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

by M. Robert Mulholland

much contemporary Christian spirituality tends to view the spiritual life as a static possession rather than a dynamic and ever-developing growth toward wholeness in the image of Christ. When spirituality is viewed as a static possession, the way to spiritual wholeness is seen as the acquisition of information and techniques that enable us to gain possession of the desired state of spirituality. Discipleship is perceived as “my” spiritual life and tends to be defined by actions that ensure its possession. Thus the endless quest for techniques, methods, programs by which we hope to “achieve” spiritual fulfillment. The hidden premise behind all of this is the unquestioned assumption that we alone are in control of our spirituality. In brief, we assume we are in control of our relationship with God.

Spiritual formation is a process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.

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

Thus spiritual formation is the experience of being shaped by God toward wholeness.

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.

We fail to realize that the process of spiritual shaping is a primal reality of human existence. Everyone is in a process of spiritual formation! Every thought we hold, every decision we make, every action we take, every emotion we allow to shape our behavior, every response we make to the world around us, every relationship we enter into, every reaction we have toward the things that surround us and impinge upon our lives—all of these things, little by little, are shaping us into some kind of being. We are being shaped into either the wholeness of the image of Christ or a horribly destructive caricature of that image, destructive not only to ourselves but also to others, for we inflict our brokenness upon them. This wholeness or destructiveness radically conditions our relationship with God, ourselves and others, as well as our involvement in the dehumanizing structures and dynamics of the broken world around us. We become either

agents of God’s healing and liberating grace, or carriers of the sickness of the world. The direction of our spiritual growth infuses all we do with intimations of either life or death.

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.

Spiritual formation is not an option! The inescapable conclusion is that life itself is a process of spiritual development. The only choice we have is whether that growth moves us toward wholeness in Christ or toward an increasingly dehumanized and destructive mode of being.

God of our creation and re-creation, you who are constantly at work to shape me in the wholeness of Christ, you know the hardness of the structures of my being that resist your shaping touch. You know the deep inner rigidities of my being that reject your changing grace. By your grace soften my hardness and rigidity; help me to become pliable in your hands. Even as I read this, may there be a melting of my innate resistance to your transforming love.

The difference between forming ourselves and being formed is the vital issue of control.

Our constant struggle with the issue of control is a crucial part of our spiritual pilgrimage. I don’t mind spiritual formation at all as long as I can be in control of it. As long as I can set the limits on its pace and its direction, I have no problem. What I do have a problem with is getting my control structures out of the way of my spiritual formation and letting God take control. 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 live as though our doing determined our being.

I believe one of the underlying realities behind the epidemic of suicide among adolescents and senior citizens is that we are a culture that values people primarily for what they do. In our culture persons’ value, meaning and purpose reside primarily in the nature of their work. Teenagers don’t “do” anything. Slinging hamburgers or bagging groceries isn’t “doing” anything—not in the culture’s value system. Adolescents are struggling to find their identity, struggling to find their personhood, struggling to find their personal integrity, struggling to find who they are in a culture that says you are what you do, but they are not yet ready to do much of anything.

We live in a culture that has reversed the biblical order of being and doing. Being and doing are integrally related, to be sure, but we have to have the order straight. Our doing flows out of our being. In spiritual formation the problem with being formed is that we have a strong tendency to think that if only we do the right things we will be the right kind of Christian, as though our doing would bring about our being.

Our part is to offer ourselves to God in ways that enable God to do that transforming work of grace.

Spiritual formation is the great reversal: from acting to bring about the desired results in our lives to being acted upon by God and responding in ways that allow God to bring about God’s purposes. So to lose one’s self in this context is to give up the deep inner informational-functional orientation that governs the lifestyle of our culture.

Spiritual formation is the great reversal: from habitual expectation of closure to patient, open-ended yieldedness. To lose one’s self in this context is to relinquish our self-generated expectations and desires for closure.

Patient open-ended yieldedness

They had the works, the doing, but they didn’t have a relationship with Jesus, the being, as the foundational reality those works would flow out of.

So spiritual formation is not something that we do to ourselves or for ourselves, but something we allow God to do in us and for us as we yield ourselves to the work of God’s transforming grace.

Even if it feels like nothing is happening, something is happening. The inner chaos created by your constant attempts to control things is having a chance to settle down. You are giving up control so God can do or say something surprising. You are opening yourself to being addressed by God. You are becoming a receiver. You are being still and letting God be the one to act in God’s way, in God’s own time. You are participating in the great reversal Mulholland talks about. This is good. When the allotted time is up, thank God for being present with you and simply proceed with the rest of your day. Try not to judge or evaluate what just happened. Remember, you are learning to yield! Refusing to judge or evaluate based on your own criteria is one way to stay yielded.

Gracious and loving God, it is with thankfulness that I hear your call to become Christlike. Something deep within my heart stirs in its heavy sleep at your call. The memory of something I was to have been, but am not, yet could still be, flits on the fringes of my consciousness. O loving God, stir up this hunger in my heart until it becomes the all-consuming passion of my life.

Have you ever noticed how the world wants to squeeze us all into the same mold? It is the world’s perspective that wants to clone us so that we will all use the same toothpaste, mouthwash, hair spray and deodorant; wear the same clothes; eat the same food; drive the same cars; and generally fulfill Madison Avenue’s image of success. It is only in Christ that we find our individuality. We become compassionate persons in an infinite variety of models. We love and serve like Jesus in unique ways.

In reality, however, the image of Christ is the fulfillment of the deepest hungers of the human heart for wholeness. The greatest thirst of our being is for fulfillment in Christ’s image. The most profound yearning of the human spirit, which we try to fill with all sorts of inadequate substitutes, is the yearning for our completeness in the image of Christ.

we are to find the fulfillment of our being in being like Christ.

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.

This means that one of the first dynamics of holistic spiritual formation will be confrontation.

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.

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.

The second dynamic in holistic spiritual formation is consecration. We must come to the point of saying yes to God at each point of unlikeness.

“He watches to see the door move from within.”1 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.