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November 15, 2024 - May 25, 2025
Henri Nouwen once said, bluntly but accurately, Without solitude it is virtually impossible to live a spiritual life.[63]
Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die.[2]
Long before the skull was the trademark aesthetic of punk rock bands, motorcycle gangs, or Hollywood pirates, it was the visual motif of Christian monks. For centuries, monks would go into their cells and kneel on prayer benches with three items spread before them: a portion of Scripture, a candle (to read said Scripture), and a skull. Not a skull bought on Etsy, as mine is, but a real one—likely from a previous denizen of the monastery: “my old roommate, Brother Makarios.”
Western culture is arguably built around the denial of death through the coping mechanism of distraction. As Ronald Rolheiser put it, “We are distracting ourselves into spiritual oblivion.”[4]
New York Times columnist David Brooks famously distinguished between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.”[5] Résumé virtues are what we talk about in life—where we work, what we’ve accomplished, what accolades we’ve received, and so on. Eulogy virtues are what others talk about when we die—namely, the people we were, the fabric that made up our character, and the relationships that defined our sojourn on this earth.
becoming a person of love through union with Jesus.
Benedict was an apprentice of Jesus who, in time, became a bona fide saint. Like a true apprentice, he saw our years in the body as a kind of training ground for eternity.
Now we’re to goal #2 of an apprentice: Become like Jesus.
To recap, the aim of a first-century apprentice wasn’t just to learn the Torah from a smart rabbi, but to learn life from one who had become a master of it.
The monks have long called this process imitatio Christi, or “the imitation of Christ.” Today we call it “spiritual formation.”
Spiritual formation is not optional.
If spiritual formation is simply the way the human spirit, or self, is formed into a definitive shape (for better or worse), then spiritual formation in the Way of Jesus is how each of us is formed to be like Jesus and, in doing so, to be our deepest, truest self—the self that God had in mind when he willed us into existence before time began. The irony of our “be true to yourself” culture is that everyone ends up looking the same.
With that in mind, let me attempt a working definition of spiritual formation in the Way of Jesus: the process of being formed into people of love in Christ.
Spiritual growth is similar to bodily growth—very gradual.
But we cannot lower the horizon of possibility that was set by the extraordinary life of Jesus and gift of his Spirit. Instead, we must stay with the process for as long as it takes to actualize our destinies.
The spiritual teacher Pete Scazzero once told me a maxim that was passed on to him by an older, wiser mentor: “The best decade of your life will be your seventies, the second best will be your eighties, and the third will be your sixties.” By best he did not mean the happiest (though I expect that too) but our richest and most joyful and helpful to others.
Our job is mostly to make ourselves available.
He won’t force it on us. As Saint Augustine said in the fourth century, Without God, we cannot. Without us, God will not.
But our job isn’t to self-save; it’s to surrender.
Formation isn’t a Christianized version of project self; it’s a process of salvation. Of being saved by Jesus.
And the author says another word for "saved" is "healed"
Love is the acid test of spiritual formation.
What does this mean?
If you want to chart your progress on the spirituality journey, test the quality of your closest relationships—namely, by love and the fruit of the Spirit. Would the people who know you best say you are becoming more loving, joyful, and at peace? More patient and less frustrated? Kinder, gentler, softening with time, and pervaded by goodness? Faithful, especially in hard times, and self-controlled?
To quote Saint Augustine yet again, “God is (at once) Lover, Beloved, and Love itself.”[17] He is the one who loves, the one who is loved, and the ultimate source of all love.
And remember, love as defined by Jesus is not just a nice feeling of affection. It’s an attitude, yes, of compassion, warmth, and delight, but it’s also an action. It’s agape—to will the good of another ahead of your own, no matter the cost or sacrifice that may require.
Christlikeness is the result of Christ in us. It’s all grace; it’s always been grace. “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”[21] And us in Christ. In fact, “in Christ” is a phrase used all through the New Testament, more than eighty times in Paul’s letters alone. Theologians call this doctrine “incorporation”—being incorporated, integrated into the inner life of God himself through Christ. Jesus has come to draw us into God’s inner life of Love loving.
to draw us into his inner life, to heal us by immersing us within the fold of his Trinitarian love, and then to send us out into the world as agents of his love.
Jesus’ invitation to apprentice under him isn’t just a chance to become people of love who are like God; it’s a chance to enter the inner life of God himself. The ancients called this “union” with God, and it is the very meaning of our human existence—
This, then, is spiritual formation: the process of being formed into a person of self-giving love through deepening surrender to and union with the Trinity.
Christlikeness is possible, but it’s not natural.
Nobody wakes up one morning around age fifty and thinks, Wow, would you look at that? I became a saint. Weird. Or Hmm, it seems I’ve been living the Sermon on the Mount. I’m increasingly free of all worry, care, judgmentalism, lust, and anger; money no longer has a hold on my heart; I’m no longer run by fear and the need to look good to other people; I feel free; I’ve been pervaded by love, even love for my enemies. What a nice coincidence. Yeah…no. Formation will happen to you, per our earlier argument, with zero conscious decision on your part, but formation into a person of love in Christ
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Dr. Janet Hagberg and Robert Guelich from Fuller Seminary spent decades analyzing the data of thousands of Christians’ lives, searching for a developmental process by which we become more like Jesus over our lifetimes. They identified a six-stage spiritual development theory:[26]
We don’t have a good grasp on how the human soul goes from spiritual birth to spiritual maturity. So we have a lot of spiritual adolescents, but few elders.
And after decades of traveling all over the world teaching on spiritual formation, he lovingly concluded that most people “had no theology of spiritual growth.” He was struck by “the abysmal ignorance people have of how we are transformed.” He said this with zero judgment, only grief.
most people’s theories of change tend to be Unconscious, not conscious Haphazard, not intentional Secular, not scriptural Mostly ineffective, not transformational The fallout of this ignorance is several well-known phenomena across the Western church: Churches full of people who are Christians but not apprentices of Jesus A widespread cancer of hypocrisy that has infected the church, where the gap between Jesus’ teachings and people’s day-to-day lives (including those of many pastors) is too great to be explained away graciously A generation of people disillusioned with the faith, with a
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However, within you and all around you are strong forces that eat willpower for breakfast: deeply ingrained habits of sin that come from your family line, the automatic responses of your body, and any form of trauma, addiction, or fear.
The genius of Jesus’ ethical teaching was that you cannot keep the law by trying not to break the law. You cannot become more loving by trying to become more loving, no matter how much self-effort you bring to the table. You have to be transformed in your inner person, or what Jesus called “the heart.”
Self-effort and grace are partners, not competitors locked in a tug-of-war for glory. But the main function of self-effort in our formation is to do what we can do—make space to surrender to God via the practices of Jesus—so God can do what we can’t do: heal, liberate, and transform us into people of love.
This is why information alone does not produce transformation. Because knowing something is not the same as doing something, which is still not the same as becoming the kind of person who does something naturally as a by-product of a transformed inner nature.
But at its worst, this is laziness, pure and simple, because it’s far easier to go to church once a week chasing a spiritual high and angle for a download from heaven than to do the daily, unglamorous work of discipleship.
Jesus is in the business of healing souls. But while the four Gospels have dozens of stories of Jesus instantly healing people’s bodies (after which, by the way, he almost always gave them instructions to go and do something as a next step), he doesn’t seem to do the same with people’s characters. There is not a single instance in which he simply waved his hand to take away an ugly habit or personality trait in one of his apprentices.
To reiterate, all three of these strategies highlight something key: the centrality of our will, the key role of Scripture, and our need for encounter. Yet in isolation, they don’t seem to work nearly as well as you’d think.
The New Testament writers speak of sin as not just an action, but also a condition—of being in sin. We screw up, we offend, we hurt, we betray, we forget, we say things we regret. “To err is human.” Calling people “sinful” is no more judgmental than a doctor telling a patient they have a liver condition. It’s just honest.
To make progress in our formation, we must face our sin.
One of the generational corrections that’s come from millennials and Gen Z (with all sorts of overcorrections, of course; that’s how it inevitably works) is the recognition that our wickedness is tied to our woundedness. “Hurt people hurt people,” as the saying goes, and it’s true.
Because of our hyper-individualistic culture, we often miss this last dimension, but Scripture’s testimony is unequivocal: Our environment has warped us.
This is one of the best ways to make sense of the Christian doctrine of original sin. Here’s Kallistos Ware: The doctrine of original sin means…that we are born into an environment where it is easy to do evil and hard to do good; easy to hurt others, and hard to heal their wounds; easy to arouse men’s suspicions, and hard to win their trust. It means that we are each of us conditioned by the solidarity of the human race in its accumulated wrong-doing and wrong-thinking, and hence wrong-being. And to this accumulation of wrong we have ourselves added by our own deliberate acts of sin. The gulf
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Most people focus on dimension #1 of sin but not #2 and #3, and as a result, we don’t realize just how desperate our situation is. One reason for this is that Western Christians (Protestant and Catholic, but especially Protestant) have predominantly thought about sin through the guilt/innocence paradigm—what theologians call a “forensic” (that is, legal) view of sin. The basic idea is that God is a morally serious God; he is not only loving and compassionate but also holy and just. We are guilty before his law of justice, and our only hope is Christ’s pardon. And the good news is that Christ
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In his analogy, sin was like a sickness and he was the doctor. Repentance wasn’t just pleading for mercy before a judge; it was opening your wounding to a physician. Based on this line, ancient Christians called Jesus “the doctor of the soul.”
Few people realize that the Greek word translated “saved” in the New Testament is sōzō—a word that is often translated “healed.”[41] So, in the Gospels, when you read that Jesus “saved” someone and then read that he “healed” someone, you’re often reading the exact same word.
salvation is a kind of healing.
