased my guilt about my general prayerlessness.

The next book was Derek Prime’s ‘A Christian’s Guide to Prayer’. It was more realistic, confessing that for most of us prayer is hard work. Encouraging – but it also didn’t help me to pray better.

Two events changed all that. The first was a turning-point in my life when I cried out to God de profundis, out of the depths. That’s another story. The other – reading some of the ancient and modern mystics and masters of prayer.

Here, in summary, is what seems to be essence of their wisdom.

* Pray as you can, not as you can’t.

There is no ‘instant’ holiness. Prayer is hard work. It is the work of a lifetime – the longest journey is the journey inward – but we begin afresh every morning. You are unique, so your relationship with God will be unique, and therefore your prayer will be unique.

* Ask yourself: ‘What is my desire?’ (Mark 11:24). What do you want? Do you want God to take possession of you? Prayer is, essentially, the soul’s sincere desire…

Prayer is an acknowledgement of our willingness to be changed, our readiness to be surprised. Our desires govern the effectiveness of our prayer, and (fortunately) alter as we pray.

Jesus taught two parables about prayer, about a sleepy neighbour and an unjust judge (Luke 11:5-13; 18:1-8). The main point he made was about the importance of earnest desire in prayer. We ought always to pray, and never to faint, or give up. Someone has said that when we faint we fall back on nothing, but when we pray we fall forward on God. And yet even if your desire is only tentative and flickering, our Lord never ‘snuffs out the smouldering wick’ (Matthew 12:20).

Prayer is friendship with God, ‘keeping company with God’, as Clement of Alexandria put it. Friendship – with any other person – involves giving oneself to the other, perhaps the most risky of all human endeavours. Friendship with someone unseen has its very special risks. Perhaps we’ve sometimes echoed Job’s complaint, ‘What is the good of praying to him?’ (Job 21:15). Or we project into our relationship with God the hassles we experience in human relationships. (For example, it is not uncommon for people who’ve had bad experiences with their fathers to find difficulty in relating to God as Father).

But the real ‘crunch’ is in another direction. ‘God is not taken in by our polite little speeches’ writes Simon Tugwell in his book, PRAYER: Living with God. While some people are genuinely afraid of the dark, all of us are rather afraid of the light. As the archbishop says in T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’. God relates to us as we are, not as we’d like to imagine we are. He is not fooled by our pretences.

We are what we pray. ‘The true self grows’, Teilhard de Chardin found, ‘in inverse proportion to the growth of egoism’. (9) It might be helpful, in an hour or a day of reflection, to write down what you are really after in your life.

* Prayer is a gift from God. Like love, it is a gift experienced every day, fresh from one who loves us. Prayer is not a bag of spiritual techniques.

Paul says God gives us the Holy Spirit to help us (Romans 8:26-27). ‘The Spirit prays in me, for me, through me, and with me.’ (10) Prayer is not just what I do, but what God wants to do through me. So prayer is not merely seeking God. Rather, it is allowing him to find us. ‘It is not I who have looked for him. It is he who looked for me first.’ (11)

* The main aim of prayer: to know God, through love. Knowing God – or anyone else – is much more than knowing about him. In her beautiful book Poustinia Catherine de Hueck Doherty talks about ‘folding the wings of the intellect and opening the door of the heart’ in God’s presence. This is ‘affective knowledge’, a knowing that leads to loving and responds to our being loved. The purpose of prayer is, as John Donne put it, ‘to get as near God as you can’. Carlo Carretto describes the most important discovery of his life – that prayer takes place in the heart, not in the head. We come to God, said Augustine, not by navigation, but by love. The saints teach us that ‘knowing Christ through love’ is much more important than ‘knowledge of doctrines about Christ’. To know a person differs from knowing about that person. So Christianity is not just a set of truths but a way of life.

But how we pray depends on who we think God is. Why not spend a few moments – right now – writing down the kind of God you generally pray to? What is he like? What do you expect to happen when you pray? How did you come to get this/these ideas about God? Is your God, to whom you pray, the same God Jesus told us about? What have the great pray-ers believed about the God they pray to? If you’ll pardon the alliteration, they have majored on three attributes.

1. God is good. He is ‘for us’. When we call on him in the day of trouble, he will care for us (Psalm 50:15). As we read the biblical drama we find that he either delivers us from trouble, or in trouble. He is always there for us. He will never leave us or forsake us.

2. God is the supreme gift-giver. There are thirty texts in the New Testament describing prayer as asking. Our Father delights to give gifts to us.

Prayer itself is a gift. True prayer is motivated by God, not by us. Our attitude is to be receptive, submissive, a channel through whom God can answer. True worshippers, Jesus said, relate to the Father ‘in spirit and in truth’, ‘for the Father seeks such to worship him’ (John 4:23-24). Christian thought calls it ‘prevenient grace’ (Grace – God’s giving freely out of his love forus; prevenient – from the Latin ‘to go before’).

3. God is great. All of the Christian saints affirm, with so many of the Psalmists, ‘Great is the Lord’. He is the sovereign ruler of the universe. All power and authority belong to him. He is not a passive spectator. He is great in his ‘being’, beyond our comprehension or definition (any definition claiming to be adequate would be an idol of the mind). He is great in wisdom. He is the one unto whom ‘all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hidden’. So our prayer always begins with worship. Some of the great hymns can help us: ‘Great God of wonders…’; ‘Jesus thou joy of loving hearts…’. ‘Our most fundamental need, duty, honour and happiness’, says Frederick von Huegel, ‘is not petition, nor even contrition, nor even again thanksgiving… but adoration’.

* There are three kinds of prayer: 1. Spoken or verbal prayer may include adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, and intercession.

2. Meditative or mental prayer is reflecting on Scripture or life’s events in God’s presence. Bonhoeffer advocated half an hour’s silent meditation on Scripture every morning. This was not ‘Bible study’ as such, but the discipline of being ‘under the Word’. ‘Lectio divina’ is an ancient phrase describing the slow, reflective reading of the Bible. Scripture is God’s personal word to me – for my ‘formation’ not just information. I read it reverently, ready to be ‘converted’ again and again (conversion begins but never ends), willing to be led where I may be reluctant to go, believing that God has yet more light and truth to reveal to me, and to the church. I try to learn to ‘meditate on the Word day and night’ (Psalm 1:2).

3. Contemplative prayer is ‘thinking of God with love’ as Charles de Foucauld expressed it. ‘Few things are needful, or only one’ says Jesus to Martha (Luke 10:42 RSV mg.). Be still, and know that he is God. Contemplation is the awareness of who (and where) God is. The intellect and lips are still, and one is open to beauty, goodness, wisdom, gentleness and love – in short, to transcendence. It’s the descent of the ‘Word’ from mind to heart. The most important element in the contemplative life is not knowledge, but love. This is a hard discipline for ‘heady’ and busy people. As our prayer deepens, many of the saints tell us, we find ourselves needing fewer words.

* Why pray? Some experiments with biofeedback machines in California found that for a majority of Christians prayer is stressful! That was because they did not practise mental or contemplative prayer. Their prayer was all words, little listening, and so was not relaxing. But we do not pray to ‘get peace of mind’. Peace of mind is certainly a by-product of restful prayer habits, but is not the reason we pray in the first place. Jacques Ellul gives us the clue in a powerful chapter he calls ‘The Only Reason for Praying’ in his Prayer and Modern Man. According to the Bible, he says, the only reason to pray is that God commands us to pray.

The general impression one gets in studying the Bible’s prayers, or teaching about prayer, is that prayer covers all the events of our lives, so there are many different ways to pray. Sometimes we are still, knowing within the depths of our being that he is God. At other times, we have to work hard at prayer: it ‘is not a gentle pastime’, as the Dutch Roman Catholic catechism puts it.

* Find a quiet, regular place and time each day for prayer. If possible guarantee that you will be unhurried and uninterrupted. For many it’s difficult to find silence in our noisy world, or solitude in our crowded cities. But you must keep trying. Turn a corner of your house into a chapel or ‘oratory’. Pull off the road under some trees. Walk along a deserted beach. Put in a telephone answering machine. Daily solitude is not a luxury; it is a necessity for spiritual survival. If we do not have that within us, from beyond us, we yield too much to that around us. Begin your ‘quiet time’ with a Bible word, phrase or prayer (‘Be still…’, ‘Maranatha’, ‘Lord, have mercy on me a sinner’). ‘Occupy yourself in it without going further. Do like the bees, who never quit a flower so long as they can extract any honey from it’ (Francis de Sales).

If you love, you will find time to love. You must stop what you’re doing for a while – every day if possible. You’ll get more and better work done in the rest of the time anyway! Your ‘quiet time’ may sometimes be short – but a short time with a friend is better than no time at all. Your quest, as Carlo Carretto suggests, is to make your own desert: if you are too busy to pray, you are too busy.

* ‘Pray without ceasing’. Meister Eckhart urged us to carry from our secret meeting with God ‘the same frame of mind’ into the world around us. Thomas Kelly, in his ‘Testament of Devotion’, talks about living on two planes at once. This is the same as the psalmist’s enjoying the Lord ‘always before my face’. Paul says we should ‘pray constantly’ (1 Thessalonians 5:17). God is vitally concerned with all the details of our lives: ‘In everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God’ (Phil. 4:6). ‘Pray at all times in the Spirit…’ (Eph. 6:18). Jesus taught that we should ‘always pray and never become discouraged’ (Luke 18:1).

* Pray with nature. An Australian Baptist theologian, Principal G.H.Morling used to have a sermon he called ‘A Robe of Healing’. His text was Mark 5:31 – ‘Who touched me?’ – and he made the point that ‘the woman touched his robe, his vesture… Nature may be thought of as his vesture. The world of nature is a cloak of God. William Carey prayed in the open air. Nature is a garment of the Most High. And we can touch God if we’re sensitive.’

Against the ancient gnostics and manicheans, who denied the reality of goodness in nature, Christian tradition has consistently reaffirmed that creation is the outcome of God’s loving and creative wisdom, his logos. Certainly, the Fall has resulted in creation’s ‘groaning with travail’. Nature is ‘red in tooth and claw’. And yet the glory of the Lord is everywhere too. In our new creation we are invited to ‘name nature’ again. Jesus expected this generation to read at least the signs of the sky and the harvest. (Few of us can do that much).

Westerners have sometimes been so busy conquering nature that they have become deaf to the voices of the rivers, the trees, the birds, and the flowers which are constantly telling us about our own condition of life, our beauty, and our mortality. For many of the saints, nature is a sacrament pointing to a reality beyond itself. For them bread is more than bread; wine is more than wine; it is God with us. (So wasting food is not just a sin because there are so many hungry in our world. It is a sin because it is an offense against the sacramental reality of all we eat and drink).

However, nature mysticism is a means, not an end. It is meant to draw us beyond nature into a relationship with a loving Creator, Provider and Redeemer (‘panentheism’ as Baron von Huegal called it – seeing in all created things God’s energies – not ‘pantheism’ which identifies creation with God). There is also the danger of nature mysticism being escapist; so rather than ‘loving’ nature, we should do as Jesus instructed and consider it. We might not be poetic, like Keats or Wordsworth, or praise God as St. Francis did (with birds in his hair) for sun and moon, fire and water, wind and weather, flowers and grass. However we can all learn to see more, with newly-opened eyes, in the magnificent world God has given to us.

* Prayer is also living and working. All of our life, our thoughts, our words, our actions, our motives, are lived in the presence of our God. Pere de Caussade talked inspiringly of ‘the sacrament of the present moment’.

Prayer cannot be divorced from daily living. Baron Friedrich von Huegel’s first suggestion to Evelyn Underhill when he was invited to be her spiritual director: visit the poor in inner-city London two days a week. After all the Spirit, says an ancient Latin hymn, is pater pauperum, ‘father of the poor’. Remember how Isaiah expressed the Lord’s message: ‘When you lift your hands in prayer, I will hide my eyes from you. Though you offer countless prayers, I will not listen. There is blood on your hands….. pursue justice and champion the oppressed.’ (Isaiah 1:15-17)

He or she who is not listening to the heart-cry of another, is not listening to God either – and God is not listening to them. Prayer is not an escape from reality. In prayer we ‘love the world’ as God does – the world of people. And there’s only one way to love – to leave ourselves and go to others.

Often this will be ‘hard love’, for we live in a world of beauty and of cruelty. As the twentieth-century mystic Joseph Mary Plumbett says it,

‘I saw his blood on the rose And in the stars the glory of his eyes.’

Contemplation, Thomas Merton used to say, is no pain-killer. But such contemplative prayer purifies action from arrogance. ‘Action is the stream and contemplation is the spring’. (12)

Prayer is phony and escapist unless it includes such sentiments as this, from a prayer of Francis of Assisi: ‘Lord, make me to do some work of peace for Thee.’ And from Bonhoeffer: ‘It is not some religious act which makes a Christian what he or she is, but participation in the suffering of God in the life of the world.’ (13)

So be encouraged! Prayer is hard – but so is everything else in this life that is worthwhile. There is no short cut to true spirituality. But prayer is also essentially a simple process – even a child-like one. We come empty-handed to our heavenly Father, humble, and poor. And, over time, we gradually discover that God inhabits more and more the centre of our lives, ‘more intimate to us than we are to ourselves’. (14)

Spiritual Disciplines

The spiritual life cannot be nurtured without discipline. Here are some well-known spiritual disciplines:

The Daily Office is an excellent structure for daily devotions. Try the 1978 Australian Prayer Book (pp.45-90) or the Daily Devotions version in the New Zealand Anglican Prayer Book. The Daily Office, says (Baptist) Stephen Winward is absolutely scriptural, God-centred, depends on an ordered use of Scripture (including difficult and challenging passages), is corporate, educative (we’re in touch with prayer traditions centuries old) and ‘obligatory’ (even though the discipline is sometimes hard). Of course, as the Protestant Reformers emphasised, it can be mechanical, formal, but it doesn’t have to be.

Christian spirituality issues from, and creates Christian community. We have suffered from too much ‘privatized religion’. Pastors, too, need to be accountable spiritually to someone. ‘Self-made Christianity’ is a contradiction. And remember, pastoral ministry is not automatically self- (or spirit-) nurturing. Because you handle holy things doesn’t ensure you’re a holy person.

In his Life Together Bonhoeffer wrote: ‘Let the one who cannot be alone beware of community … Let the one who is not in community beware of being alone.’ We need both community and solitude: each is necessary for the enrichment of the other. It is only in the discipline of silence and solitude that we learn when to speak and when to refrain from speaking.

The sacraments are the Lord’s specific gifts to his people: the corporate acts par excellence of his church.

Fasting is a good regular or occasional discipline. Fast from food, words, TV, spending money, the telephone, sex, watching sport – whatever will help get ends and means in perspective for a while.

Silence is ‘the royal road to spiritual formation’ (Nouwen). It is not just the absence of noise, but an opportunity to listen to the still small voice of the Spirit. ‘Meditation’ is a way for scripture to be internalized not merely (as in Transcental Meditation etc.) a technique to ‘calm down’.

Journaling is a useful way to record the promptings of the Spirit in your life. A spiritual journal is a written response to reality: a record of one’s inner and outer life (including dreams), a way to inner growth, reflection and healing.

CORPORATE SPIRITUALITY: GROWING IN FAITH HOPE AND LOVE WITH OTHERS

There are 22,000 Christian denominations in the world. The devil is active in all of them (and the Holy Spirit in most of them). And the devil has a particular strategy to destroy the work of the Holy Spirit for each denomination, each local church, and every Christian. In prayer and fasting we should ask for discernment about what this strategy might be! Some of us are experts in what Satan is doing everywhere else, except in our own situations!

Recently I have been invited to many places to teach a seminar on the many ‘mind-sets’ described in the New Testament which are distortions of God’s whole truth, or which make part of the truth the whole of it. Pharisees are given to legalism and dogmatism, Sadducees to rationalism, Scribes etc. to traditionalism, Zealots to radicalism, mystics to experientialism, Essenes to utopianism, grace-deniers to antinomianism. You can continue the list…

Here we will look at three ways the Holy Spirit wants to spiritually strengthen the church – through a biblical spirituality for ministry, the classical discipline of spiritual direction, and prayer with others.

Towards a Spirituality for Ministry

Ministry is mainly about how I relate to others. Every Christian is a minister, a servant. Some ministers are pastors – shepherds, leaders, mentors. Their task: to empower others towards God’s potential for them. So they spend half their ministry alone, with God, half with people (and the rest in administration!). They do three things, essentially: pray, teach, train (or delegate; Exodus 18:19-21, Acts 6:1-7). There’s only one generalization you can make about biblical pastors: they spent a disproportionate amount of their lives in deserts.

The minister – whether pastor or other – serves by introducing persons to Jesus, our only antidote for alienation. Alienation (sin) is the severing of self from self, self from others, self from God. The opposite of alienation is belonging: the process is called metanoia (‘turning’ from blaming, to owning one’s alienation and being ‘converted’). Truly ‘converted’ people are eucharistic, thankful, grateful.

There are three classical models of ministry in terms of spirituality.

1. The Wounded Healer: The minister of Christ expects trouble (as Jesus promised) in a world tempting us with clean sorrow and clean joy. The Lord is closer when we are vulnerable, when we stop pretending to be powerful, and admit how wounded we are. Personal spiritual renewal comes only through brokenness, dying (Psalm 51:10-12,17, John 12:20-28). The Christian life begins and continues as a via crucis. We recognize Judas and Peter in ourselves – we’re both wicked and weak. And yet, in our despair, when resurrection seems unlikely we hear him in the garden or on the sea-shore, alive, calling us by name.

Because we are identified with a dying/risen Christ, our ministry is a ‘living reminder’ of this oneness. So we will avoid crucifixion-only spiritual masochism or resurrection-only triumphalism. And our pastoral task is to prevent others suffering for the wrong reasons.

2. The Servant Leader: Ministry is the translation of the Good News into human relationships. It’s having authority to empower others to live in the Kingdom. ‘Authority’ implies a firm basis for knowing and acting; ‘authorities’ maintain their position after knowing/acting have finished, and ‘lord’ it over others (which is why people who climb institutions have difficulty maintaining a spiritual life). Jesus, in contrast to the authorities, was a servant, identifying with us in our ordinariness (the Suffering Servant wasn’t good-looking, Isaiah 52:13). So ministry has to do with ‘the quiet homely joys of humdrum days’ (Sangster), the sheer Mondayness of things. Such servanthood is indiscriminate (if I cannot embrace someone, it is because he or she reminds me of some fear in myself).

3. The Scholar Teacher (Latin ‘schola’ = free time). Henri Nouwen (Creative Ministry) contrasts ‘violent’ and ‘redemptive’ teaching models. ‘Violent’ teaching is competitive (knowledge is property to be defended rather than a gift to be shared), unilateral (the teacher is strong/competent, the pupil weak/ignorant), and alienating (students and teachers belong to different worlds). ‘Redemptive’ teaching is evocative (drawing out potentials), bilateral (teachers are free to learn from students), actualizing (offering alternative life-styles in a violent world).

Jesus is our pattern for ministry – to God and for the world. Close communion with the Father was at the heart of all he was and did. As his disciples saw this reality they wanted to be part of it (why don’t more people ask us to teach them to pray?). His prayer-life was disciplined and ordered, although he too, was busy. It begins with a contemplation of God – ‘Our Father’ – before moving to human need. He prays hard before important decisions, like choosing the twelve. His meditation on Scripture gives strength in times of testing, particularly when the devil wants him to do ministry another way. Time is found for prayer – 40 days, a whole night, very early in the morning. Hurry is the death of prayer. (When did you last take a retreat?). Nowhere does Jesus pray ‘to feel good’: for him, and for us, the key imperative is obedience.

Spiritual Direction Mark Link sent a letter to a number of students in the high school where he taught. He invited them to * attend the eucharistic liturgy once a week (in addition to Sunday) * give 10 minutes of each day to meditation; and * meet with a spiritual director every week (or 2 weeks) to help them with their spiritual growth, particularly with their prayer.

The response, he says, exceeded expectation. The book on prayer he wrote for those students is still one of the best around (YOU: Prayer for Beginners and Those Who Have Forgotten How, Argus, 1976).

In the words of William Barry, spiritual direction is ‘that form of pastoral care which offers direct help to another person to enable that person to relate personally to him or her, to respond to God personally, and to live the consequences of that relationship.’ (15)

Some do not like the word ‘direction’ with its directive implications, so there are alternatives: ‘soul friend’, ‘spiritual friend’, ‘prayer companion’, ‘spiritual mentor’.

Everyone, said Martin Luther, should have ‘a father (or mother) in God’. Essentially the spiritual director discerns what Ignatius called the ‘movement of spirits’, whether good or evil, in the other. ‘Consolation’ is a life-giving movement towards God, though it won’t always be pain- or struggle-free. ‘Desolation’, on the other hand, might even be pleasurable, but leads away from God, into chaos, confusion and turmoil.

So the key gift a spiritual director will possess will be that of ‘discernment of spirits’. He or she will be one who can ‘read the signs of the times and the writing on the walls of souls’ (Leech). The spiritual director will be a person of above-average faith, hope and love; of experience (spiritual, theological, psychological, and in the life of prayer), and of learning (steeped in Scripture and the wisdom of the spiritual masters).

Spiritual directors try to encourage a contemplative attitude in those who seek direction. True contemplation causes us to forget our surroundings, and the passage of time. It is an experience of transcendence, of self-forgetfulness, of absorption in the contemplated object. It involves us in wonder, gratitude, and joy. Because the Lord is invisible, he is sometimes hard to ‘apprehend’; because of his ‘otherness’ he is hard to listen to. So true contemplation goes beyond words, into the realm of the imagination. Much verbal prayer can be self-absorbing. True contemplation is ‘lost in wonder, love and praise’ with something or someone other than the self as the object. Reflection rather than analysis is the primary mode of contemplation.

Agnes Sanford says (in The Healing Gifts of the Spirit) to people who say ‘I can’t find God’ that they should do some simple things they like to do, that will put them in the way of God ‘so that he can find you’. Above all, scripture and nature can be means for this to happen. One of the richest experiences of my life resulted from my director’s suggesting I imagine I am Peter in the story of the feeding of the five thousand. Try it!

An important corollary of spiritual direction is an attitude open to ‘conversions’. Whereas most of us believe we are truly converted to the Lord only once, there is a sense in which we are experiencing transitions, movements, conversions, all our lives if we are growing people. Henri Nouwen (Reaching Out) writes for example about moving from loneliness to solitude, hostility to hospitality, illusion to prayer. Connolly talks about moving from disappointment to receptivity. And there is a constant movement in a Christian from sinfulness to forgiveness.

John of the Cross teaches us how to cope with the ‘dark night’, when we feel we have nothing to hang on to. How can we know this experience is from God? He says there are three signs: an inability to pray the way I used to; a sense of going backwards; but also a genuine desire for God. Although such an experience is painful, God is there, he says. (That’s why we need a discerning spiritual director in times like these: otherwise we might be tempted to wallow in despair.)

How can I find a spiritual director? First, do some reading in the area. (See the bibliography). Then ask yourself: do I know someone who fits the characteristics outlined by these authors? Ask God for guidance, of course. Sometimes, if a more mature person can’t be found, you can try mutual direction with a caring Christian friend. Attend courses and retreats. Ask your local Anglican or Catholic priest for contacts: their traditions have not excluded this discipline, as most have.

Richard Foster suggests that while spiritual direction can become formalised, it need not be. ‘If we have the humility to believe that we can learn from our brothers and sisters and the understanding that some have gone further into the divine Centre than others, we can see the necessity of spiritual direction. As Virgil Vogt has said ‘If you cannot listen to your brother/sister, you cannot listen to the Holy Spirit’.’ (16)

Praying With Others

The most compelling reason for praying with others is Jesus’ promise that ‘whenever two of you on earth agree about anything you pray for, it will be done for you by my Father in heaven. For where two or three come together in my Name, I am there with them’. (Matthew 18:19, 20).

Jesus took his disciples with him occasionally when he was praying in solitary places (Luke 9:18,28). We know what Jesus prayed in Gethsemane probably because part of his prayer was overheard (Mark 14:33).

The apostolic Christians prayed together from the start. The Holy Spirit was poured out on a group at prayer (Acts 1:14). They continued to spend a lot of time in prayer together (Acts 2:42). Paul prayed constantly with his co-missioners (Colossians 1:9; 1 Thessalonians 1:2; 2 Thessalonians 1:11) and asked others to join him in disciplined prayer (Romans 15:30). James (5:16) tells us to ‘confess your sins to one another and pray for one another, so that you will be healed.’

But prayer with others is not only helpful to us, it is also associated with all the great spiritual awakenings. For example, the Evangelical Revival in England in the late 18th century began in a little ‘Holy Club’ at Oxford. So impressed were the Wesleys with the prayer cell principle that every Methodist society was organised into small Band and Class meetings. Similarly the great revival in America in 1857- 1858 was empowered and nurtured in prayer meetings. The longest- lasting revival in Christian history, affecting four-to-five generations of Koreans, has been noted for its powerful prayer meetings.

Conclusion

Spirituality is about loving the God who loves us. Here is a pot-pourri of quotes from some of the spiritual masters I came across in the past week:

‘You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you’ (Augustine).

‘God’s love is single, but not private; alone, yet not solitary; shared but not divided… growing no less by sharing, failing not through use, nor growing old by time’ (Hugh of St. Victor).

‘There are four degrees of love. The first is love of self for self’s sake. The second is love of God for self’s sake. The third is love of God for God’s sake. The fourth is love of self for God’s sake.’ (Bernard of Clairvaux).

Finally, from Juliana of Norwich: ‘All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.’

Shalom!

Rowland Croucher

Endnotes

1. Evelyn Underhill, The Spiritual Life, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1976, 85-85.

2. Gerard Hanlon, ‘A Spirituality for Our Times?’ in Clergy Review, June 1984, 200.

3. 1 Corinthians 6:9-11, Colossians 3:5-7.

4. Matthew 5:19.

5. Matthew 19:17,21.

6. Matthew Fox, Original Blessing: A Primer in Creation Spirituality, Santa Fe: Bear & Co., 1983.

7. W.E. Sangster, The Pure in Heart, London: Epworth, 1955, 90-91.

8. John Baillie, Invitation to Pilgrimage, 71, quoted in Sangster, ibid., 84.

9. Teilhard de Chardin, Hymn of the Universe, Fontana, 1970, 111.

10. Robert Faricy, Praying, Villa Books, 1979, 20.

11. Carlo Carretto, Letters from the Desert, Darton, Longman & Todd, 1972, 27.

12. Thomas Merton, No Man Is An Island, Hollis & Carter, 1955, 61.

13. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Prisoner for God, London: SCM, 1953, 166.

14. Augustine, Confessions III, 6.

15. William A. Barry, ‘Spiritual Direction and Pastoral Counselling’, Pastoral Psychology, 26 (1), 1977, 6.

16. Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, London: H & S, 1980, 160.

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