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

by M. Robert Mulholland

Our spirituality is not an add-on, it is the very essence of our being. We are spiritual beings whose emotions, psychology, body and mind are the incarnation of our spiritual life in the world.

Once we understand spiritual formation as a process, all of life becomes spiritual formation.

Rebellion against God’s gracious work moves us into destructive and dehumanizing emptiness, into increasingly dysfunctional lives that are self-destructive and treat others as objects to be manipulated and used for our own purposes.

It is not surprising that we, as members of an instant gratification culture, tend to become impatient with any process of development that requires of us more than a limited involvement of our time and energies. If we do not receive the desired results almost instantly, we become impatient and frustrated.

Often our spiritual quest becomes a search for the right technique, the proper method, the perfect program that can immediately deliver the desired results of spiritual maturity and wholeness.

What we don’t realize is that often a period of apparent spiritual stagnation, a time in which we don’t feel as if we are going anywhere, a phase of life in which our relationship with God seems weak or nonexistent, the time of dryness, of darkness—what the mothers and fathers of the church speak of as the desert experience—is filled with nurturing down below the surface that we never see.

In the final analysis there is nothing we can do to transform ourselves into persons who love and serve as Jesus did except make ourselves available for God to do that work of transforming grace in our lives.

Spiritual formation is the great reversal: from being the subject who controls all other things to being a person who is shaped by the presence, purpose and power of God in all things.

We learn from Jesus’ experience, however, that the most critical temptations attach themselves to the call and empowerment of God that defines the meaning, value and purpose of our existence.

When we operate from the perspective that our doing determines our being, we expect immediate returns on our investment of time and resources—observable results that prove that we have performed well and are therefore persons of value and worth. If we fail to receive such instant feedback, we presume we have failed and begin to struggle with a perceived loss of self-image, value, purpose and even identity.

If indeed the work of God’s formation in us is the process of forming us in the image of Christ, obviously it’s going to take place at the points where we are not yet formed in that image. This means that one of the first dynamics of holistic spiritual formation will be confrontation.

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.

Wherever something in our life is not formed in the image of Christ, there is a place where we are incapable of being all that God wants us to be with others; there is a place where our life with others is hindered and limited and restricted in its effectiveness and in its fullness; there is a place where our life will tend to become disruptive and even destructive to others.

If you want a good litmus test of your spiritual growth, simply examine the nature and quality of your relationships with others. Are you more loving, more compassionate, more patient, more understanding, more caring, more giving, more forgiving than you were a year ago? If you cannot answer these kinds of questions in the affirmative and especially if others cannot answer them in the affirmative about you, then you need to examine carefully the nature of your spiritual life and growth.

Our relationships with others are not only the testing grounds of our spiritual life but also the places where our growth toward wholeness in Christ happens.

Two basic emotions go with awakening: it is both a comfort and a threat. It is comfort because there is a sense of awakening to deeper realities of who we are and who God is. But at the same time there is threat: in that awakening we recognize that we are not what we ought to be and that God is something far more than we thought.

purgation: the process of bringing our behavior, our attitudes, our desires into increasing harmony with our growing perception of what the Christlike life is all about.

In a world where such order and control are partial at best, anxious care can become a consuming passion that misshapes all relationships, all events and all activities of one’s life. When this happens, anxiety-driven persons tend to become manipulative and dehumanizing in their relationships with others. Others must conform to their pathological attempts to order the world and maintain control of their lives. Anxiety-driven persons are also compelled to impose their own order on the events of their lives. Layer upon layer of defenses and securities are constructed to keep the unpredictable and unexpected from intruding into their carefully ordered world.

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.

The only pure motive for our spiritual disciplines is the motive of loving obedience to God. Only the motive of loving obedience will enable us to persist in the disciplines when the going gets rough, when nothing seems to be happening, when the old habits and attitudes of our brokenness seem unaffected by the disciplines that aim at their healing and transformation.

We tend to think of prayer as something we do in order to produce the results we believe are needed or, rather, to get God to produce the results. Go into any Christian bookstore and note the number of books devoted to techniques of prayer. We are interested in knowing what works and developing the skills that will ensure that our prayers are effective.