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November 27, 2022 - February 4, 2023
When spirituality is viewed as a journey, however, the way to spiritual wholeness is seen to lie in an increasingly faithful response to the One whose purpose shapes our path, whose grace redeems our detours, whose power liberates us from crippling bondages of the prior journey and whose transforming presence meets us at each turn in the road.
She told how one day she was standing at the kitchen sink, washing the dishes, with tears of anguish and frustration running down her face into the dishwater. In her agony, she cried out, “Oh, God, who is my father?” Then, she said, she heard a voice saying to her, “I am your Father.”
The voice was so real she turned to see who had come into the kitchen, but there was no one there. Again the voice came, “I am your Father, and I have always been your Father.” In that moment she knew the profound reality that Paul is speaking of. She came to know that deeper than the accident of her conception was the eternal purpose of a loving God, who had spoken her forth into being before the foundation of the world.
The process of being formed in the image of Christ takes place primarily at the points of our unlikeness to Christ’s image. God is present to us in the most destructive aspects of our cultural captivity. God is involved with us in the most imprisoning bondage of our brokenness. God meets us in those places of our lives that are most alienated from God. God is there, in grace, offering us the forgiveness, the cleansing, the liberation, the healing we need to begin the journey toward our wholeness and fulfillment in Christ.
But this can be uncomfortable. We would much rather have our spiritual formation focus on those places where we are pretty well along the way. How much of our devotional life and our worship are designed simply to affirm, for ourselves, others and perhaps even God, those areas of our lives that we think are already well along the way? In fact, may not such practices become a defense mechanism against the areas that are not yet formed in the image of Christ?
That probing will probably always be confrontational, and it will always be a challenge and a call to us in our brokenness to come out of the brokenness into wholeness in Christ. But it will also be a costly call, because that brokenness is who we are.
This is what Jesus indicates when he speaks about losing yourself. That part of you which has not yet been formed in the image of Christ is not simply a thing in you—it is an essential part of who you are. This is what Jesus is pointing to when he calls us to take up our cross.
Our cross is the point of our unlikeness to the image of Christ, where we must die to self in order to be raised by God into wholeness of life in the image of Christ right there at that point. So the process of being formed in the image of Christ takes place at the points of our unlikeness to Christ, and the first step is confrontation.
There must be a consecration, a release of ourselves to God at each point of our unlikeness to Christ. When there is, the process of being formed in the image of Christ begins.
T he fourth element in our definition of spiritual formation, for the sake of others, is the one we must never forget. Everything that God has done, is doing and ever will do in our lives to conform us to the image of Christ (which is the image of our wholeness) is not so that we may someday be set in a display case in heaven as trophies of grace. All of God’s work to conform us to the image of Christ has as its sole purpose that we might become what God created us to be in relationship with God and with others.
We can never be all that God wants us to be with others as long as that point of unlikeness to the image of Christ exists within us.
The one who loves others abides in the light and is not a cause of stumbling.
The primary focus must be trinitarian—God, self, others—if we are to grow holistically into the image of Christ.
the process of being formed in the image of Christ takes place primarily at the points of unlikeness to Christ.
Search me, God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (NIV)
At the end of the day (just before retiring at night or in the morning before getting caught up in the new day), take five minutes or so to reflect on the last twenty-four hours, asking God to search you and know you and help you know you. Review each aspect of your day, each interpersonal interaction, each inner thought pattern and outer response as though someone had filmed the whole thing. As you do, ask God to show you where you fell short of Christlikeness—where you fell short of God’s created purpose for you to be a compassionate person “whose relationships are characterized by
love and forgiveness, persons whose lives are a healing, liberating, transforming touch of God’s grace upon their world.”
Open yourself to the process of spiritual transformation by saying yes and giving God permission to do the work God wants to do in you right there.
The great promise of the Christian life is that “God is there, in grace, offering the forgiveness, the cleansing, the liberation, the healing we need to begin the journey toward wholeness and fulfillment in Christ.”
One wonders, for instance, how many of the sexual aberrations of noted Christian leaders in recent years might be due in part to their being strongly intuitive types who failed to nurture the sensing side of their preference pattern.
Or take the thinking-type persons whose special temptation is emotional explosion. Why? Because if they do not bring their feeling side into their spiritual life and deal with their feelings and emotions in a holistic way, those pent-up emotions will sooner or later explode in damaging ways. When this happens, it tends to confirm our mistaken idea that our shadow side is evil, and we redouble our efforts in the areas of our preferences in an attempt to overcome the evil. Many people ride this spiritual rollercoaster throughout their Christian pilgrimage, because no one ever tells them that
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As I mentioned in chapter six, one particular temptation of intuitive persons is primitive sensuality. Can
you see the rationale for this? If intuitives do not seek spiritual nurture of the sensing side of their nature, the sensing side will be deprived, starved, and it will cry out for nurture in unhealthy ways. The result may be primitive sensuality, the kinds of sexual exploits that some leading Christian figures have fallen into, or perhaps a more private obsession with sexual fantasies, pornography or masturbation. (Could it be that extravert intuitives will tend to express primitive sensuality with others, heightening the possibility of disclosure, while introvert intuitives will tend to
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In
Take the prayer found in Psalm 139:23-24 one step further and ask, “Search me, O God, and know my heart; try me and know my thoughts. See if there be any undeveloped, undernourished part of my personality and lead me in a more holistic, life-giving way” (my paraphrase).
After praying in this way, sit quietly and allow God to bring to mind any way such a one-sided spirituality has been detrimental to you or to others. Is there any way this one-sided approach has manifested itself in unspiritual behaviors? Are you aware of your undernourished shadow side crying out for equal time and attention? As God helps you to become more aware, ask him to lead you in a more life-giving way and show you what that might look like in very concrete terms. Table 2, “Following Your Spiritual Path,” will be very helpful to you in this regard.
She had learned truly to rest the entire weight of her being in God, to be anxious in nothing and to rejoice in everything. Instead of my ministering to her, she ministered to me, and I left that room knowing I had been in the presence of one of God’s
Prayer and supplication, then, are not reactions to circumstances; they are the habits of the heart by which we meet the troublesome events of life.
Having established the posture of the disciple’s heart toward God in the midst of life’s disruptions, Paul speaks of our petitions. These requests, however, are now set within a different frame of reference. If we have not first entered into the posture of prayer and supplication, our requests tend to be very narrowly focused on our own agenda and have their center in our self-referenced matrix of life. The posture of prayer and supplication, however, places us and our situations into the deeper matrix of God’s presence and purpose. While still shaped by our perception of the situation, our
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Instead, Paul tells us, trust is a release of both mind and heart to God. This trust is what the classical Christian tradition calls detachment. It is neither a passive resignation nor a fatalistic acquiescence to whatever comes. It is, rather, a consistent posture of actively turning our whole being to God so that God’s presence, purpose and power can be released through our lives into all situations.
Such trust enables us to be God’s persons for others. Without such trust, our lives are spent defending ourselves against the real or imagined threats of others, or manipulating others for our own purposes. Such trust empowers us to be agents of God’s transforming grace in a hurting and broken world. Without such trust, we are unable to stand against the systemic evil of institutions and society.
Psalm 131: O LORD, my heart is not proud nor haughty my eyes. I have not gone after things too great nor marvels beyond me. Truly I have set my soul in silence and peace. A weaned child on its mother’s breast, even so is my soul.6
The first affirmation expresses the absence of self-concerned anxiety. Then, in the image of the weaned child at its mother’s breast, the psalmist reveals the life of absolute trust in God. The unweaned child is at its mother’s breast for its own needs, its own agenda—milk. The weaned child, however, has no such need or agenda. It is content to rest in the mother’s arms and receive whatever attention she chooses to give. The stage of purgation is characterized by the struggle of two selves: the self that is not yet all that it has been created to be in God’s will for our wholeness, and the
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When you come to appear before me, who requires of you this trampling of my courts? Bring no more vain offerings; incense is an abomination to me. New moon and sabbath and the calling of assemblies— I cannot endure iniquity and solemn assembly. (Is 1:12-13)
In this stage, prayer becomes the flow of our life as God is experienced in all things. I think what Paul speaks of as unceasing prayer is a life that is increasingly attuned to God in all things—not in a privatized withdrawal from the world but in the midst of the hustle and bustle, busyness and pain, hurt and brokenness of our life and the world around us.
As God becomes a vital and living reality in our own being, God, paradoxically, also becomes more present in the world “out there,” infusing all things, events, persons with the fullness of God’s presence and purpose.
“It is now no longer I that live but Christ lives in me.”13
As with some of the other stages of the Christian pilgrimage, union has several components. Relying on St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa of Ávila, the two greatest writers on this stage, Groeschel lists the components of union as prayer of quietness, dark night of the senses, full union with God, ecstatic union, dark night of the spirit and transforming union.14
The dark night of the senses begins to move us beyond such dependency to an unconditioned relationship with God. Groeschel notes that this is often a time of great suffering: “a mysterious collection of misfortunes overtakes people at this time.”17 The biblical model here is Job, who, deprived of all affective and cognitive assurances of God’s love and care, comes to the deep experience of God that transcends such assurances. This is heavy stuff! But ultimately God must be in our life who God is, unrestricted by the narrow limits of our thought or feeling.
Such a pliability in God’s hands is, in the mystical tradition of Christian spirituality, occasionally accompanied by the experience of ecstasy, or ecstatic union, best described as a period of total absorption in God, during which a person is unaware of her or his surroundings.21 Paul’s description of being caught up to the third heaven, where he didn’t know whether he was in the body or out of the body (2 Cor 12:2-3), has the characteristics of ecstasy.
The experience of full union, and ecstasy if it is given, prepares the pilgrim for the dark night of the spirit, the last and narrowest tunnel of the spiritual journey toward wholeness in Christ. The dark night of the spirit is the eye of the needle through which no remaining vestiges of self-will may pass. It is the final stage of losing our self that it may be no longer we who live but Christ who lives in us (Gal 2:20). But such loss is profoundly painful. It is indeed a dying, a crucifying, and is surrounded by the darkness of God’s “absence” even as was the cross from which Jesus cried
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Once we have relinquished all vestiges of self-control of the relationship with God and the world, we enter into the transforming union for which Jesus prayed: “I pray . . . for those who will believe in me . . . that they all may be one, even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you,...
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This journey through the stages of awakening, purgation and illumination to union is accomplished in the vehicle of our personality, with its unique design of preference patterns and its ever-modulating psychological state.
It is easier to keep God under control when our preferred patterns regulate our dynamics of behavior and relationship, and where we have learned to accommodate to our psychological state. It is often on the less preferred side of our preference pattern, however, that God breaks in and upsets the little religious systems by which we try to keep God “safe” and under control.
The often disturbing, upsetting intrusions of others enable them to become agents of God’s troubling grace in our pilgrimage.
Our sisters and brothers in the faith also become God’s agents of comfort, encouragement and support as we wrestle with the call to come out of the security of our incompleteness into the wholeness God has for us in Christ. It is in the community of faith that we find the support structures of the classical and personal spiritual disciplines, through which God conforms us to the wholeness of Christ for others.
The classic stages of the spiritual journey—awakening, purgation, illumination and union—are an attempt to describe the different movements we experience along the way. We all experience these stages, whether we know how to name them or not.
As you look at your overall spiritual journey, which stage seems to describe best where you find yourself right now? How is it helpful to see your experience described here? Are there any surprises or new insights that provide guidance regarding how you might give yourself more fully to this stage of your journey? This would be a good place to journal about (or even to draw) where you find yourself on the spiritual journey.
As you read the section titled “The Futility of Anxious Care,” ask God to show you where you might still be “closed within the fragile shell of [your] own limited order and control.” If you were to draw a continuum with “A Life of Anxious Care” on one end and “The Life of Trust” on the other, where would you place yourself? How is God inviting you to turn your whole being toward him, so that his presence, purpose and power can be released through your life? If you are journaling about where you find yourself on the spiritual journey, start a new page in your journal by writing “God, I hear you
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Holistic spiritual disciplines are acts of loving obedience we offer to God steadily and consistently, to be used for whatever work God purposes to do in and through our lives.
