Currently reading: Beyond Welcome: Centering Immigrants in Our Christian Response to Immigration by Karen González 📚
James Wood provides a helpful intervention into the “spiritual formation” conversation by utilizing Aristotle’s Four Causes. (He seems to have done this independently of Luke Stamps, though happily their treatments do not contradict.) I imagine this article will complement Mere Fidelity’s recent conversation around spiritual formation.
Prayer is not a patient wait for the rule [of God] to come into effect at the end of history, it is a patient participation in present rule. God’s rule is not being held in reserve to be inaugurated at some future date, after centuries of human rulers have done their best (or worst). It is in operation now. It does not depend on public acknowledgement.
Whether men and women know it or not, they are now living under God’s rule. Some live in rebellion that can be either defiant or ignorant. Some live in an obedience that can be either reluctant or devout. But no one lives apart from it. It is the premise of our existence. There are no days when the rule is not in operation. The week is not divided into one Lord’s day when the rule of God is acknowledged and six human days in which factories, stock exchange, legislatures, media personalities, and military juntas take charge and rule with their lies and guns and money. Nor is the rule restricted to occasional interventions that are later remembered as great historical events—exodus and exile, Christmas and Easter.
It is, of course, not obvious. The decrees of the rule are not audible to unbelieving ears, the beauty of the rule is not visible to unbelieving eyes, the presentness of the rule is not apparent to anxious minds and hurting bodies. But many great and important realities are not obvious: the atomic structure of matter, for instance, or the properties of light, or the complexities of language. All the same, even when we misunderstand or do not understand we continue to pick up objects, see forms, and speak words. Likewise, neither ignorance nor indifference diminishes God’s rule. Day after day “the Lord reigns.” Taking into account the rebellious passions, malicious temperaments, and slothful wills of millions of people, along with the good intentions, misguided helpfulness, and ill-timed ventures of other millions—not to speak of the disciplined love, purged obedience, and sacrificial service of still other millions—our Sovereign presides over and works with all of this material, personal and political. With it and out of it he shapes existence. He seems to be in no hurry. But prayer discerns that leisure is not indolence. Slowness is not slackness. In the end the sovereign will is done.
In commenting on Psalm 93, Eugene Peterson offers these words deserving of our most serious reflection:
God, it seems, does not abandon his essential character when he rules. A God of steadfast love and deep holiness, he is more himself than ever in his rule. He does not set aside the robes of holy love when when he exercises his rule in the mud of human history. The means of God’s rule are consistent with the ends of that rule: holiness, the gradual, patient, penetrating beauty of God’s rule in our desecrated, violated, profaned world.
The blessed assurance of grace announces that the high-wire game of proving ourselves is finished. By grace, the lingering threat of judgment has been removed. […]
[T]he key question of the Christian life becomes one of freedom: What would you do, what risk would you take, what would you say if you weren’t afraid? What would you do if you truly believed your standing with God was secure, the ultimate threat of judgment was removed, and you didn’t have to do anything? How would you spend your time and energy if you could undertake something for the sheer joy of doing it rather than any outcome it might produce?
These are scary questions, but I suspect their answers have something to do with exercising the unique gifts God has given each of us. We may even find ourselves free to think of others and their well-being rather than anxiously safeguarding our own.
The single most widespread American misunderstanding of prayer is that it is private. Strictly and biblically speaking, there is no private prayer. Private in its root meaning refers to theft. It is stealing. When we privatize prayer we embezzle the common currency that belongs to all. When we engage in prayer without any desire for or awareness of the comprehensive, inclusive life of the kingdom that is “at hand” in both space and time, we impoverish the social reality that God is bringing to completion.
Solitude in prayer is not privacy. The differences between privacy and solitude are profound. Privacy is our attempt to insulate the self from interference; solitude leaves the company of others for a time in order to listen to them more deeply, be aware of them, serve them. Privacy is getting away from others so that I don’t have to be bothered with them; solitude is getting away from the crowd so that I can be instructed by the still, small voice of God, who is enthroned on the praises of the multitudes. Private prayers are selfish and thin; prayer in solitude enrolls in a multivoiced, century-layered community: with angels and archangels in all the company of heaven we sing, “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God Almighty.”
We can no more have a private prayer than we can have a private language. A private language is impossible. Every word spoken carries with it a long history of development in complex communities of experience. All speech is relational, making a community of speakers and listeners. So too is prayer. Prayer is language used in the vast contextual awareness that God speaks and listens. We are involved, whether we will it or not, in a community of the Word — spoken and read, understood and obeyed (or misunderstood and disobeyed). We can do this in solitude, but we cannot do it in private. It involves an Other and others.
Currently reading: Where Your Treasure Is: Psalms that Summon You from Self to Community by Eugene H. Peterson đź“š
Moral transformation isn’t something we do; it is something that happens to us, often in unexpected and painful ways. With few exceptions, the pattern is fairly uniform: life must break us in order for God to break in. Grace initiates, enables, empowers, sustains, and completes the whole process.
Currently reading: The Age of Choice by Sophia Rosenfeld đź“š