Is spiritual formation navel-gazing?
Jon Tyson, Unsplash
We're doing a short series on what spiritual formation is, as well as addressing some of the criticisms and concerns around spiritual formation that we've heard in recent years.
Some of the very real questions posed to us, and even something we've wrestled with ourselves, are: Isn't spiritual formation just a glorified form of navel-gazing? Isn't the contemplative life just a different version of self-help or self-actualization, the key word being SELF? And don't spiritual practices just promote these ideas?
I get it. And honestly, focus on the self can be a legitimate pitfall of spiritual formation. This question of navel-gazing and spiritual formation is absolutely worth addressing, because the temptation for our formation to become self-focused can show up in a variety of ways, especially if we treat spiritual formation as the end-all-be-all of life in Christ.
Many of us have been drawn to the spiritual formation "movement" because we’ve felt that something was lacking in our worshiping communities, theology, or faith experience. We believed that there had to be more to following Jesus than personal quiet times, attending church and inductive bible studies each week, joining the welcome or hospitality team to serve in our church community, and treating the bible merely as a handbook for morality. Please understand I don't mean to demean any of these things, which are all crucial to the Christian faith!
However, some of us have started to take Jesus at His word when he says we've been invited into life to the full in John 10, or that we can actually know the incomprehensibly limitless love of God as Paul writes about in Ephesians 3. I love those words of Paul...that we can know the God who is beyond knowledge. We long for the kind of terrifying and soul-deep intimacy with God that we read about from mystics like Julian of Norwich or Dallas Willard, and we learn that there are innumerable ways to engage in prayer, to hear the voice of God, and to make room for the Spirit to invade every part of our lives.
In our previous post, we defined spiritual formation as this: Spiritual formation is the intentional and semi-intentional response on our part to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in transforming us into the likeness of Christ, being rooted in His love, drawing us into authentic and vulnerable community, and sending us back into the world to witness to His transforming power. In a recent podcast, Emily P. Freeman quoted Michael J. Cusick, saying that spiritual formation is "tending to the gap between our beliefs and our experience." I love that.
And honestly, we can't afford NOT to tend to our inner lives.
One of the things we've come to realize is that our inner worlds are often much larger, deeper, and more influential than our outer world. What I mean by that is that the way we experience, internalize, and respond to the world and its events plays a far larger impact in our lives than the events themselves. There's a psychological and spiritual concept that we don't learn from experience, but rather we learn from experience that is reflected upon and articulated (Churches, Cultures, and Leadership, Branson and Martinez).
The reality is that we respond to the external world out of what's within us. If we don't tend to our inner life, then inevitably, we'll respond poorly, and we may even inflict wounds upon ourselves and others. We have to be willing to reflect on who we are becoming and what's actually forming us into that person, especially in this new world we've been living in these last few years. We've all borne recent witness to the devastating effects of a lack of formation, in leaders in particular -- that when we don't value and reflect upon who we're becoming in Christ, we can do real damage. You don't have to listen to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill podcast to know this is true.
But the opposite is also true. Out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks, as Jesus said. If it's His likeness that we are transformed into and reflect, then that can make all the difference to the world around us. If you want an example of how tending to the inner life can have a profound impact on the world, read Cal Newport's article, in which he recounts Martin Luther King's experience of solitude and prayer that led to an encounter with God and his involvement in the Civil Rights movement.
LEARNING TO BE LOVED AND TO LOVE
I think it's clear both in scripture and in our lived experience that we are invited into a life of wholeness, restoration, and shalom, and that invitation is only possible through an intimate knowing of God and being known by Him. Naturally, this draws us both inward and to a place of silence and solitude before God. Silence and solitude, Henri Nouwen argued in The Way of the Heart, is where transformation happens. It's where we learn about the gift of God's presence, and where His unending, radically faithful, and deeply personal love wrecks and restores us. Nouwen so sweetly writes that silence "is not emptiness and absence, but fullness and presence, not the human silence of embarrassment, shame, or guilt, but the divine silence in which love rests secure."
And it's that love that transforms us from the inside out, and not just for ourselves, but for other people, too. In our very human search for meaning, identity, and belonging to God, we can certainly get very caught up in ourselves and miss Jesus entirely -- and we can even miss a crucial point of the gospel: that we aren't just saved from sin, but into the Kingdom of God.
As followers of Jesus, we are invited to deny ourselves, to pick up our own crosses and walk the way of Christ. This, to me, implies two important things: 1) that we know the Jesus whom we claim to follow, and 2) that walking the way of Christ means we learn to live and love like Him. The purpose of spiritual formation, above anything else, is to encounter the presence of the Living God, and to allow God to transform us into the image of His Son. That kind of transformation is anything but self-involved. If we walk the path of Christ, if we truly believe in following him, then our lives ought to reflect his self-giving, loving, and compassionate nature. And how else can we reflect Jesus if we don't spend time at His feet and in His presence?
One of the most well-known sayings of the Desert Fathers is of Abba Arsenius saying this: "Go into your cell, and your cell will teach you everything" (Benidicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers).
Devoting time to learning the prayerful acts of silence and solitude in the presence of God literally change us from the inside out. One of the things I love about this quote is that at first, it sounds like the secret to a fulfilling spiritual life is to shut ourselves away from the world like monks and nuns. However, I think what Abba Arsenius is really saying is that we find something sacred and special in the quiet place before God, and then we realize that we can't stay there forever. Eventually, we learn it's time to leave our cells of prayer and enter the world again.
One of the reasons we believe spiritual formation is so dang important is because it's about teaching us first how loved we are, and then how to extend that love to other people. And it begins with us knowing our own belovedness in the eyes of God. I love Henri Nouwen's words of wisdom in an old Christianity Today article:
"When you discover your belovedness by God, you see the belovedness of other people and call that forth. It's an incredible mystery of God's love that the more you know how deeply you are loved, the more you will see how deeply your sisters and your brothers in the human family are loved."
(Friends in ministry: stop reading this blog post and just read this article by Nouwen. It'll be one you return to again and again, I promise.)
HONEST PITFALLS OF SPIRITUAL FORMATION
While we don't believe that spiritual formation is in and of itself navel-gazing, we do want to recognize a few navel-gazing-like pitfalls of which we ought to be prayerfully aware. Here are three:
When spiritual formation drifts into legalism. When we find a prayer practice or spiritual discipline that resonates with us and our particular season, we can easily start to treat the doing of the disciplines as the way of righteousness. We can become overly attached to lectio divina or centering prayer, and forget that they are merely means of grace, not the grace of God in and of themselves. We all know our human propensity to believe that our salvation and sanctification is dependent upon our actions. But becoming like Christ is the work of Christ in our lives. We participate, and we make conscious, intentional choices to follow Him, but we are only able to know Him and reflect Him because He is performing the act of transformation within us. Bryan touched on that in more depth in our previous post.
When spiritual formation drifts into Gnostic pride. One of the major pitfalls of spiritual formation is believing that once we're "in the club," so to speak, then we have the special sauce to the spiritual life that everyone else is missing. And then we can start to look down on those who "don't understand" or have missed out on these "secrets" to a deeper prayer life. None of this is secret or special knowledge. It's all, again, means of grace, offered to us as opportunities to tune our hearts, minds, and souls to the loving voice of God. Let's not think we are above those who have different ways of communing with and knowing God, because we aren't. Spiritual formation is for everyone.
When spiritual formation drifts into self-absorption and self-isolation. If we're being truly honest, both legalism and Gnosticism are very much their own versions of self-absorption. In legalism, I become attached to the belief that my actions are what save me, and in Gnosticism, I become attached to the belief that my own knowledge, prayer life, and experiences make me spiritual superior.
And we can also think that spiritual formation is just about me and Jesus. There's this idea that many of us have had (it's not novel, sorry to break it to you): that we don't need to attend church to follow Jesus, because church is a mess and a place of deep wounding for so, so many people. There is, to be sure, truth to that, and we've experienced church hurt ourselves--especially in the last couple of years. But we can't follow Jesus in a vacuum. We just weren't meant to. Bonhoeffer wrote: "One who seeks solitude without fellowship perishes in the abyss of vanity, self-evaluation, and despair." We need each other, friends, and the world is crying out to know the same love that we do. If I am to learn to love like Jesus, then I ought to be around those He loves.
Jesus Himself is our greatest example of spiritual formation, as He went away as often as he could to be alone with the Father. And then, as He said in John 5:19, He returned to community and He did what He saw the Father doing. May we have the courage to seek the Father in our daily lives, so that we can see and discern what it is that He's doing in the world and join Him in it!
Hopefully this post is a help to you! Keep an eye out for the next one, in which Bryan addresses the question: Is spiritual formation just a Catholic or even a New Age thing? Should be a fun read.😉