It has been a great joy of mine the past few months to be part of a wonderful team of bloggers at Conversations Journal. It has helped to hone my thinking on any number of topics in Christian spirituality. I’ve made some new friends and learned a great deal. I’ve posted previous pieces to Innerwoven. I’d like to catch us up on a few before heading into a new Lenten series. This one was from September, 2013. I hope you enjoy.

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I have walked and sought to articulate the Jesus Way (thanks Mr. Peterson) for over thirty years. Time has a way of being deceitfully generous with the actuality of our personhood. If you don’t believe me, go back and read old journals and then ask yourself the following questions. Is real change actually possible or am I merely an older, more sophisticated version of my broken self? Can one truly change or are we always forced to concede to God’s ever-expanding grace? Is that the point of “real change?” Is that deeper theological concession our most necessary change? If so, isn’t that merely a change of perspective more than a change of habits? If real change is never possible, what provides adequate impetus toward righteousness and beauty of character? Are these all the wrong questions?

I have large skeletons in my closet, a veritable killing field of front-page newsworthy issues of note, all nicely buried in my past. In May 2011 I graduated with a Masters degree in Spiritual Formation and Leadership from Spring Arbor University, Michigan. If the reader hasn’t already noted the glaring irony in such a statement, stop here. However, if you can see, as do I, the comedy of the words ‘master’ and ‘spiritual’ in the same sentence you are welcome to chuckle right along with me and see why I am stuck with these questions. As one eager for personal transformation I joined MSFL to determine if there were answers to my former questions.

I’m a little skeptical of the spiritual formation movement, specifically in evangelicalism, a theological trajectory that prides itself on being the conduit – a portal as it were – through which an ever-relevant gospel is communicated to an ever-needy world. The deepest need is always union with God, a multivalent and complex process under any rubric. But it is one that denies easy categorization or codification. And yet that is what we so often seek to do, for good reasons, but in some ways ill advised. Evangelicalism, for all its strengths, can be its own worst enemy, pursuing ardently whatever hints there may be of change on the wind in a frantic effort to stay ahead of the cultural relevance game even in matters spiritual formation.

I am convinced that no transformation is possible before one comes to that impossible crossroads where the utter frustration of “immovability” crashes into the immensity of holy desire for wholeness and union. Only here are we ripe for grace. Only here is grace poised to do its deepest work. Only here can our death lead to new life and transformed reality beyond the reaches of commoditization.

Given the stakes of remaining stuck and our propensity toward packaging the means of change, I am doubtful that the challenges inherent in actual transformation are just so high that packaging and promotion are still easier than acquiescence and brokenness. Be that as it may, by whatever means necessary, the Church has been reintroducing the cold, dark, clear waters of the great Christian spiritual tradition back into a world more thirsty than ever. I’m hopeful that any short term glitz, jingoism and book table mongering will lead to long term spiritual gains, long after any perceived spiritual formation “movement” has lost its traction and sex appeal.

Moreover, spiritual formation happens most often when we’re busy doing stuff one might not normally associate with the host of heaven. Or, as Mr. Lennon says, “life is what happens when we’re busy making other plans.” Chasing change, specifically humility, is like chasing a greased pig. We rarely catch it and just look like idiots in the process. Sit in the muck with the pigs and they’ll come to you. Then, it’s bacon for dinner. Or, at least the satisfaction of knowing that we’re all in it together.

Pictures found here and here

Dear friends, I’m feeling a little weepy today. This blog, which grew out of an inner compulsion to share my, well…inner compulsions with the world, is three years old today! It also came about through the encouragement of a number of close friends and colleagues, many whom are bloggers themselves (and I dare say considerably more accomplished than I), to “put it out there.” That is to say, if a writer I would be, then life with pants down is how I must live. 

I’d be remiss if I didn’t say to all of you, those who have signed on to follow this little venture, a heartfelt thank you. Thank you for your willing deliberations with my own willing deliberations. Thank you for receiving what I choose to give, some good, some not so much. Thank you for letting me into your computers, your living rooms, your hearts. Just…thank you. 

Since this blog was always intended as a “one stop spiritual shop” for all things inner-Rob and hopefully, by extension, inner-you, I thought it fitting to celebrate this anniversary in a simple way; a way I so often find clarity in the chaos that is me: my journal entry from today, Friday, January 31st, 2014.

Once again, thank you.

From my journal: Friday, January 31, 2014

There is something at once alarming, even disconcerting, about the increasing awareness of God’s movements in the soul. Like becoming suddenly aware of the fact that one is treading water in a vast, shark-infested sea, we realize that we are in way over our heads. And the only hope of survival is that someone comes to save us before we are either drowned or ingested.

As we creep ever deeper into a new year, I am drawn to consider the fortuitous goodness of God. I look back over the past few years and see a number of explosions, all of which have led to a slow conversion attained through the gathering up and careful consideration of the resulting shrapnel. I’ve studied in detail my own wounds. They’re not pretty. But they yield fascinating evidence of God’s messing around.

Like fortune-teller tea leaves at the bottom of the cup, I begin to see patterns of grace previously unnoticed and so arranged as to point me to bigger ideas at play in the mind of God. “How weighty to me are your thoughts, O God! How vast is the sum of them!” I try to count them – they are more than the sand; I come to the end – I am still with you.” There’s the clincher I suppose. The community of God-as-God continues to invite me into that holy poker party even though I have little to offer the game.

Only now, in dusting off the rubble from numerous cage-fights between God and my ego, am I given clarity in some semblance of understanding. The movements of the human soul run so deep below the surface of things that, to unearth their seismic significance is to uncover the shining face of God, covered in coal dust, brow aglow in perspiration, from a tireless mining operation that had been taking place all along.

Prayer alerts me to the fact that God cares enough to dig at all. It merely points my head downward, ever downward, where God – like some Middle Earth dwarf – digs away, layer by painful layer. It creates a hunger in me to join God in the whole dirty enterprise. After all, sometimes diamonds come from that coal and gold is found when digging for something else.

But, only suffering and travail are strong enough to complete the journey from the center of the soul back to the surface. There, my mouth, my hands and feet, my life among the living, may be fueled by the ore of pain burning in the well-stoked furnace of love.

So be it.

Have I said thank you?

Pix here, here and someone’s cell phone, whom I cannot recall presently