In Charge of My Own Spirituality
There are may reasons that I gravitate toward spiritual disciplines and ancient forms of spirituality and worship:
- I think old things are cool.
- I appreciate beauty over timeliness
- I appreciate literary quality over marketing
- I am a routine-oriented and enjoy discipline
- I feel comfortable with repetition
But as I have spent time questioning why I gravitate towards having spiritual disciplines one answer kept rising to the surface of my heart:
I don’t trust myself.
At all.
One of the benefits of spiritual disciplines for me has always been that I am not in charge of them. I don’t make up my own way of prayer—instead, I pray guided by prayer books and ancient spiritual practices. I don’t make up my own way through the Bible—instead, I use the lectionary (or let my wife pick which book of the Bible I should read).
It’s true that I enjoy the beauty of ancient traditions, but I think it essential that contemporary Christianity continue to produce new forms of worship rooted in our ancient faith. What is really essential, I believe, is not the smells and bells. The guidance is the crucial part we have been missing. Without it, we are left with a me-centered form of spirituality. Part of discipleship should be to move from a vague, me-centered sense of spirituality into spiritual formation and spiritual discipline.
In most churches today we do a tremendous disservice to congregations by telling them to be in charge of their own spirituality. Go read your Bible, we say. Go pray for a few moments each day. But we don’t teach them how to do these things, and we let them choose their own ways. It’s like a Choose Your Own Adventure book for spiritual growth.
I may come off as a liturgy snob. That’s not my intent. I do not really care how you implement spiritual practices in your church, family and personal devotions. What is most important to me is that you cede control of your own spirituality. Learn from others how to read and pray. Let others lead you for a while. Then you will be stretched and shaped by God’s story, and not your own.
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Thanks for these thoughts, Thomas. In this, as in many (most? all?) things, finding some balance is the key.
In Catholicism, because we have such an intense “guidance system” for spirituality, we’ve veered at times dangerously close to leaving the individual behind … allowing her/him to go through the motions (plugging into the communal path) without having to be so personally involved … without hardly ever getting to the heart of it.
One of the attractions of a writer like Richard Rohr is that he preaches the creative tension of community/individual and tradition/”now” .
I agree. I think for me, choosing to not be in charge of my own spirituality, to a degree, can be a very individualistic choice in and of itself. I think churches should not turn spirituality into a rigid form or doctrine, but allow the members the freedom to explore their faith tradition in new ways. For me, it’s kind of like jazz music. The rules and form are there, and then you can riff as the Holy Spirit leads you.
I’ve seen the benefit of discipline (training through practice) more as a contrast to how I govern my life and growth. Well, I don’t think it’s really a governing…and that’s the problem sometimes. I have patterns and ways, but the organization part doesn’t really gel like is does for other people. Usually I feel trapped by routine. only in recent years have I felt comforted by it.
This is why in the process of studying how Christians throughout history achieved spiritual growth I learned that there is much we can do to cultivate the field of our hearts and ready it for the seeds of God and his work. It is the work of discipline.
Strangely, it is discipline that ushers in freedom. It doesn’t stand in opposition to it, as we may be wont to assume.
Lisa, what you’re saying reminds me of what Augustine said in The Free Choice of the Will: “seek to live a good and upright life and to attain unto perfect wisdom.” Evangelicals, building off of the Enlightenment philosophy of the self, see freedom as having unlimited choices, i.e. the right of free speech is the right to say whatever you want. The Christian view of freedom is to choose goodness out of a world full of choices.
The same freedom Augustine speaks of applies to our own spirituality. We shouldn’t have the freedom to choose whatever we want to do and call it worship or devotional time. As Christians we need to choose the spiritual disciplines and practices that put us on the path of a good and upright life, full of heavenly wisdom.