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. 

Form: Shaping Spirituality Pre-form

This is the second of five posts that address one way we are spiritually formed. The last post focused on In-form and how gathering information is just the starting (and not the apex) of spiritual formation, which might be a bit out of step with the way many of us were taught in the Church.

Once we gather a decent amount of in-formation, we begin to discover that we have not gathered pure and unmodified information. In fact, as we learn more about the world, we are aware that all the information we gain comes through a number of filters and lenses so that it modifies the information we gather.

There is a danger in thinking that any bit of information comes into our brains as pure and unbiased. We begin to think that what we learn is in fact nothing short of the absolute Truth. We become convinced that the way we see the world is not only the correct way but cannot understand why others do not see it the same way. "They" are morons and idiots. Be it the left or the right or anyone in between, when we buy into the idea that we encounter information as pure and untouched, we are heading down a road toward idolatry and not Christian spiritual formation.

But when we see that we all have different lenses we are using to see the world and these lenses color what we see and how we see, then we being to understand that just gathering information is not the apex of our spiritual lives. For many Christians we were taught the world looks like this image to the right.

This lens colors the way we see the world. So we think the world is kinda crappy and one day we will be in heaven and better. So we teach that people are fallen and broken and that God cannot be in the presence of sin. This makes total sense - if you are wearing these lenses. If you are not wearing these lenses, then the idea that humans are broken and fallen and "bad" is just plain nuts.

As we gather more information, we become aware that before we were in-formed we were pre-formed. We were born into a place and time and context that drives assumptions and language. We did not choose this and we are often unaware of our pre-formed natures.

Take for instance, that in different parts of the world colors mean different things. While I associate red with anger and desire, these are not universal. These associations were pre-formed in me - however I did not know that these bits of information were not universal until I saw this chart:

If the way I associate colors is shaped by my pre-formed self, then it is not the same for the way I understand God, my neighbor and my self?

I could go on about how our pre-form stage of spiritual formation takes into consideration things like the birth of formal operational thinking, the imaginary audience, and even the nature/nurture conversation. It could even be stated that many of us stay at the pre-formed stage which allows us to justify our actions. So we say things like "I was born this way" or "I was raised this way" or "I cannot help it". As though we are pre-formed and then come out as fixed creatures unable to change/adapt/evolve. When we remain in this stage and retard our spiritual formation, we are spiritually immature while feeling like we are advancing in our formation.

But the point is that when we are in-formed, we discover our pre-formed and then we are invited to take the next step: con-form.

Form: Shaping Spirituality - In-form

Spiritual formation is something that seems to be something that comes up in conversation in popular Christianity each lent. For the next several posts, I wanted to share a study that I am doing here at the church called "Form: Shaping Spirituality". 


Each week the discussion takes on a different incarnation of the word "form". Since there are five weeks in the study, there are five "form" words - In-form, Pre-form, Con-form, Re-form, and Trans-form.


These are not random words but rather a set of words that describe a way of understanding spiritual formation that I have been pondering for a bit of time. 


Just like when we are born, when we start spiritual formation, we seek out a lot of information. This is a great thing as this is how we learn and build a understanding. The problem is that for many of us, this stage is seen not as the starting point but as the point of spiritual formation. It is as though we think spiritual formation is just a matter of gathering enough (or the right) information. And when we get enough information, then we are spiritual formed. 


This is almost like thinking that memorizing the instruction manual to the stove will make you a chef. Yes, we need to know how to use a stove to cook, but that is just the start. 

Clay Johnson’s book (which I am currently reading) is called the Information Diet (a promo video is here). The parallel he makes is that just as we have made food into something that is cheap and easy to consume, so too have we made information cheap and easy to consume. So when we eat junk food, we feel like we have eaten but really what we have eaten is not sustainable for the body.

As we unpack this metaphor a bit more, we can consume a lot of information about things spiritual and feel like we are getting deeper in our spirituality. So we engage in Bible studies and take sermon notes and listen to different teachers on all things Christian. We gain a lot of information but not all this information is sustainable to spiritual formation. 

Once we begin to identify and discover that information collection is only a starting point in spiritual formation, then we begin to move into "pre-form".