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.

Form: Shaping Spirituality Con-form

As we move through spiritual formation, we first are at the in-form stage. Then we are able to move into the pre-form stage. Some people realizing all the information gathered and all the lenses keeping us from maturing, seek out new lenses to help them develop and mature. When we are willing and able to put down our natural lenses, then we can step into the con-form stage.


Conforming is often thought of selling out or just not being your "true self". Who would want to be a conformist? Isn't this the thing that many people do not like about religion - religion makes you be something you are not in order to make you into something you would not choose to be. So it is often assumed that religion makes people into mindless, doctrine spewing, Bible quoting people who hate all people who are not of their clan.

Yea, who would want that?


This is not the same as the con-form step in spiritual formation.


Here is an example of conforming in the way I am attempting to get at.


When you step onto the soccer field to play a game, everyone on the field conforms to a set of shared understandings (often called 'rules') in order to develop as not only soccer players but as athletes. If I were to not conform my way of being to the game of soccer then I will never grow as a soccer player and in a greater sense I can even stagnate as an athlete (I could just hold the ball and sit there).


Similarly, when we conform to a shared understanding of living, then we grow not only as disciplined people but even more generally as spiritual formed beings.


There are a number of shared understandings that have come to us through the ages that help us spiritually develop. Silence, prayer, breathing, fasting, Sabbath observation, worship, service, alms giving, meditation, listening, devotion, acts of justice, etc.


If we want to be spiritually formed and mature, then we must move beyond seeking information and seeing the world only through our preformed selves, we must con-form our lives.


There is a story told by Anthony DeMelo which goes something like this:

A man asks the teacher "Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?" The teacher replied. "As little as you can do to make the sun rise." The student asks the teacher, "Then of what use are the spiritual practices you prescribe?" The teacher smiles and after a moments' pause looked at the student in the eye and said plainly, "To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise."


The step of con-form is a step in which we rely on a shared understanding of how to live. We may not like all the understandings, (just as I may not like the way a referee calls a soccer game), but we bend our lives and conform to these understandings. When we do so, we begin to be formed.


*Warning* Con-form is not a stage for the impatient or those seeking a quick fix. It is a stage in which we never 'graduate' from and move on from. It is really the foundational stage of spiritual formation. Without it we are aimless and wandering. We will never be a soccer player if we do not conform to the understanding of soccer and we will not mature if we are do not con-form to shared understanding of spiritual formation.