More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
May 26 - June 9, 2022
A deeply formed life is a life marked by integration, intersection, intertwining, and interweaving, holding together multiple layers of spiritual formation. This kind of life calls us to be people who cultivate lives with God in prayer, move toward reconciliation, work for justice, have healthy inner lives, and see our bodies and sexuality as gifts to steward.
The deeply formed life is not possible without an intentional reordering of our lives. This is why you’ll find many different ways to flesh out the content of this book in the real world. However, before we consider them, I need to offer a few words about the practices themselves.
First, the practices don’t save us or make God love us more.
Our lives can easily take us to the brink
of burnout. The pace we live at is often destructive. The lack of margin is debilitating. We are worn out. In all of this, the problem before us is not just the frenetic pace we live at but what gets pushed out from our lives as a result; that is, life with God. Educator and activist Parker Palmer makes a compelling case that burnout typically does not come about because we’ve given so much of ourselves that we have nothing left. He tells us, “It merely reveals the nothingness from which I was trying to give in the first place.”
N. T. Wright similarly affirmed, “It is only when we slow down our lives that we can catch up to God.”4 This is the paradox of contemplative rhythms.
Dallas Willard famously
said,
“Hurry is the great enemy of spiritual li...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
As I reflected on Brother Lawrence’s life, it struck me that I sometimes forget that he lived in a unique setting. His ability to “practice the presence of God,” difficult as it might have been, was still more attainable because of the structure and rhythm of his life.
David wrote psalms about quieting his soul (see 131:2), making his soul “wait in silence” (62:5), and being still and knowing that God is God (see 46:10). Psalms is the prayer book of the Bible, and it is one that emerges from the depths of contemplation and reflection.
I sometimes imagine a scenario in which someone is locked inside of a supermarket and dies of starvation. Can you imagine? You might say this is impossible. Yet in our spiritual lives, this happens every day. Whether we know it or not, we are locked inside the supermarket of God’s abundant life and love. It’s all available to us. Even so, people are spiritually starving. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
God is committed to our transformation. He is not in the business of simply improving our lives; he wants to infuse them with his life. Every day, he moves toward us in love, reaching, seeking, and pleading with us to pay attention. This is the essence of contemplative rhythms—the goal of monastic life. We have to open ourselves to God’s way of being; that is, we have to leave but enter back in through another way. Like the apostle Paul said, we are invited to “live freely, animated and motivated by God’s Spirit” (Galatians 5:16, MSG).
how easy it is to sing about being still but how hard it is to practice it. I
Focus on Relationship, not Technique Attitude is key: we must recognize that silent prayer is not a technique to master
but a relationship to enter into.
On the surface, the account seems to juxtapose Mary the contemplative with Martha the activist. Martha was actively trying to feed everyone and, in the process, became indignantly resentful at her sister, who was just sitting at Jesus’s feet. In her annoyance, she even began to boss Jesus around, saying, “Tell her then to help me” (verse 40). In that moment, Jesus tenderly acknowledged how worried, distracted, and upset Martha was. But he let her know that Mary had chosen what was better at that moment and that only one thing was necessary: attentive presence.
The fatigue we experience is multilayered.
There is the fatigue of the body. We don’t get as much sleep as we need. We push our bodies to the limit and live off cups of coffee and Red Bull. There is also the fatigue of the mind. In a given day, we are bombarded with ceaseless information that we have no time to absorb or process. And ultimately, there is the fatigue of the soul.
He then discovered a connection: the Hebrew word for “growl” was the same word for “meditate” in Psalm 1.4 This becomes a powerful metaphor for shaping the way we approach Scripture. Meditation, then, is the practice of slowly chewing on God’s Word until it penetrates our hearts.
It’s called lectio divina. It simply means sacred reading, and it’s a practice of slowing down and chewing on Scripture through four movements: lectio, meditatio, oratio, and contemplatio; that is, reading, meditation, prayer, and contemplation.
For many, the gospel is their ticket to the afterlife: “When I die, I go to heaven because of what Jesus has done for me.” For others, the gospel is connected to a particular understanding of the death and resurrection of Jesus. Along this line of thinking, the gospel is reduced to a particular theology of atonement. Herein lies one of our greatest challenges. When the essence of the gospel is stripped down to the afterlife or to a glorious but strictly individual personal decision of faith, it’s not what Jesus described as the good news about his kingdom come. And predictably, there’s no real
...more
Sharon Harper’s simple delineation of terms helpful, as she distinguished race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality from a biblical perspective:
Race, ethnicity, culture, and nationality often are used as interchangeable words, but each one has a different shade of meaning…. Ethnicity is biblical (Hebrew: goy or am; Greek: ethnos). Ethnicity is created by God as people groups move together through space and time…. Culture is implicit in Scripture, but the word itself is never used.
Culture is a sociological and anthropological term that refers to the beliefs, norms, rituals, arts, and worldviews of particular people groups in a particular place at a particular time. Culture is fluid…. Nationality indicates the sovereign nation/state where an individual is a legal citizen. It is a geopolitical category determined by the legal structures of the state…. Race is about power—in political terms, dominion. As a political construct, race was created by humans to determine who can exercise power within a governing structure and to guide decisions regarding how to allocate
...more
The cry of Isaiah is for righteousness—for justice. And justice very simply is about having right relationships, one with another. To do justice means that every person is taken seriously as a human being made in the image of God.
Isaiah cried out against the larger structures of human existence. Isaiah was basically saying that on an institutional level, people were being sinned against.
Justice was being withheld, and the poor and widows were being mistreated. This was not a new problem.
But in the end, the language of color blindness is the attempt to establish relationship by denying diversity and our honest differences. So as good as intentions may be, pretending to be color-blind is still playing at something other than the truth.
What does a deeply formed life look like when offering racial healing and justice? I propose seven habits.
I’ve heard many say, “If you don’t love this country, leave.” But that’s much oversimplified and spiritually dangerous. Our refusal to honestly look at the dark history of the United States often reveals an idolatry of the heart.
Deeply formed reconciliation can’t happen without the spiritual discipline of lamenting.
To be deeply formed for racial reconciliation means we must open ourselves to the truth that things we hate
in others we also find in ourselves.
God wants to form the world deeply for the work of healing, and this kind of forming requires interior examination.
He sees the good in us, the bad in us, and the ugly in us. God knows us thoroughly. The entire psalm is about David recognizing God’s knowledge of him. In verses 7–8, David continued, Where shall I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there! If I make my bed in Sheol, you are there!
The contemplative way is about listening deeply to God. The way of reconciliation entails listening deeply to each other. The way of interior examination is about deeply listening to ourselves. In order to do this, we need a theology of examination for the purpose of self-awareness.
When we consider Psalms and other biblical texts as models for interior examination, we begin to see the priority given toward accessing and integrating the world within. But it takes some work. David, in Psalm 139, did three things effectively that we are invited to follow. He made time for interior examination, he was integrated enough to surrender his inner world to God, and he had the courage to face
himself. In short, his life was deep enough to confront busyness and compartmentalization—trouble spots for most of us.
the degree to which we are able to hold all of ourselves together is the degree to which we live with integrity, joy, and peace. The act of holding all our parts together before God requires that we grow in awareness of ourselves. It’s impossible to hold together what we don’t even know exists. The deeply formed life cannot flourish without a commitment to interior examination. As Jesus cautioned, in the gaining of the world, we can easily lose our souls (see Mark 8:36). There is more to us than what we see, and the gospel gives us the courage to search and surrender all of our being to God.
Patterns are the repeated behaviors, practices, habits, or ways of thinking that extend from one generation to the next. The importance of naming patterns is that it situates us in reality.
As we like to say at New Life, “Jesus might live in your heart, but Grandpa lives in your bones.”
By this we mean that all of us have inherited
positive legacies as well as negative ones. Whether the legacie...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
The four questions are: 1. What are you mad about? 2. What are you sad about? 3. What are you anxious about? 4. What are you glad about? As we wrestle with these questions, whether in solitude or in community, we bring to light some of the material that needs to be named, discerned, and healed.
our sexuality and spirituality are connected.
religion and eros? Or said another way, How do we join spirituality and sexuality in ways that lead to greater wholeness in our relationship with God and with others?
At the core of this relationship between sexuality and spirituality is desire and longing. What we do with our sexual desires and longings says a lot about what we believe about God. This is why we need to clearly define terms.
Spirituality can be described as a vast longing that drives us beyond ourselves in an attempt to connect with, to probe and to understand our world. And beyond that, it is the inner compulsion to connect with the Eternal Other, which is God. Essentially, it is a longing to know and be known by God (on physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual levels)…. Sexuality can be described as the deep desire and longing that drives us beyond ourselves in an attempt to connect with, to understand, that which is other than ourselves. Essentially, it is a longing to know and be known by other people
...more
Dawn noted that in Genesis 1 and 2, we are presented with two visions of sexuality: social
