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February 2 - March 2, 2022
There are eight principal thoughts, from which all other thoughts stem. The first thought is of gluttony; the second, of fornication; the third, of love of money; the fourth, of discontent; the fifth, of anger; the sixth, of despondency; the seventh, of vainglory; the eighth, of pride. Whether these thoughts disturb the soul or not does not depend on us; but whether they linger in us or not and set passions in motion or not—does depend on us.
Discipline, strictly speaking, is activity carried on to prepare us indirectly for some activity other than itself. We do not practice the piano to practice the piano well, but to play it well.
Concretely, the only place where I can “fight the good fight of faith, lay hold on eternal life” (1 Tim. 6:12), is in and through the management of my body, dealing rigorously and wisely with it and depending on God’s help.
Rejection of spiritual disciplines because of an identification of them with the outward acts alone simply does not go to the heart of the matter.
He showed us that spiritual strength is not manifested by great and extensive practice of the spiritual disciplines, but by little need to practice them and still maintain full spiritual life.
We can even lay it down as a rule of thumb that if it is easy for us to engage in a certain discipline, we probably don’t need to practice it. The disciplines we need to practice are precisely the ones we are not “good at” and hence do not enjoy.
Similarly, in the excesses of spiritual “asceticism” we see asceticism for asceticism’s sake. These people are no longer truly ascetic, no longer are they truly concerned about taking pains for the end of a healthy, outgoing union with the healthy, outgoing, and sociable Christ who also loves himself and all of God’s creation.
Monasticism in fact proved that you could be “out of the world” and still be of it; and its ever-increasing excesses were but a witness to the futility of contesting this fact.
When through spiritual disciplines I become able heartily to bless those who curse me, pray without ceasing, to be at peace when not given credit for good deeds I’ve done, or to master the evil that comes my way, it is because my disciplinary activities have inwardly poised me for more and more interaction with the powers of the living God and his Kingdom. Such is the potential we tap into when we use the disciplines.
Others need us to keep their lives in place; and when we retreat, they then have to deal with their souls. True, they need God more than they need us, but they may not understand this. We must carefully respect their pain and with much loving prayer make wise arrangements on their behalf; and we must do all possible to help them understand what we are doing and why.
Read not The Times,” he concludes, “read The Eternities!”
As Miguel de Unamuno says, “We need to pay less attention to what people are trying to tell us, and more to what they tell us without trying.”11
In fasting, we learn how to suffer happily as we feast on God.
The spiritually wise person has always known that frivolous consumption corrupts the soul away from trust in, worship of, and service to God and injures our neighbors as well.
Secrecy rightly practiced enables us to place our public relations department entirely in the hands of God, who lit our candles so we could be the light of the world, not so we could hide under a bushel (Matt. 5:14–16). We allow him to decide when our deeds will be known and when our light will be noticed.
Abstinence, then, makes way for engagement. If the places in our blood cells designed to carry oxygen are occupied by carbon monoxide, we die for lack of oxygen. If the places in our souls that are to be indwelt by God and his service are occupied by food, sex, and society, we die or languish for lack of God and right relation to his creatures. A proper abstinence actually breaks the hold of improper engagements so that the soul can be properly engaged in and by God.
Calvin Miller well remarks: “Mystics without study are only spiritual romantics who want relationship without effort.”
But we dishonor God as much by fearing and avoiding pleasure as we do by dependence upon it or living for it.
The emphasis upon the character of overall discipline throughout the life must not be missed if prayer is to be the powerful work and effectual discipline God intended it to be, one of his most precious gifts to us.
The fire of God kindles higher as the brands are heaped together and each is warmed by the other’s flame. The members of the body must be in contact if they are to sustain and be sustained by each other.
Stewardship—which requires possessions and includes giving—is the true spiritual discipline in relation to wealth.
To possess riches is to have a right to say how they will or will not be used. To use riches, on the other hand, is to cause them to be consumed or to be transferred to others in exchange for something we desire. The difference between possession and use immediately becomes clear when we think about how we sometimes use and control the use of riches we do not own, as when we influence the decisions of those who do own them. It’s possible to use or consume goods we do not own, and it is possible to own what we do not and perhaps cannot use.
In the spiritual life, simplicity is not opposed to complexity, and poverty is not opposed to possessions. In fact, as simplicity makes great complexity bearable, so poverty as Bonhoeffer explains it—freedom from desire—makes possessions safe and fruitful for the glory of God.
Our problem is not primarily with how we see the poor, but with how we see ourselves. If we still think and convey by our behavior that in some way we are fundamentally different and better as persons from the man sleeping in the discarded boxes in the alley, we have not been brought with clear eyes to the foot of the cross, seeing our own neediness in the light of it. We have not looked closely at the lengths to which God had to go to reach us. We have not learned to live always and thankfully in the cross’s shadow. From that vantage point alone is our solidarity with the destitute to be
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We cannot sustain our programs, we are told, unless we can attract and hold the right kinds of people. These people seem to have forgotten that the church’s business is to make the right kind of people out of the wrong kind. More often than not the wrong kind in God’s eyes are precisely the “right” kind by the world’s standards—or are even “our kind.”
Remember, Jesus did not send help. He came among us. He was victorious under our conditions of existence. That makes all the difference. We continue on his incarnational model when we follow the apostle’s command “to associate with people of low position” by unassumingly walking with them in the path of their daily affairs, not just on special occasions created because of their need.
We continue to be misled by the world’s view of well-being, which holds riches to be well-being, and that is why we react by thinking of possessions as inherently and essentially evil, instead of as a domain of spiritual work of the purest sort.
The role of Christian ministry or the special “religious” vocations is to embody and communicate the gospel of God’s government to all and to prepare those who can stand in the crucial “secular” areas of the world to be religious caretakers of the world’s goods. If taught well, such Christians within important secular environments will then be on the job to see to it that what needs to be done with the goods of this world is done as it needs to be done.
There is something very deep here to be explored, for it is closely tied to our cowlike confidence in banal decency and to our corresponding failure to take appropriately strong measures against evil as it rests in our own personalities and in our world.
We delude ourselves about the sustaining conditions of people’s evil deeds because we wish to continue living as we now live and continue being the kinds of people we are. We do not want to change. We do not want our world to be really different. We just want to escape the consequences of its being what it truly is and of our being who we truly are.
Once we see what people are prepared to do, the wonder ceases to be that they occasionally do gross evils and becomes that they do not do them more often. We become deeply thankful that something is restraining us, keeping us from fully doing what lies in our hearts.
This is the future event we should keep in mind when learned people tell us that personal virtue is not an answer to social ills. The effect of this saying is to keep people working at changing society without attempting the radical transformation of character. It pleads for a continuation of “life as usual,” which is precisely the source of the problem. Often, those who work in this way like to think of themselves as “radicals.” They fail to go to the root of social order and disorder, though. The only true “radical” is the one who proposes a different character and life for human beings.
But it was not as said in Lord Acton’s well-known statement, that “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Rather, power makes corruption apparent, and absolute power makes corruption absolutely apparent. Thomas à Kempis was correct: “Occasions make not a man fail, but they show what the man is.”
Everyone who has a pastoral role to others, whether as an official minister or not, must strive for a specific understanding of what is happening to those who come regularly under his or her influence and must pay individual attention to their development.6 This is the absolutely sure way to “win the world” (John 17:21–23).
It will be a school of life (for a disciple is but a pupil, a student) where all aspects of that life seen in the New Testament records are practiced and mastered under those who have themselves mastered them through practice. Only by taking this as our immediate goal can we intend to carry out the Great Commission.
