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The things we value are the things worth yawning and blinking through. Something more than intellectual exercise and reading comprehension is happening in prayer. We are dwelling and abiding. Yes, it’s mundane, often slow, and sometimes confusing. But this is what it teaches us to say, “Ten thousand may fall at my side, but it will not come near me!”
term for seasons of dryness: educative desolation. Diadochos of Photiki from the fifth century says that God uses educative desolation to draw our spirit forward to him.
The opposite of this kind of amazement, Rolheiser says, is pondering. Our spiritual maturity will ask for more pondering than amazement.
Mary is the hero of the pondering stories in the Gospels. While everyone around her is stirred and amazed, she ponders all these things in her heart (Luke 2:19). Some translations use treasured. I like that too, but it has the danger of communicating nostalgia to us modern readers, as if Mary kept these memories of angels and wise men to look back on and treasure. It doesn’t mean that. It means that she took in all the data of that moment and let it into her heart and kept it there so it might transform and change her.
We must be present for all of it, for the mundane and for the glorious.
Scripture and human history show us that we are driven by deeper hungers—desires that are infinite and keep us restless,
We are neither saved nor sanctified by good habits, but certain habits put us in the way of transformation and change.
personal transformation cannot be the ultimate goal or it will never be transformative. God must never be a mere enhancement to our self-improvement plan or a ticket to a better life. He is life itself. He must be the goal, the end, the prize. Communion is coming to God for the sake of God: for his beauty, his love, his presence, his joy. But transformation slips in through the backdoor and comes at us sideways. We are changed indirectly by our enjoyment of God.
After you read a passage of Scripture, write down or take note of what the passage says about God, his beauty, his power, his faithfulness, his love, his presence, his glory, his grace, and his majesty. Sit with these truths and let them move around in your heart, pushing to the side smaller things that often demand your attention. This can be for a few brief moments, or it can take up your entire prayer time.
Boasting in God is a habit that slowly creates different grooves in our heart, new affections, new loves.
“Prayer does not seek to draw God toward us,” St. Augustine says, “he is closer to us than we are to ourselves. Its purpose is to bring us close enough to him for dialogue, and to make us aware of his nearness.”
We are desire-oriented creatures. Augustine says we have infinite hunger, and God is infinite fullness.
Don’t settle for lesser foods.
Come near, enlarge your heart. “Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it” (Psalm 81:10). Christianity is a desire-oriented religion. We are meant—commanded!—to pursue delight and pleasure. Does that surprise you? The only rebuke is against finding delight in things that aren’t meant to satisfy the “infinite hunger”
one of the benefits of fasting—it clears the palate of our hearts and prepares us for the richness of the presence of God.
The teacher has riches to share, and in the sharing, the student is lifted and the teacher grows deeper.
Our part is to daily put ourselves in the way of that work of transformation. A life of prayer puts us in the most concentrated path of that deep work. And one of the main parts of a life of prayer is the practice of meditation.
A model is something we can try on, grow into, or reconfigure.
There are no disembodied prayers. Pretending there are leads to a shallow spiritual life.
Come honestly and vulnerably to God with the emotions that come with those experiences. If you don’t, you’ll be numb to the gifts God has already given and the healing that is to come.
Christian meditation is fighting, grasping for joy. It’s intentionally and regularly remembering and pondering the history of God’s power for his people. If you coast, you lose.
Meditation is the discipline that lights the fuse between the understanding of the mind and the tasting of the heart—the knowledge of God and the joy of his presence. Richard Baxter, a seventeenth-century pastor in England, said that meditation is to read the Bible in such a way as to make your heart hot. It turns your Bible readings into a burning bush.
Meditating on Scripture can look something like this. First, take a phrase or sentence or truth from the text, something that stuck out to you or warmed your heart. What about this truth is a reason to worship God? How can you adore him? What attributes of God does it show? Write down anything that stands out. Tell him what you adore about him. Visualize what your life, your friends, your church, and your community would be like if he was adored for this more fully. Then consider what wrong thoughts, feelings, and behaviors happen when this truth about God is forgotten. How have you lived
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You might summarize these steps with adoration, confession, thanksgiving, and supplication (or asking). I tend to write these reflections down: What am I adoring? What am I confessing? What I am thankful for? What do I need? And then I pray the answers to these questions.
like to think of myself as an ethical person, but there is almost nothing I wouldn’t, in some sense, sell. For instance: There are close family relationships that I have cut off, without even really deciding to, for years at a time. I sold them for stability and mental peace—transactions I think of with doubt and unhappiness every single day. This would seem to suggest that I love my stability and mental peace above all else. And yet I sell those too, at cut-rate prices, again and again: I sell them for the tiny blinking world inside my phone, the anxious grind of tweets and news alerts and
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the normal rhythm of quietly listening to the voice of God so that when circumstances are not quiet, our hearts are not disquieted.
If the landscape reveals one certainty, it is that the extravagant gesture is the very stuff of creation. After one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go.
Solitude is the act of trying to be there.
The habit of solitude is for linking up with God in his view of us, ensuring primarily that our lives are centered more on God than on ourselves.
In previous chapters I’ve described a way of praying or meditating that imagines what God might say to us as our Father, what Christ might say as our Brother and Savior, what the Spirit might say as our Counselor or Comforter. That’s a very intimate way of reading Scripture and hearing God’s Word. But solitude is waiting to hear how God comforts and heals apart from our own imagination.
Don’t expect (I mean, don’t count on and don’t demand) . . . you will have all the feelings you would like to have. You may, of course: but also you may not. But don’t worry if you don’t get them. They aren’t what matter. The things that are happening to you are quite real things whether you feel as you would wish or not, just as a meal will do a hungry person good even if he has a cold in the head which will rather spoil the taste. Our Lord will give us right feelings if he wishes—and then we must say Thank you. If he doesn’t, then we must say to ourselves (and to Him) that he knows best.
Here’s another way to practice solitude: at the end of the day, put your phone aside and take a moment to pay attention to what God did today. What can you give thanks for? Where did peace reign? Where did you experience grace? Consider how you responded to conflict, fear, or worry. Then repent of the things you need to, and give thanks for the times when God provided victory. Christians have traditionally called this the “daily examen.”
Deep work is slow work, with successes and failures along the way.
one of the basic steps of Christian maturity is growing out of those desert feelings of loneliness and boredom and into the garden of solitude and stillness.
“Feelings of boredom, loneliness, frustration, confusion, and indecisiveness often instigate a slight pain or irritation and prompt an almost instantaneous and often mindless action to quell the negative sensation.”
our devices “exploit the human desire for flow, but without the meaning or mastery attached to the state.”
When we have lots of information input, the area of our brains that makes intentional choices becomes less active and the part that drives us by habits and learned behavior takes the wheel. As a result, many of our decisions are made by habit. After a long day of overstimulation, we fall back on our habits—and for many of us that means social media. While we may read Twitter and Facebook in the morning, following links and engaging with individuals, at night we scroll mindlessly.
Habits that cause depletion rather than life and health (emotionally and spiritually) always have a downward spiral. In other words, when we’re tired after a full day of information overload, we don’t engage the material we encounter online with the wisdom we might have had earlier in the day. We might type out angry comments on social media, indulge in images we shouldn’t look at, mindlessly follow link after link, or purchase things we normally wouldn’t.
Solitude develops our inner lives to love what God loves—and God loves our neighbors.
Martha has labored over real food, but all Harry sees is an abstraction.
we just go along in life just sort of full and never fully satisfied.”
Jesus is describing a fast inside a fast: on the one hand, we’re fasting from food, learning to sustain our appetite for God; but we’re also fasting from the glory and praise of others, since it’s likely we crave it more than we’re fully aware. There is a crucifying power of doing things for God in hiddenness and secret. Intentionally resisting praise expands and grows our heart for Christ.
We can fast from all kinds of things—media, alcohol, chocolate—but there’s something about physical hunger that transforms our hearts.
“Nourishment is necessary only for a while; what we shall need forever is taste.”8
make space in your week for fasting. Start with a meal. Make some accommodations ahead of time to fast in private. If you are at work during your times of fasting, have some plans on how to keep your fasts for God to see rather than others. During lunch, instead of eating, use the time to pray.
God’s Word is more necessary to us than bread. So when you fast, do what is more necessary. Take the time you would’ve spent eating and meditate on Scripture. Pray for others, confess sin, and enjoy God’s Word, even while you’re feeling the pangs of hunger.
Let your hunger pangs remind you of Christ’s hunger in the wilderness. The Spirit who led Jesus into the wilderness (Matthew 4:1) is the same Spirit who sustains you in your own hunger. Remind yourself of Christ’s thirst on the cross (John 19:28)—when the soldiers heard him cry out they gave him a sponge full of sour, bitter wine. Remember that because of our sin, we deserve that sour, bitter drink with its wrath and condemnation.
Perhaps most challenging is not the time during your usual meal when you pray but the time after. Your body wants relief. A simple prayer—“Help me, Father,” “Give me strength, Lord,” “Satisfy me with your presence, Christ”—will suffice. Trust that the Lord will supply what you need. If you fail, don’t be hard on yourself. Try again the next week and pray for help during the week as the day arrives. Remember, fasting doesn’t merit anything. It doesn’t get us into the feast—Jesus does. But fasting does stir and excite the taste buds of our hearts for the true feast of Christ. As you go about
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As you can, increase your fasting to two meals or to a whole day. As with any discipline, it’s best to progress incrementally. The amount of time is not the point; the goal is to increasingly stir your hunger and dependence on Christ, exposing some things (like food or drink) that have control over you. Remember that being disciplined is not sanctification in itself. You may be able to fast seven days and still be filled with pride. Seek humility, letting your fasts constantly lead you to neediness and hunger for the Lord. The fruit of your fasts should be more thanksgiving, more awareness of
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Fasts should be followed by feasts. If you are coming off a day-long or multiday fast, a large multicourse meal may not be easy on your intestines, so give yourself space. Maybe break your fast with a smoothie and then feast the next day. But feast we should, and we should do it in good company.
