A new column….
THE SPIRITUAL LANDSCAPE
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October 20th, 2011 Cache directory "/home/content/f/w/s/fwschmidt/html/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/ttftitles/cache" is not writable.At Rest in the Sanctuary of the Soul
October 8th, 2011
My thanks to the folks at Patheos for an invitation to participate in an on-line roundtable devoted to Richard Foster’s Sanctuary of the Soul. Foster issues a fresh invitation to journey into God through meditative prayer. Exploring the way in which Scripture, icons, silence, and other practices can serve us on that journey, Foster succeeds in teaching us to pray without losing sight of the real invitation: a life of intimacy with God in Christ. The post that follows is not a review, but a reaction to Foster’s work. For more on Foster’s book and the reaction of other contributors to the roundtable go to:
http://www.patheos.com/Book-Club/Richard-J-Foster-Sanctuary-of-the-Soul.html
Richard Foster has been a reliable and thoughtful guide to the spiritual life and his new work, Sanctuary of the Soul, is no exception. Of course, there is no introduction to prayer and meditation that can completely assuage the fears of its readers. Meditation and prayer is not the natural environment of most Americans. We are an activist, engineering, and inventive culture. And the prospect of silence and reflection can be off-putting.
I was struck then by Foster’s caution, which I have often given to others as well: “Be gentle with yourself.”. That is sage advice. But it also requires a bit of added explanation, because heard in isolation, it sounds like a tautology: “Be serious, thoughtful, focused, but then, again, don’t be.” Knowing how careful Foster has been himself and — sensing the pastoral tone of this new book — I am reasonably confident he would agree. So, for those who are drawn to the promise of intimacy with Jesus, but find the path into that intimacy far too daunting, allow me to offer my own take on what it means to “be gentle with yourself.”
One, remember, you know what you know when you know it…the great gift of listening to veteran pilgrims is that they are familiar with the turns and pitfalls along the way. The spiritual life is open to anyone who has a passion for a relationship with God, but it helps to have a guide. The difficulty, however, is that it is perilously easy to be discouraged by the seemingly dramatic difference between our own spiritual condition and the condition of those who have preceded us. So, being gentle with yourself involves remembering you know what you know when you know it. Ignorance of the road ahead is no sin. Failing to act on what you have learned is. Embrace the experiences you have had. Let them shape you.
Two, resist the temptation to indulge endless postmortems…if what you know now is what is important, then regrets are a distraction. Release the mistakes you have made along the way, embrace God’s forgiveness, and forge ahead. You wouldn’t berate a small child for failing to keep pace with you. God will not treat you in that fashion.
Three, don’t compare your progress with others. Recently a colleague observed, “if you compare, you will despair” and “comparing our insides with someone’s outsides” is particularly innervating. Each of us is God’s gift to the world in the making. In that way, comparisons are irrelevant. The life that is your gift is yours alone, with it’s own path.
Four, receive what you are given with gratitude and joy…The spiritual life is not a forced march, it is a journey into wonder. When we begin thinking of it as a forced march we brutalize the experience. The reassurance Jesus gives his followers that his “yoke is easy, his burden light,” were words of comfort spoken to a religious world that had lost it’s way in the effort to be faithful.
Fifth and finally, rest where you are. You cannot force or engineer intimacy with God. All you do is rest into it. The good news is that Jesus has promised to be there when you do.
And therein lies the deepest wisdom of the advice, “Be gentle with yourself.”
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October 3rd, 2011We join the bandwagons left and right, we parrot the wisdom of our politicians, and then we offer up our God as a bonus.
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September 28th, 2011For those who ask….what does music have to do with the spiritual life:
http://experts.patheos.com/expert/frederickwschmidt/2011/09/27/sing-a-new-song/
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September 26th, 2011A new column on the question: How do we respond to hard times? Are they an invitation to surrender? Or are they another kind of opportunity?
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August 25th, 2011
This week marked the beginning of a new academic year. As in years past, I have spent a few days describing the nature of our spiritual formation program to new students.
Over a decade ago the program looked very different from the one we have today. We relied on outside facilitators. The student experience varied greatly. And oversight for the program was assigned to someone whose primary responsibilities lay elsewhere. The program was also required for certain degree programs, but no one received credit. Predictably, it was difficult for students to take the task of spiritual formation seriously and the program felt a bit like an addendum to the other work that they did. Students often observed that the program was “Like the Book of Judges — everyone was doing what was right in their own eyes.”
The situation is very different today. The program is still required, but the students receive credit for their efforts. Members of the full-time and adjunct faculty facilitate the formation groups. The work of the formation groups serves as a structured introduction to spiritual disciplines, organized around a common syllabus and texts. And we have supplemented our core program with elective course work in the field of spirituality, a track devoted to issues in spirituality in the Doctor of Ministry program, and a certificate program in spiritual direction for both clergy and the laity.
All of this, of course, restores an emphasis lost or omitted long ago in much of what counts for theological education — an emphasis that once lay at the heart of a seminary’s work: the formation not just of the mind, but the soul. There are a number of reasons that this endeavor slipped to the margins of theological education, but one of the important factors has been the triumph of the university model of education.
The university model stresses atomization and specialization as the best means of subject mastery. Faculty members are socialized into the model by their graduate students and then, in turn, they socialize their students. The model has its strengths: Faculty are able to deeply familiarize themselves with a distinguishable body of literature and issues; and students benefit from their intimacy with that subject matter.
The problem, of course, is that (for the most part) seminaries don’t prepare academics. They prepare clergy. And the task of the clergy is (or should be) soul formation. In other words, their task is integrative and its basic impulse is the very opposite of the university model. That is why theological education as a bit like the experience of sitting on the floor of your den at 1am on Christmas morning with hundreds of parts to a child’s toy with instructions for assembling it in a language you don’t understand.
There will be those who argue that the failure of the seminaries to grapple directly with that issue is license for jettisoning theological education completely. I can’t share their blithe confidence in the virtues of self-imposed ignorance. But until the theological academy finds the courage to revisit the basic assumptions that lie behind the enterprise, future generations of seminarians will need to do the integrative task themselves, asking not just what they have been taught, but how it contributes (or doesn’t) to the formation of their souls and their relationship with God.
There is no substitute for sitting prayerfully with the varied, unassembled pieces of an experience like a seminary education — and a question we don’t ask often enough: “How is it with your soul?” That is and always has been the question. And if clergy give the question attention, they will be better equipped to help others ask the question as well.
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July 31st, 2011I work in both churches and the academy. And, from time to time, people will preface their response to something I’ve said with the words, “Well, if you worked in the real world…”
Frankly, all those comments demonstrate is how little people know about the church and the academy, where (as the saying goes) “the politics are so dirty because the stakes are so small.” Both institutions could really afford to be a little less real, if by “real” what you mean is nasty, divisive, back-stabbing, grasping, or ego-driven.
But, as Karl Rahner, the great Catholic theologian noted some years ago about the church, those failings are no surprise at all. The church is for sinners, who are in the process of being redeemed — that is, living ever more fully into God’s good and loving desires for us. But the process is not complete. So, the church, our world, and — for that matter — every last one of us are not yet fully what we should be, can be, and (if we are open to it) will be.
That, however, is precisely the problem with offering up the “life in the real world” excuse. The moment we excuse our failure to do the right thing by referencing “life in the real world,” we foreclose on that process. And that process of growth and virtue cannot begin again until we open ourselves anew to the demands of “the real real world,” — the real world of God’s desires for us.
To be sure, there are a host of explanations for why our public and private lives are marked by cynicism:
Politicians will and do complain that they live in the real world of getting elected and reelected and, for that reason, can’t attend to true statecraft, be honest about the limits of what government can or should do, or consider facts that lie outside their particular party’s message.
Business people will complain that they live in the world of the bottom line, so the quality of the products that they produce suffers and the accuracy of the financial statements that they offer are sometimes can’t be forthcoming.
Journalists will argue that they live in the ever more complex world of reporting where entertainment and advocacy draws readers and viewers, which is why they can’t report the news in a fair and balanced fashion.
Schools and universities will argue that they live in the real world of budget allocations and means testing, so they can’t be honest about student progress.
Churches will argue that in the real world people will balk at being told that the Gospel demands something of them, so they will avoid preaching anything hard.
And each of us will write off what we hear on Sundays as “nice ideas” that can’t possibly work in the real world of our lives.
The excuses are endless, but the deeper issue is spiritual and the central question is stunningly simple:
Which is the real real world?
Answer that question and that is the world that will shape the choices we make, the world we serve, the people we become, the legacies we leave behind, — the men and women they will one day bury. We can scrape through the “real world” of our fears and cynical calculations and teach our children to do the same or we can open ourselves to the real-real world possibilities of God’s good desires for us.
It’s your choice. It’s mine. No excuses.
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July 16th, 2011The New York Times can’t stop reporting on “The News of the World” debacle. They run two or more “news” articles a day and throw in an editorial — just in case the editorializing isn’t finished. They devoted only one article to the work of American Bridge and stuck to “just the facts.”
Aaron Fielding quietly stalks his prey — Republicans — with his video camera, patiently waiting for a political moment worthy of YouTube. At 27, he is a full-time “tracker” for American Bridge 21st Century, a new Democratic organization that aims to record every handshake, every utterance by Republican candidates in 2011 and 2012, looking for gotcha moments that could derail political ambitions or provide fodder for television advertisements by liberal groups next year.…If all works as planned, incriminating moments captured by American Bridge will quickly become part of the political bloodstream.
Together, the Murdoch group, American Bridge, and the Tendenz of reporting in the Times provide a window into the way we get our news.
If you thought (or hoped) that listening to the news would provide you a good faith effort at an objective window into the events of the day — or if you thought that the effort would provide you with a window into information that would equip you to shoulder your responsibility as a voter and citizen — forget it. Wear a HAZMAT suit, prepare to pick through the garbage, and remember, whatever you are being told, has a slant to it — and not just the slant that comes from the inevitably subjective character of any judgment we humans make, but an unvarnished, conscious effort to tell you what to think.
Most reporting today (especially on any vaguely political subject) is reporting on non-events — a pep rally to get the faithful snarling and snapping at the opposition. Small wonder, then, that sleaze, slant, and assassination are now the weapons of choice in political and public discourse.
It should to be named for the moral and spiritual failure that it is.
So what can we do?
- Treat the reporting that we are offered with the suspicion it deserves.
- Arm and inform yourself in more than one place — the truth is out there.
- Insist on more than we are offered: Write to the editor. Note the inaccuracies.
- Be skeptical of your own views — just because someone agrees with you doesn’t meant that they are objective.
- Shun sleaze, slant, and assassination. It almost never has anything to do with the issues and journalists should not be rewarded for trading in it.
And don’t give up. It is our spiritual and moral obligation to stay engaged, even when the most natural reaction is to shed the HAZMAT suit, take a shower, and grab a good stiff drink.
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July 14th, 2011Nothing I said in What God Wants for your Life got me into more trouble than the chapter on signs and wonders:
Don’t you believe in miracles?
Don’t you believe that God is active in the world?
Don’t you believe in the power of prayer?
Yes…but I don’t believe that signs and wonders are necessarily indicative of the will of God. Sometimes the exceptional is just exceptional.
For example: I made a major move in employment some years ago — prayerfully, I might add — on the basis of what I felt God moving me to do with my life. It was a profoundly difficult choice and rooted finally in questions of vocation. When I told my employer that I was going to be leaving I was promptly offered a 10K raise to stay. That, in my experience, was exceptional — one could even say, miraculous. BUT it didn’t speak for a moment to the question of what God wanted for my life. In fact, taking that kind offer into consideration would have been a distraction. The right decision was much more deeply rooted in paying attention to the daily, annual, long, slow, work-filled years that lay behind me.
There are many reasons we pay more attention to the miraculous or exceptional in our lives than we do the daily, lifelong patterns — all of them understandable, some of them good, some of them bad:
We look to the miraculous because in principle we believe that God is active in the world and hears our prayers…That’s not a bad reason, but it can be easily distorted. God is not a cosmic bellhop and life is not all about us. We are called to serve as Christ served — we are not hear to live a lifelong, all-you-can-eat buffet.
We are afraid to have faith…all of us use training wheels on spiritual journey — experiences that bolster our faith: things that have happened to us, answers to prayers, familiar approaches to worship, Scripture. These are good things. But they should not be the object of our trust and confidence (a.k.a., faith). God is the one on whom we are meant to live in ever closer dependence. Days, weeks and years marked by the sameness of life — or, harder yet, by loss and tragedy — make it harder to live in dependence upon God. So we look for God-sightings, the miraculous to secure our hope. Those are the moments to cultivate a greater trust in God — whatever happens. Training wheels are a great thing, but if you show up at the Tour de France with three wheels in back, you are not Lance Armstrong — and if, as children of God, we show up at the finishing line more dependent than ever on God’s gifts, instead of God, we will have missed the point.
We also long to experience the presence of God…In our materialistic world, where what we can see, feel, hear, touch, and smell makes the more powerful claims on our attention, it is not surprising that we look for the exceptional to reassure us that God is here. That’s understandable. Cultural forces and intellectual forces have left us with the impression that, if God exists at all, God is “out there” beyond the last process or molecule that we have successfully identified. In an environment like that, we are bound to what God to “show up” with the same, tangible evidence. The problem, though, doesn’t lie with God. The problem is with our perceptions:
The whole of creation, material and non-material, common and exceptional, is the work of God’s creative and sustaining presence. What could be more miraculous than the ability to see, hear and understand — to love? What could be more miraculous than new life or the wonders of the world around us? The Greek Orthodox church has long held — and rightly so — that we owe the miracle of our existence to God as Trinity. The very fact that we count only the exceptional as miracle, then, constitutes one of our problems.
The other is this: If you aren’t alert to the work of God, you won’t appreciate it. For most of us, as we mature spiritually, we have more and more of those “Why-didn’t-I-see –this-before?” moments. And the answer, of course, lies not in the supposed absence of God, but in our awareness of God’s presence. You can be in the best of acoustical spaces, with accomplished musicians and if you have a tin ear for music or have never cultivated a love of it, you will not appreciate the music performed.
The same is true of God’s work. God doesn’t need to work more miracles. We need to learn how to see.
