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

by M. Robert Mulholland

When we continue to offer the discipline, that discipline becomes a means of grace God works through and moves to transform that dead portion of our body into life in the image of Christ.

Our prayer, our spiritual reading, our worship, our daily office, our study, our fasting, our retreats are the structures that keep us open to the work of the Spirit of God in our lives and support and encourage the difficult work of our individual spiritual disciplines. And through all these means God lovingly holds us in the process of being formed in the image of Christ for others, moves us from brokenness into wholeness.

the greatest single danger in the spiritual disciplines is the temptation to turn them into works righteousness.

Silence is fasting from speaking to listen to God; solitude is fasting from fellowship with others to be alone with God; prayer is a means of dialogue with God.

silence is the deep inner reversal of that grasping, controlling mode of being that so characterizes life in our culture.

In the classical Christian spiritual tradition, however, solitude is, in the silence of release, beginning to face the deep inner dynamics of our being that make us that grasping, controlling, manipulative person; beginning to face our brokenness, our distortion, our darkness; and beginning to offer ourselves to God at those points.

Solitude is not simply drawing away from others and being alone with God. This is part of solitude. But more than this, it is being who we are with God and acknowledging who we are to ourselves and to God.

Jacob had to come to the point of solitude, the point of acknowledging before God the kind of person he was, before healing could begin.

In silence we let go of our manipulative control. In solitude we face up to what we are in the depths of our being. Prayer then becomes the offering of who we are to God: the giving of that broken, unclean, grasping, manipulative self to God for the work of God’s grace in our lives.

Our growth toward wholeness in Christ is for the sake of others within the body of Christ, that we might nurture one another into the wholeness of Christ. Our growth toward wholeness is also for the sake of others beyond the body of Christ, that the redeeming, healing, transforming love of God may be made known in a broken and hurting world.

When we don’t feel like worshiping, the community should carry us along in its worship. When we can’t seem to pray, community prayer should enfold us. When the Scripture seems closed for us, the community should keep on reading, affirming and incarnating it around us.

Such private religions are invariably non-prophetic. They do not disturb the economic and political order and so they fit easily and comfortably into the culture of capitalism. The god they offer is a private god, a wholly inward god. In the context of public enterprise and private religion, spirituality can quickly degenerate into a search for better, perhaps more thrilling and unusual, experiences. So much of the current interest in “the God within” has moved in the direction of a narrow and limited understanding of God and of the nature of religion.

Most of us already practice some corporate spirituality, but it tends to be very superficial and external. We never move with one another into the depths of our being, where God can do the crucifying work of nurturing us into wholeness.

The essential difference between orthodox Christianity and the various heretical systems is that orthodoxy is rooted in paradox. Heretics, as Irenaeus saw, reject paradox in favor of a false clarity and precision. But true faith can only grow and mature if it includes the elements of paradox and creative doubt. Hence the insistence of orthodoxy that God cannot be known by the mind, but is known in the obscurity of faith, in the way of ignorance, in the darkness. Such doubt is not the enemy of faith but an essential element within it. For faith in God does not bring the false peace of answered questions and resolved paradoxes. Rather, it can be seen as a process of “unceasing interrogation.” . . . The spirit enters into our lives and puts disturbing questions. Without such creative doubt, religion becomes hard and cruel, degenerating into the spurious security which breeds intolerance and persecution. Without doubt, there is loss of inner reality and of inspirational power to religious language. The whole of spiritual life must suffer from, and be seriously harmed by, the repression of doubt.4

These are obviously people who believed in Jesus, and their lives had been shaped by that “belief.” They had spent their lives doing things “in Jesus’ name.” Their lives, apparently, had been marked by rigorous religiosity and filled with religious activities. But Jesus reveals that their activities did not spring from a vital relationship with him. They were in control of the relationship they had with Jesus. These “believers” were operating out of their own agendas, not in response to a relationship in which Jesus was truly Lord.

I realized that Peter’s “possession” of that ministry was preventing openness to God’s guidance.

In our day Christianity is widely seen as a religion of personal pronouns, a purely individual faith; and this understanding is felt to be traditional, though it is in fact of recent origin. The traditional social doctrine of orthodox Christianity has been largely forgotten and replaced by an individualistic theology.

Worship of God is to result in a focal concern for the welfare of one’s neighbors and community. Attempting to worship God while closing one’s eyes to dehumanizing injustices in the social, political and economic realms—or, worse, while engaging in practices that contribute to injustice—is regularly denounced as totally unacceptable. Iniquity joined with solemn assembly is an abomination to God.

Whenever our spirituality becomes captive to the world we live in, it becomes a proponent and defender of the status quo.

But, what happens when theology becomes captured by its context, by the prevailing culture? Theology, and the institutional church in which theological reflection takes place, then becomes a resource of the culture and no longer its critic. Theology becomes the servant of the social order, the God of justice is tamed and put at the service of organized injustice.

There must be a creative tension between our spiritual pilgrimage and the world where it is lived out. If we attempt to undo this difficult tension, we move either into an unworldly spirituality that isolates us from the world or into a worldly spirituality that insulates us from the radical demands of a vital relationship with God.

Following the leadership of Jesus, his Church needs to stand as a sign of contradiction and of conflict, affecting and, as it were, upsetting through the power of the Gospel, mankind’s criteria of judgment, determining values, points of interest, lines of thought, sources of inspiration, and models of life which are in contrast with the Word of God and the plan of salvation.

this does not mean that the church sets itself against the culture. The church is not called primarily to be confrontive but to be obedient and faithful to God’s presence and purposes in the culture. The result will be confrontive, but that should not be the purpose. Our purpose should be to live out the values and dynamics of New Jerusalem in the midst of the values and dynamics of Fallen Babylon. When we do this, Fallen Babylon is going to be disturbed. Fallen Babylon will not appreciate the bringing to light of its value system. Yet the confrontation comes not because we seek it, but because falsehood cannot stand in the presence of truth.

So what was the problem in Ephesus? It was the lack of the love the Ephesian Christians had had at first. Somewhere between the vital, transforming social witness described in Acts and Jesus’ word to the church in John’s vision, the Ephesian church had become a community of cold orthodoxy—maintaining its “faithfulness” in isolation from the world, not allowing the world to subvert it, but having no transforming impact on the world around. Corporate spirituality without social spirituality results in the death of corporate (and individual) spirituality.