Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation (Transforming Resources)

by M. Robert Mulholland

Too often spiritual formation is seen as something “added on” to our personality that solves all our emotional, psychological, physical and mental problems.

As John Wesley constantly emphasized, there can be no personal holiness without social holiness. Much of what passes for spiritual formation these days is a very privatized, individualized experience. It does not enliven and enrich the body of Christ, nor is it vitally dependent on the body of Christ for its own wholeness.

But spiritual formation as “being formed” will also be seen to move against the grain of our do-it-yourself culture and

nature; a dying is involved in our growth toward wholeness, a cross on which we lose our old self with its bondages and brokenness.

You also know my reluctance to let you have your way with me in these areas. Hear the deeper cry of my heart for wholeness and by your grace enable me to be open to your transforming presence in this reading.

To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much work that we can be aware of only in the results. . . . In the gulf of our unknown being God works behind our consciousness. With His holy influence, with His own presence. . . . He may be approaching our consciousness from behind, coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light, long before we begin to be aware that He is answering our request—has answered it, and is visiting His child.2

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state or the other.4

Liturgy consists of the corporate and individual patterns of devotion, worship, fellowship and obedience that enable us increasingly to manifest in the world God’s kingdom of love, forgiveness, reconciliation, cleansing, healing and holiness.