Crying Babies & Christian Retreat Addiction
There are two times in life when a person feels an overwhelming desire to act. There are the times when the innate sense of “fight or flight” causes adrenaline to course through a person’s veins and jump into action–car accidents, the sight of blood, a baby crying. As I gathered my thoughts to write this piece my little one woke up and cried for someone to pick her up out of her crib. She even got specific. In the midst of the sleepy, whiny gibberish she said daddy. I sat up from the rocking chair and felt an overwhelming compulsion to go grab her out of her crib. My baby was calling out for me. I instinctively felt a need to act. The other times a person feels the need to act are when a person feels the weight of a hundred eyes on him or her pressure the person into action. This type of response happens on middle school playgrounds when kids are peer pressured into smoking cigarettes. It also happens during Christian retreat altar calls.
Joking aside, a Christian retreat is really a mixture of both. Yes, there is typically the awkward re-dedication altar call. Fortunately, there is a deeper response, the adrenaline of detachment from the cares of the world and surrender to God in worship. It’s called a mountain top moment for a reason. The adrenaline is flowing and we yearn to stay in “retreat mode” forever. I’ve seen youth cry because they don’t want to get back on a bus and return to normal life. The momentary rapture of a retreat experience is addicting, so some people begin to chase mountain top moments and seek to replicate that rush of adrenaline spiritual experience.
In Matthew 17 some of the disciples have a mountain top moment. They see Jesus transfigured before them on top of Mt. Tabor and have a literal mountain top moment. Peter, in his attempt to capture the moment, suggests monuments be built to record this amazing happening. Like a young person on a retreat he wants to bottle the moment and store it away forever. Jesus dismisses this notion and then heads back down the mountain.
Once down the mountain Jesus tells everyone to come to the kingdom of God like little children, in humility. It’s a nice image, but sometimes I feel like a baby crying out before God. Indeed, in between the mountain top moment and the sermon on being like children Jesus actually stopped and helped out a father who like a baby was crying out for someone to help his son. Jesus responded and healed the child. Only then did he begin to tell the others that they should approach the kingdom like little children.
The connection between these passages in Matthew 17 and 18 is that Jesus perpetuates the first type of overwhelming response to action. He is teaching his followers that the way to maintain their mountain top response, like the one some of the disciples had at the Transfiguration, is to respond to the people who are crying out all around us for healing and salvation. In his commentary on Matthew in the Resonate Series (see my review), Matt Woodley puts it this way:
The Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa once said that the ‘artist is the one who does not look away.’ In this sense, followers of Jesus are also artists. First, we will not look away from Jesus’ glory. In corporate worship and personal times of silent prayer, we yearn for a true glimpse. We will spend time doing nothing else except listening to the Father who tells us to listen to Jesus. But, secondly, as artists of the spiritual life, we also won’t look away from the world’s pain and agony. With Jesus, we’ll descend mountain of glory and walk among the anguished and the imperfect around us. (180)
For so many, myself included, the spiritual life slips into the second type of response is the typical response. We feel peer pressure to do our devotions and to pray. We don’t want people to find out we aren’t doing what the other cool kids are doing. So we try to build up altars to prove we were there, like Peter trying to memorialize the Transfiguration. The better way to act is to perpetuate the mountain top moment, just like Jesus did. When he came down from his mountain top moment he literally came down, but he never actually came down from the mountain spiritually. He went into action, letting the confirmation of the Father at the Transfiguration spur him toward healing, toward preaching the good news and toward caring for the little ones and least of these. We are called to continue our mountain top moments the same way. Our spirituality does not need to be defined by guilt or peer pressure. Let it be the fruit of your communion with God, a life lived as if instead of holding onto that mountain top moment you chose to give pieces of that special spiritual moment to others who are crying out like babies in desperate need of it.
Twenty Five Books Every Christian Should Read
Renovaré, the spiritual formation organization, has come out with a book about Christian books, the provocatively titled Twenty Five Books Every Christian Should Read. Gathering together editors from Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant traditions, the list comprises the following books:
1. On the Incarnation by St. Athanasius
2. Confessions by St. Augustine
3. The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
4. The Rule of St. Benedict by St. Benedict
5. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
6. The Cloud of Unknowing by Anonymous
7. Revelations of Divine Love (Showings) by Julian of Norwich
8. The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis
9. The Philokalia
10. Institutes of the Christian Religion by John Calvin
11. The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Avila
12. Dark Night of the Soul by St. John of the Cross
13. Pensées by Blaise Pascal
14. The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
15. The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence
16. A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by William Law
17. The Way of a Pilgrim by Unknown Author
18. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
19. Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton
20. The Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins
21. The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer
22. A Testament of Devotion by Thomas R. Kelly
23. The Seven Storey Mountain by Thomas Merton
24. Mere Christianity by C. S. Lewis
25. The Return of the Prodigal Son by Henri J. M. Nouwen
I have read Confessions, Divine Comedy, Institutes, Pilgrim’s Progress, The Way of the Pilgrim, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mere Christianity, which comes out to about 25% of the list. I have On the Incarnation, The Practice of the Presence of God and The Cost of Discipleship sitting on my “book queue” shelf, waiting to be read. Almost all of these books have been on my radar, and I would want to eventually read every one, except for Brothers Karamazov—I just can never really get into Russian writing.
Which of these books have you read? What would you add to the list? Subtract from it?
Exploring the Life and Prayer of the Heart
“Prayer of the heart” falls outside of the hurried and hectic ways and mechanisms of the contemporary American lifestyle. It’s foreign culturally. Since it is so uncommon for us, we should pay attention to what we might be missing. We should explore the benefits, and grow by learning lessons from this particular spiritual attitude.
If we think of the heart as the “feeling mind,” rather than, let’s say, gooey sentiment or an emotional mood, we realize the “heart” has everything to do with how we grow and mature spiritually speaking. It’s common Bible knowledge that “God looks at the ‘heart’.” But, we also know this word speaks neither of the blood pumping flesh in our chest cavity, or just some romantic, interior place were Cupid’s arrow has pierced us, and made our eyelashes flutter rapidly. Coupled with our reasoning, the “feeling mind” is the impetus for many, if not most, of the choices we make, whether foolish or faithful. Dallas Willard calls the heart the “control center” or C.E.O. of the mind. It is the place where we make up our minds, if you will.
As this curious part of our being is trained, we come into grater contentment, a righted knowledge of self and our Redeemer, and better worship and adoration of God. A cooperation of our obedience and the Holy Spirit do this work. It’s a process of relieving ourselves of our misguided concepts of control, and willingly letting God’s Spirit change us. I think of what Jesus said… if we save our lives, we lose them; and if we lose ourselves for his sake, we will truly find ourselves completed in God’s righteousness. This holds fast as we take care to desire God. The “loss of self,” of course, is not some reduction of individuality, or a diminution of the psyche, but rather a fulfillment of our potential as humans creations of God’s, fashioned in his image.
For many, a study of the devotional writings of Christians present and past, has served as a powerful guide to this “change of heart”. There are 2,000 years worth of devotional classics to choose from, starting with the Bible, and the early writings of the Christian devout, and coming into present day with the likes of Andrew Murray, Humility & Aboslute Surrender;Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together; C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm, many works by A.W. Tozer, and others. These people serve as needed mentors and guides.
One classic stands toward the top of the heap as a favorite among Catholics and Protestants both, over the last 500 plus years. It is among the most translated books ever written, along with John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, and Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest. (Obviously, none of these works come close to the Bible in abundance of copies or proliferation of translations.) I speak of Thomas á Kempis’ work, written between 1420 and 1427, called The Imitation of Christ.
Decades before Martin Luther and other Reformers attempted to incite reform within the Church, the Holy Spirit’s whisperings were at work, drawing his own to greater devotion and holy living. One such group was the community known as Brethren of the Common Life (or sometimes called The Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life, because it included plenty of women as well). This was a decidedly grassroots movement of (non clergy) laity, and the Church in Rome didn’t know what to do with them. They lived side-by-side, sharing their money and possessions, like the early church in Jerusalem. In devotion to Christ they maintained lives of prayer, work, and community in the bond of the Holy Spirit. They provided for their needs as copyists, reproducing Christian manuscripts by hand, and were led spiritually by the revival and renewal teachings of Dutchman Gerard Groot, more than the Pope. Groot’s primary teachings come forth most powerfully in The Imitation of Christ.
Please enjoy this excerpt:
Had you but once entered into perfect communion with Jesus or tasted a little of His ardent love, you would care nothing at all for your own comfort or discomfort but would rejoice in the reproach you suffer; for love of Him makes a man despise himself.
A man who is a lover of Jesus and of truth, a truly interior man who is free from uncontrolled affections, can turn to God at will and rise above himself to enjoy spiritual peace.
He who tastes life as it really is, not as men say or think it is, is indeed wise with the wisdom of God rather than of men.
He who learns to live the interior life and to take little account of outward things, does not seek special places or times to perform devout exercises. A spiritual man quickly recollects himself because he has never wasted his attention upon externals. No outside work, no business that cannot wait stands in his way. He adjusts himself to things as they happen. He whose disposition is well ordered cares nothing about the strange, perverse behavior of others, for a man is upset and distracted only in proportion as he engrosses himself in externals.
If all were well with you, therefore, and if you were purified from all sin, everything would tend to your good and be to your profit. But because you are as yet neither entirely dead to self nor free from all earthly affection, there is much that often displeases and disturbs you. Nothing so mars and defiles the heart of man as impure attachment to created things. But if you refuse external consolation, you will be able to contemplate heavenly things and often to experience interior joy.
The Imitation of Christ focuses much on renouncing the world–a major concern of their day; as was a very academic perspective toward the things of God. These common religious dispositions lacked a heart’s devotion to God in thought and deed, and The Imitation of Christ attended to that deficit.
Perhaps, to our contemporary sensibilities, The Imitation of Christ goes too far in casting away the world. Our place and time in human history does not correlate directly with their era. Yet, if we set aside, for a moment, our personal tastes, or our exact situations in 21st century America (or elsewhere), and read this work with friendliness toward the community of believers in the time it was written, we will find much treasure there. I encourage you to do just that!
The Imitation of Christ a short work that is available in its entirely, online, in various places. Here is one location: http://www.leaderu.com/cyber/
I Owe My Faith to “Heretics”
It’s high time we recognize the narrowness of contemporary evangelicalism’s definition of “heresy” as a yeast that leavens the whole body and soul with sin and condemnation. If the wrong view on something such as infant baptism, seven literal days of creation or heaven and hell can make someone a heretic in contemporary evangelicalism then the following people are “heretics”:
-James
-Iraneus
-John of Chrysostom
-Origen
-Gregory of Nyssa
-Augustine
-Anselm
-St. Nicholas (“Santa”)
-Thomas Aquinas
-Martin Luther
-John Calvin
-Karl Barth
-George MacDonald
-G.K. Chesterton
-J.R.R. Tolkien
-Dorothy Sayers
-C.S. Lewis
-N.T. Wright
The fact is, I owe my faith to these “heretics.” They have taught me so much about living the gospel and finding salvation and deliverance in this life and the life to come. They taught the people who taught me, and the people who taught them, from generation to generation to generation. I am part of the rich, vibrant faith tradition of Christianity that has been passed on for thousands of years by the people in the list above.
The thought that for thousands of years God has used “heretics” who don’t understand the “gospel” of contemporary evangelicalism to pass down scraps of knowledge that did not redeem them, only so that two thousand years later we are allowed to understand exactly what is in the Scriptures is the worst kind of pride.
Tea With Molasses
I love tea. It’s a habitual pleasure. I have a french press on my desk at work so that I can have five or six cups whenever I feel like it. I was craving something sweet one night a week ago, so I went into the kitchen and put on some tea water. I opened the pantry to pull out some sugar and then I saw it: black strap molasses. I thought, that might be good. It wasn’t.
I couldn’t believe I would think of something that was not that tasty (hubris, anyone?), so I googled it and people do indeed drink tea with molasses. But people also drink light beer. Just because people do it doesn’t make it right.
Like tea with molasses, some ideas sound good but end up being not so good. Then what do you do? I think we need to learn from it. When we try something new during a worship service and it doesn’t work out the way we intended, it shouldn’t be relegated to the rubbish heap of bad ideas—we should try to learn from it, to tinker with it, to try and find the goodness in it and refine it until it becomes a meaningful part of our creative lives.
I think I’ll continue to tinker with molasses in tea until I get it right. I hope I can take that mentality and apply it when that prayer doesn’t work quite right, or that advice was a bit flat or that drum fill in a song is a half beat too short.
Staring At Seeds
I planted some basil, cilantro and chrysanthemum on my desk at work. Sitting under the neon lights, I have been watering them each day. Last Friday the basil and cilantro sprouted. I just stared at them, waiting for them to open up and get bigger.
Each day they are a little bigger, I think anyways. It’s hard to tell day by day. I know a few weeks from now I’ll walk in and see a full plant and wonder when did this happen?
I think our spiritual life is like that, for better or worse. Sometimes I wake up and wonder when was the last time I prayed? Other times, I relish the brilliance of my collective spiritual life, how everything is connected and deep.
Seeds are planted in our lives. We must take care of them. The trick of it is that there is no easy five step plan. Ten minute quiet times and random spontaneous prayers don’t get you to that when did this happen moment. Gardening, tilling, and cultivating our spiritual lives—that is what gets us to those deep, connected moments of spiritual growth.
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