Why passion is not enough for faith

Recently I finished reading Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence. While this book is a little different than I expected and I almost did not finish reading it, I made the commitment to read it and so I finished it. 

The author quoted Jorge Luis Borges who noted, “Art is fire plus algebra.”

That got me thinking about spiritual formation.

I listen to a number of people talk about how they feel they should read the Bible more or have a better devotional life. Words like "I should want to want to do this" come up a lot.

For instance I heard a Christian say the other day, "We should want to read our Bible every day!" 

The underlying issue in these comments and sentiments is that we are under the false impression that if we just had the right amount of passion for something then we would want to want to do it. If we just had a change of heart and a passion for God then we would want to read the Bible everyday.

This is a false impression because passion (fire) is not enough! The thing that the saints of the church and those who are deeply grounded is that they too have figured out that passion is not enough to spiritually mature. The saints have all figured out the systems (algebra) to fuel the fire of passion.

You know the secret to wanting to want to spiritually mature? Set up systems in place that you cannot make an excuse for not doing it. We don't like the idea of having bad breath so we brush our teeth. Even if you do not have a fire about dental health, you have a system in place to ensure your teeth will remain healthy.

Want to mature in your spiritually? Discover the algebra, because fire is not enough.

Form: Shaping Spirituality: Trans-form

In a final post about a way of spiritual formation, we will look at transform.

I credit Rev. Nancy Allen on the following visual. She said she got it from a Companions in Christ study, but she was not sure where she first saw it.

It is one of the better ways I have come across to describe what a transformation through spiritual formation "looks" like.

Many of us begin to talk about God in abstract terms and use language that speaks of God as "out there". As such, we relate to God as an "other" not related to the self (see fig. 1).

Some people find that to talk about God in the abstraction is not helpful or "Biblical" and so there is a very powerful movement in which there is a talk of getting Jesus into your heart. Whereas in fig 1 God is outside of the self, in fig 2 God dwells in the temple of the body.

The fact of the matter is in both fig 1 and fig 2, the protagonist is the human being. Fig 1 has the human story and God's story moving in parallel. There are times when the stories come close (Christians call these mountaintop experiences or thin places) but they do not touch. Fig 2, God becomes a personal deity in which prayers are offered and the person who prays them becomes convinced that God does not love them but is in love with them. This is parodied in this SNL sketch:

Jesus (Phil Hartman): Tina.. Tina.. all I'm saying is, prayers like, "Please don't let the rice get sticky." You know. 
Tina (Sally Field): Yeah! Yeah! 
Jesus: I mean, do you really need My help with stuff like that? See? 
Tina: [ crying profusely into her apron ] I'm very, very sorry..! I guess I was justwasting your time..! I certainly wish you had told me about this sooner..! 
Jesus: Well, I thought about it, and I decided to finally say something.. 
Tina: Oh, God, I'm so embarrassed..! 
Jesus: Well, believe me, there are a billion people with the same problem! [ chuckling ] 


Notice in this sketch and in fig. 2, the person center stage is not God, but the human. 


Through the process of reforming, we are transformed. Fig. 3 visually expresses that when we are transformed we are not longer looking as God or hold God in our heart, but we become enveloped in God. We have our story but our story is just one story of God's story. We have a relationship with God, but the relationship is not exclusively ours.


Fig 3 is a life transformed. The protagonist of fig. 3 is not the human - it is God. 


Transformation is beyond being a better person. It is beyond doing good or living by the golden rule. If we are religious or spiritual just to be better people, then the main actor in our lives is still, well, us. 


Rather, the call of Christian spirituality is a call to transform so that we are no longer the main player in our lives. We are not the protagonist. Transformation leads us to losing our story in God's story so that God's story becomes our story.


Spiritual formation is about moving toward fig 3. It is about being formed so that we are not the center of the action in our life. It is about learning God's story so that God's story becomes our story.


Spiritual formation is bound together in information, preformation, conformation, reformation, and transformation. 

Form: Shaping Spirituality: Re-Form

In this series I have touched on a way of spiritual formation. First there is inform which we all are born into. Then as we grow most of us naturally move into preform. A great number of people remain at this stage and are not able/willing to do take the next step and die to self in order to conform to spiritual disciplines. This post will touch on what happens in the next stage: reform.

When you go to a gym and conform your workout to the suggestions of the trainer, you begin to feel differently. Whereas you may have really liked to work your biceps, the trainer forces you to also work your triceps. This feels differently. When we conform our lives to spiritual disciplines we also begin to feel differently. We may be very comfortable with prayer, but when our spiritual guide asks us to sit in silence for periods of time - it feels weird. If is a muscle we have not worked out before. Soon, the novelty of being in silence feels really quite great. It is something that we integrate into our "workout" and now feel like it is something that we will always do.

Until something throws us out of our routine. We go on vacation, we visit family, we have a death in our lives, a child is sick, we are sick, there is a three day weekend - anything that throws off the rhythm we have established in our "spiritual workout". Because the new routine of our "spiritual workout" has not had a chance to grow deep roots in our lives, we can quickly forget to continue these new disciplines. After a day or so, we rationalize away why we have not engaged these disciplines and then we wake up and then feel guilty that we have not "worked out" in sometime and then these new disciplines wither away.

This cycle of integrating our new "workout" into our lives and then it dropping out of our lives is the stage of spiritual formation I call Reforming. Like a potter who works and reworks clay, our lives are being reworked to a new shape. Let us be clear here, in the potter metaphor, you and I are not the potter we are the clay and the spiritual disciplines become the potter's wheel. If the wheel is not spinning, then the clay will just sit there and there is only so much the potter can do. The potter is able to work and reform the clay without the wheel, but the clay is limited in what shapes it can take.

Being reformed is the hardest part of spiritual formation. It is harder than conforming to new disciplines it is harder than dying to self. It is the hardest because it is ongoing. There is constant upkeep to ensure the wheel is still spinning.

And many of us just don't have that sort of discipline. However, if we are persistent, we will move into the next stage of spiritual formation - transform.