Be the change by Jason Valendy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.