I’ve been thinking lately about what I may or may not have learned from a master’s degree in Spiritual Formation and Leadership I completed last year. Firstly, even upon writing that just now I am forced to admit that this is the kind of degree my parents warned me against. I can just hear them now, “spiritual formation! What the hell is that gonna get ya?” They would have strongly objected to something so…kumbaya and huggy (well, I did just blow out the candles after all). Perhaps time will tell what scraps there may have been in this sentiment. Secondly, who would ever, willingly and in good conscience, juxtapose the words “master” with “spiritual formation” anyway? A rather self-aggrandizing move, don’t you think? It is akin to proclaiming with assurance the attainment of humility. The assertion in itself denies the reality. Thirdly, the words “completed” and “spiritual formation” also do not belong together. How do I know this? I learned it in my degree. Well, actually, I kind of figured that one out all on my own, but…just sayin’.

Briefly, here are a few things I really did learn.

I cannot manage this earthly sojourn on my own. This truth is not self-evident, especially in our own machoistic, John Wayne individualism prevalent in America. The bulk of my degree was done online. Before you roll your eyes at the idea of either spiritual formation or community online, let me assure you that…it works. I, too, was skeptical. However, to this day I find myself pining for the nearness of the other dear souls who shared this journey with me. They are who I am becoming. I’m really happy about that because they are some of the most remarkable pilgrims I’ve ever met. The wobbly sensibility I sometimes sense in my daily insufficiency is ample reminder of their strengthening role in my life.

Spiritual formation is God’s gig. One might think this to be self-evident. The spiritual life has fascinated me for as long as I can remember. As a result, I’ve read all the right books, heard all the right voices, tried all the best disciplines, sat at all the right feet, and been to all the right conferences. After all that, I’ve come away with this single truth: spiritual formation is God’s gig. God is busy, not dormant; active, not passive. God is good, not evil. The math tells me then that God, who is both busy and good, plays a central role in who I am and am becoming. Phew.

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. Related to the last one is this: no matter how “good” I think I get at this whole spiritual journey, Christ is, from first to last, the central figure in my formation. And Jesus shows one powerful, over-arching truth: God is love, expressed through grace. I enter poor and naked. I remain poor and naked, but loved and forgiven. This singular truth has radically altered my understanding about my “worth” in the tricky, and often dangerous, process of change. I will always come before God with a boat load of crap, both known and unknown. Therefore, since it’s about grace, and I’m not fooling God anyway, why not hang out with God all the same? I like that idea. Alot.

Faith is about mystery, not certainty. Since the Renaissance, and baptized at the Enlightenment, we have been on a self-congratulatory trajectory of humanism. The humanist manifesto: God is cool, but we’re pretty cool too and, with enough data, we can nail down this whole God thing (or perhaps scrap it altogether, whichever serves us better). Really. If that is so, why is it that we still hold to such desperately bad behavior as a species? Even our doctrine belies our self-love since it has been conveniently boiled down to a science; the data of God. Believe this stuff, sign on the dotted line and keep on being self-congratulatory fools. It’s working really well…right? I’m happier and more fulfilled in my life with God now that I’ve given up on the crazy idea that, the longer I walk with God, the more certain I will become about everything.

There are only beginners. Spiritual formation really is the epitome of the law of diminishing returns, at least as far as understanding is concerned. The deeper we go into Christ, the larger he becomes. The more one learns the less one knows. The more grace we need, the more grace we encounter. The more we love, the more we need to love. The more we have, the less we own…and so on. Catholic priest, psychologist and writer, Henri Nouwen tells us that, as we “progress” in the spiritual life, we enshrine an educated not knowing. Bummer. Beautiful.

It’s about the cross. Jesus on the cross portrays everything we need to know about the heart of God. God-with-us (Jesus) lived a life that always led to death, both metaphoric and real. Love and discipleship lead to sacrificial self-giving. Man, do we ever need that message in our culture! Richard Rohr insists that “Jesus is insistent that the way to God is the way of the cross. It’s not the prosperity Gospel of “the American Dream” with a little icing of Christ over the top.” Ouch and Amen.

The end of it all is…love.This should also be self-evident, right? However, the fundamentalists in our midst get particularly nervous when we use terms not easily “proven” or “quantifiable” as love. I mean, that messes with the whole idea of holiness and right understanding of the bible, right? Besides, it’s too easy to simply redefine love to mean something all mushy and squishy like them damn liberals! Perhaps. Hands up: how many of you know when you’re not loved? Yeah, me too. Again, I think we’re over-thinking something very simple and elemental. If it feels like hate…it probably is. To “believe” in Jesus is not just to say, “hey, I now have all the facts before me and, yes, I can buy into that.” To believe is to live as Jesus lived, come what may. It’s the whole package, mind, heart, soul, body…bowels as the King James would say.

That pretty much sums it up. The rest is details…

I’ve begun lately to feel a bit murky, like the water in the fish bowl a little too dirty to support healthy fish. There is something rather insidious that goes on in our deep down parts. It’s a kind of conspiracy that sets itself up to deny what we most need when we most need it. The old saying that distance makes the heart grow fonder makes sense in the youthful infatuations of long distance love. In matters of the soul however, distance mostly gives birth to more distance.

Since graduating last year with an MA in Spiritual Formation my prayer has been generally rich and full of gooey spiritual goodness. But the past few weeks have been excessively busy – death to the spiritual life, and I’ve fallen victim to the demands of self-imposed urgency. I choose to get to work just a little earlier to get more things accomplished. I cram in just one more phone call, send one more email, tweak the calendar a tiny bit more, and then look back to find that the wake of my boat moving through sacred waters is no longer distinguishable. I’ve inadvertently floated out to sea because I haven’t been paying attention to my surroundings. I’m untethered and afloat somewhere with no land in sight.

This is what happens when we pay more attention to the deck chairs than the proximity of the water. We’re happily lounging but in a context rather hostile to doing so long term!

If I could give one piece of advice, mostly to myself, but to others who also long for depth, breadth, quality and meaning in their prayer it would be this: pray. That’s it. I can offer nothing more profound than that. Allow nothing to steal what rightfully belongs to the soul’s longing for union with God.

Distance breeds distance, which in turn breeds the greatest conspiracy against the spiritual life: apathy. I don’t care to write anything more…

I’m off to pray.

Eastertide. It’s tempting to think that, after the resurrection of Jesus, all was done that needed doing; all the loose ends neatly tied, the t’s crossed and i’s dotted. The whole Easter pie had only to cool on the window sill and hungry people could dig in to its holy goodness.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In fact, it was only the beginning. The fifty day period that followed the empty tomb, celebrated at Pentecost (which means fifty weeks) and with it the coming of the Spirit, saw Jesus’ daily planner more packed than ever. Facing him were a veritable army of quaking, heart-broken, soul-sick, emotionally shattered disciples. Probably no one in history ever needed an encouraging word more than they!

So, while the religious leaders happily gloated over their perceived victory over this Nazarene upstart, Jesus was re-ligamenting (the same root from which we get religion) the faith of his broken followers. While they busily politicked with the ruling Roman elite, further positioning themselves for power, prestige and pull, Jesus was subversively showing himself to his startled friends and laying the foundation for what would help to crumble the false one upon which had been built such a vast religio-political empire. These humble souls, gradually enlivened and encouraged in the presence of the one to whom they had so completely surrendered but who had so unimpressively left them, would eventually go on to change the face of the known world. It would change our world. Indeed nothing would ever be the same again.

In and through the whole debacle that we’ve come to know as Easter there comes a promise like no other. In a way, never before seen in time or eternity, here heaven and earth kissed. God had stooped to embrace this damaged, sinful and light-starved cosmos in the most unexpected way. God slipped in the back door as a baby, with parents and jobs and bills. He became a man; a man with a story, a life, and that life was the light of all.

If we can learn anything from this time in the great salvation narrative it’s that there is always hope in the in between. Those periods when the book of our lives has been slammed shut and everything from which we drew hope and inner sustenance has been blotted out like a solar eclipse are only precursors for what we cannot yet see. Matthew’s gospel has the first words from Jesus’ post-resurrection lips as simply, “greetings.” With precious little fanfare for one they would come to understand as the King of kings, he gives them a simple, howdy! It is almost as though he was playing some twisted game of life and death peek-a-boo and he’d just been found out.

For all the complexities of our mortal lives, Jesus ever comes in the simplicity of everyday conversation. Before we can piece it all together and make sense of the tangled liminality of this-world living Jesus pokes his head in the shower door and catches us completely unaware and vulnerable. But, for the joy of seeing the one face we most needed to see, we forego any shock or dismay and welcome anew the place he once held in our lives.

The joy of lovers reunited is all the sweeter following the pain of separation. Eyes are never happier to see than when they’ve lost all hope of ever seeing again. The heart’s deep pain is quickly forgotten in the realization of that which once held it captive so effortlessly.

Let’s allow ourselves to dig deeper into the Easter story, letting it dig deeper into us and become our story. Having journeyed through the penitence and preparation of Lent, the strange irony of Palm Sunday, the tense calm of the Last Supper with its eerie undercurrents of betrayal, the black forgottenness and despair of Good Friday, the deathly silence of Holy Saturday, for those first disciples, that was where it ended. No triumph and fanfare. Just hopelessness.

But it didn’t end there. For those who place their trust in the Nazarene carpenter, it never is. Like those before us, we are continually being reintroduced to the forgotten Savior, the one who left us alone, but the one who returns. And he returns with goodies.

Before they could receive what was promised at Pentecost, when eyes were opened, tongues loosed, lives renewed, they waited. That’s what disciples do in the in between. They wait.

We wait.

We listen.

We prepare.

Then, at the right time…hope springs eternal and, like the Spring we are…

reborn.

In preparation for Easter…

It’s 4:00 P.M. and you suddenly remember that this was supposed to be the day that you were to leave work early to pick up your child from school at 2:45.  But instead you sit squashed up next to an overly chatty carpool neighbour with less than acceptable breath and one on the other side who insists on lighting up inside a car that could easily give birth it’s so full.  Your guts wrench tighter and tighter at every red light. You think horrible thoughts about the potential disasters which have befallen your child whose been doing who knows what on the school playground for well over an hour now.  You wonder, not so quietly, whether these drivers have ever gone so slowly.  You can just see the headlines: “Parents found negligent in child abuse case”.

All of those early morning prayer meetings, small group studies, extra services and church work you cram kicking and screaming into an already nightmarish schedule seem a mockery right now.  You had hoped that, if nothing else, by sheer good attendance God might tip the scales in your favour and perhaps cut you some life changing wisdom – the kind that would help you not to be so criminally absent minded!

To make matters worse you realize that it was your turn to type up the minutes from the last Strata Association meeting, which, coincidentally, was tonight, mere minutes after you’ll sweep up your cold, bewildered child off the playground.  Hopefully nobody suspects you for the insanely stupid person you feel like inside.  Driving home from the playground, a totally carefree child now safely in tow, you’re mentally cataloguing every microwaveable item you have in the house.  Perhaps if you linger for a few extra minutes in thanksgiving prayer God will add just a little food value to the popcorn (there‘s the vegetable), tater tots (the starch) and homemade milk shakes (and, there’s the dairy) your ecstatic children will ingest for their dinner.

Furthermore, to add insult to injury, wasn’t this going to be the year that, instead of blindly handing out the chocolate Easter eggs, you were going to read key Bible verses reminiscent of this season of Christ’s passion?  What a way to convey your passion for Christ and for your family, right?  You’d had such high Martha Stuart hopes for Easter time and yet you feel more like Erma Bombeck, or God forbid, Woody Allen.

It’s 12:10 A.M.  Exhausted, you turn out the lights from a day of self-inflicted mishaps and sociopathic anxiety.  A voice comes in the quiet just before sleep and whispers, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.”  And it occurs to you, that’s the point isn’t it?

Easter.

Jesus came to seek out the weak, the forgetful, the exhausted, the worried, the chaotic.  The empty tomb means that God is loose in the world; loose in your crazy, mixed up world.  Can you hear the knocking, even over the din of your anxiety-ridden life? If so, answer the door.

God will most surely enter.