Transformation: Practices that Lead to Transforming Encounter

The root of Christianity is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved.[1]
-Thomas Merton

To live in our Adoption, to live as an Ambassador of the Kingdom of God, and to live an Abundant Life of listening to God’s Spirit, we must be grounded, at ever-deeper levels, in the love of God.  But this presents a problem: we often don’t feel that love, and we have life experiences that might make us doubt the depth of that love. 

My own story serves as an example.  Growing up, I believed in Jesus and, in many ways, experienced his goodness.  But within me, at the core of my being, there dwelled some different beliefs about who I was.  I felt a lot of shame about my family and secrets that we kept.  I felt in many ways like an imposture who might be exposed, found out, at any moment.

I was a skinny kid, too, and all too aware of it.  In addition to my skinniness, I had a physical aberration called pectus excavatum, which is essentially a fancy way of saying that I have a big hole in the middle of my chest, between the ribs, above the sternum.  Oh, how I hated that hole.  I felt like something was terribly wrong with me, and taking off my shirt felt like shining a spotlight on everything I was sure would get me rejected.

In 7th grade, our gym class had a three week section of flag football.  Anything was better than wrestling, so I was excited as our gym teacher got out the bag of balls and cones.  But then I realized that he was going to divide us “shirts and skins.”  Naturally, I got placed on skins, so I had to take off my shirt in front of all my peers.  I felt like the chimp in Gary Larson’s Far Side strip who gazes at all the other chimps lamenting that they are already silverbacks.  And I was sure every one would gawk and laugh at the hole in my chest.

I wasn’t much of an athlete, but I wasn’t a total slouch, either.  Still, it was quite a surprise to me and I think to everyone else when I caught a short pass and took off down the sideline.  Somehow, I evaded my nearest pursuers and actually found daylight towards the end zone.  I was left with only one man to beat, a boy named Greg, quarterback of the football team and all-around junior high Adonis. 

Somehow, I managed to beat Greg down the sideline.  Perhaps he wasn’t really trying, perhaps my adrenaline gave me gazelle-like speed, but I just barely slipped past his grasping arms, claiming my share of middle school glory.  I was elated.  And then the balloon popped.  To this day, I can still hear Greg breaking off his pursuit, turning away from me, and yelling to the rest of the class, “Well, I can’t catch that little runt!”  Every one laughed.  I think even our gym teacher laughed.  I felt totally exposed.  Humiliated.  A shock of pain ripped through me.  What I had feared had come about, and on a level beyond understanding or rational thought, the shame I felt about myself solidified into a reality. 

I didn’t say anything.  I’m sure I pretended I didn’t care.  And life went on, I guess, pretty much as it had been going.  Except something had happened.  Some thing that I feared about myself—that I truly was and should be ashamed—had been confirmed.

Now, how does that belief, so strong in me, compete with the voice of Jesus saying, “You’re in, you’re beloved, you’re adopted?”  This, you see, is the sort of thing that we are up against.  Jesus must lead us out of every false narrative we have come to believe.  Some of them, though we may hate them, we also cling to, for we all need something familiar in which to wrap ourselves.  Furthermore, many of us become accustomed to drawing our identity--our sense of who we are--not from our adoption in Jesus but through some proxy means of earning approval: being nice, competent, successful, rich, or whatever other external thing we can succeed at.  But our soul can never really thrive planted in those poor soils, and we have a hard time bearing fruit for others. 

What is needed is an unlearning of our false identity—which is what any identity built on trying to be good or competent enough is, and coming fully into our adoption as chosen children of the Living God.  And the only way this happens is through encounter.  Jesus calls us out of mere mental belief which, while important, doesn’t have the power to transform us, and into a God encounter/God experience that re-makes us from within.  Think of all the people in scripture who had to radically encounter God’s goodness before they could thrive following Him.  Moses.  Elijah.  Paul.  When we encounter the reality of Who God is as He really is and not how we have made up that He is, everything changes. 

This is exactly why we need spiritual practices.  We are transformed through encounter with the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and the practices create the space for such encounters.  They come in all shapes and sizes.  Reading scripture can be an exercise in gaining more information in the hope that it will lead to transformation, but encountering the Living God through scripture is something else all together.  You can read where John says, “Behold what manner of love the Father has lavished on us…that we should be called children of God.  And that is what we are!” and form a theology of adoption.[2]  But it’s something else again to experience lavished love as a reality and not just an idea.  In my life, as I persevered through trying times of darkness with that nagging voice of shame always pulling me down, engaging spiritual practices slowly turned the tide until what seems the greater reality to me is that not that I am “out,” but than I am “in,” faults and foibles and all, even the hole in my chest.  It was God at work, pursing me, to make me whole, but it was the practices that created space for me to receive that pursuit and say “yes” to it.

What we seek then, are practices that lead to encounter with the goodness and nearness of Jesus so that we are transformed.  The process will most likely look something like this: We become aware of the nearness and goodness of Jesus and we ask the question, “How can you be this good?!” which gets us off thinking about our self (thank God) and creates space, empowered by the grace of Jesus, to disassociate from negative thoughts and emotions that we have long over-identified with, such as the one from my story above, the belief that something within me was critically flawed and condemned to shame.  The entire process gives us renewed energy to be with God with joy and, from that joy, to presence the love of God for others.

Spiritual practices can catalyze this entire process of encounter. 
 

[1] New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton.  Abbey of Gethsemani, Inc., 1961. P 75.

[2] I John 3:1

Transformation: Visualizing Spiritual Practices (Life in the River)

Life may be like a box of chocolates, but sometimes it’s more akin to a raging river.

Imagine a river, wild and rushing.  Its roar prevents you from hearing much of anything, its currents create huge sprays of water, its waters pour over you and echo up the hills all around you.  This river represents modern life—hurried and loud.  The easiest thing in the world is to be swept down its current, trying to survive, then to arrive at river’s end asking, “Where did the time go?  How did it go so fast?” 

Indeed, imagine that you are being swept down the river, but in front of you there is a huge boulder, interrupting the current’s flow.  Water rushes to either side of the great rock, but behind it, a dry space has been created, untouched by the water’s stream.  At first you are frightened by the boulder or what might happen if you encounter it, so you swim to the side, trying to avoid it.  But then you realize that the boulder might offer you something that the river never can, since the river never really lets you rest.  So you start swimming towards it.  With some serious effort, you are able to exit the wild rush of water and stand in the dry space, no longer knocked about.  You can breathe easily.  And, miraculously, as you step into the space, the roar of the river somehow recedes.  There is quiet.  You can hear your own thoughts, connecting with quiet in a new way.

When you enter back into the river, things are different.  The current doesn’t seem as strong.  Or maybe you’ve just become a better swimmer?  Still, the roar of the river seems quieter, too.  And your heart is encouraged when you see another boulder in front of you.  You repeat the process and find that when you engage the waters again, the current seems lesser still.  Now, rather than being afraid of the boulders or wanting to avoid them, you are, with gladness, on the lookout for the next one!

In this little parable, the boulder represents a spiritual practice.  A practice creates a space that we can enter for the transformation of our soul through encounter with Jesus which empowers us to live in a new way.  Through the space created by spiritual practices, we are literally able to receive grace and power from on high so that we can be in the water completely differently.  For example, the week that I wrote this chapter was, in a word, crazy.  The river usually is!  The week culminated in my wife, Rebecca, and I being called home from a short getaway to be with our son who was having a serious asthma attack.  One rushed trip home, one hospital visit, and $2,500 later, we were rejoicing that he was totally fine!  But I found myself, upon waking up the next morning, tired and disappointed that we had had to cut our trip short, and thinking, too, about money, since we hadn’t been counting on a large medical bill.  Plus, I had a ton of work to do for the coming week.  So yeah, woe is me and all that.  I was feeling it.

In the midst of all this, a word from scripture lodged in my head.  “Life is more than what you eat.” [1]  Where did that come from?  I knew it was from scripture, but was it just a random thought popping in, as they do?  The more I meditated on it, the more I became convinced that Jesus was speaking to me.  I followed the thought and created some time in my morning to sit and pray into the scripture, where I became aware that Jesus, as he usually does, was asking me to trust him and not to worry.  In fact, the same passage says so explicitly: do not worry!  And I found that as I responded “yes” to that invitation to trust, there was a tangible buoyancy within me.  When I came out on the other side of the prayer, there was a new infusion of life within me that had not been there ten minutes previous. 

Did my problems go away?  No.  Still had a hospital bill, still had a lot of work to do; the river was still strong.  But in the midst of it, I was different.  I was gentler towards Becca and I was kinder with those whom crossed my path.  Through a time “behind a boulder,” I was transformed to love and be with others in a new way.

Now, the difference between real life and the river metaphor is that in real life, we are responsible for placing the boulders in the river.  We have to take responsibility for our spiritual lives by arranging them in a way that creates space for encounter.

Jesus did this, which is surely why he “often withdrew to solitary places to pray.”[2] He was leaving the wild waters of life, with its raging currents and, in a space of quiet, engaging deeply with the quiet, empowering voice of his father.  Jesus, in fact, never really left this conversation of prayer.  Sure, there were times of explicit prayer, but Jesus was also engaging with the voice of God all the time, wherever he was.  Prayer remained a discrete part of his daily and weekly rhythm, but it was also a constant conversation.  Through it, he learned to be continually abiding in the place of his Father’s goodness.  Again, even when he was on the cross, he was able to draw upon this source of generosity, prayer for those who executed him, “Father, forgive; they don’t know what they’re doing.”[3]  Where does such compassion come from, in the midst of overwhelming pain?  Simply from being connected to his Father, The Divine Source of All Goodness, whose love and grace is greater than death or any other sorrow we might face.  Yes, even in the face of death, in the most wild current of the river, Jesus was in that dry place behind a boulder, abiding and trusting. 

Jesus’ invitation is that we would abide in him.  If we practice this abiding, we will thrive in the river and survive the storm, when life is sweeping over us with its waves and with its torrents.  The more we grow in spiritual practices, the more they will become a natural way of life.  Rather than being things we do because we’re supposed to do them, they will become part of us; we will see them as the means by which we connect with the core of us, where we abide in God and find all life in Him.  We will, in short, naturally become the type of people who do God’s will and ask and act according to the heart of Jesus.[4] 

[1] Matthew 6:25

[2] Luke 5:16

[3] Luke 23:24

[4] John 15:7 and I John 5:14

Transformation: Spiritual Practices as Get-Tos, Not Have-Tos

There are other reasons that we avoid spiritual practices.  In most people’s operating system, there lives some code (virus is probably a better metaphor) that says we have to work our way to God.  This is the heart of The Human Paradigm of proving ourselves and earning our way forward.  At the core of us, no matter how much we might profess grace, some part of us—until it, too, is converted by Jesus--goes on believing we must earn God’s attention or affection.  Thus, when we start talking about disciplines or practices, people usually jump straight to The Human Paradigm, with its focus on performance and getting things just right.  They think about prayer and scripture and solitude and silence as things we have to do, checkboxes that must be ticked, gold stars that must be won.  Most people end up exhausted, resentful, and avoidant of further practice. 

This way of thinking must be unlearned. 

But it’s complicated.  Learning God as He is will mean confronting whatever false views of Him we still hold.  Many of us do not want to create space for our souls to meet with God because we don’t, at our core, trust him.  We might avoid solitude and silence, for example, out of fear of the God we will encounter in that quiet space!  All of this Jesus must confront and convert, leading us by his Spirit “into all truth” as we unlearn our false beliefs and leave our false narratives about God and, in turn, about our own selves.[1]

Jesus is our model and he, certainly, did not relate to any spiritual practice with fear or avoidance.  You get the sense that he loved engaging them.  After all, they connected him to his loving Father!  And indeed, practices are like meals we get to come to in order to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”  When my wife cooks a delicious dinner, I don’t sigh and think, “Well, I guess it’s time to eat again (sigh).”  Sometimes I fairly run to the table.  It’s not a have-to, it’s a get-to, and if we are moving in The Jesus Paradigm and our adoption, we will relate to practices with freedom and liberty and joy, not with compunction or obligation. 

This does not mean there’s no discipline or will power exerted to engage spiritual practices.  Part of our humanity is resistance, and our ego will always resist being out of control and, thus, encountering God.  We have to work to align ourselves with our spirit’s desire to connect with God, which will mean humbling our ego (and our very selves) before God.  This takes effort, but it’s never the labor to earn something from God; it’s always the labor to surrender into His grace and mercy.  As Dallas Willard often said, “Grace is not opposed to effort; it’s opposed to earning.”  We are not living in the first paradigm of striving to earn, but we are putting in effort to grow in grace.  Our urgent work—the effort we must put in—is to re-orient our lives.  There is rigor, because character development always demands deep soul work, just as the transformation of the body requires long hours of discipline and dedication at the gym.  Still, the more we grow in grace, the more all spiritual practices will feel like get-tos and not have-tos.  And simply changing this frame, even on a mental level, will make us much more apt to read the Bible, have quiet times of prayer, and so forth.  By simply labeling our tendency to turn practices into have-tos, we can avoid falling into the trap.

Bottom line, if we engage spiritual practices out of The Human Paradigm and its central question (“How am I doing?”), we will get exhausted.[2]  But if we engage them in order to “grow in grace,” we will learn to look forward to a disciplined life.[3]  If they are about encountering the God of all goodness so that our character and our core is transformed to love others as Jesus did, we will run to the practices. When we see that they will empower us to live and love others in a completely new way, they will become our great ally. 
 

[1] John 16:13

[2] Remember The Human Paradigm with its focus on ‘How am I doing?’

[3] See 2 Peter 3:18