As I have read and reflected over the past 7 months on my
sabbatical journey, the spiritual disciplines keep coming up, something God is
calling me back to, or in some cases, to do for the first time. As I read more
about various ones, I find that they almost always seem to be a counterbalance
against some aspect of our nature, which when left to itself leads us far away
from God. The disciplines are like course corrections, guiding us back to
center.
It might seem that without these, you will keep going
straight, but our sinful natures pull us off to the left, further and further
off course, without us even noticing. These disciplines pull us back to the
right until we are heading straight on course again. Like a rudder they
counteract the winds and currents pulling us off our heading.
In evangelistic Christian circles, we have a tendency to
question certain disciplines as being legalistic and binding. The October
monthly reading in Common Prayer: A liturgy for Ordinal Radicals ( p. 462) speaks to this:
“Growing up in a legalistic Christianity” many of us have developed a suspicion a discipline and order that can lead to a pretty sloppy spirituality. Reacting against the institution’s sickness, we easily find ourselves with little to help us heal from our own wounds, create new disciplines and carve out a space where goodness triumphs. People who are afraid of spiritual discipline will not produce very good disciples.”
So here are some of
the disciplines I have run across. Not an exhaustive list, and perhaps
better called Practices.
[1-4 are time oriented, operating on daily, weekly, annual
or even longer cycles. The other ones are not really tied to cycles in the same
way]
1. Daily prayer at set times in the day -
“the office” as practiced particularly in monastic communities. As protestants,
we resist scheduling times to pray, but if we don’t, we often forget. Oddly
enough, we don’t have to schedule daily meal times. We just stop and eat as a
matter of course. Stopping to pray at set times regardless of what else is happening reminds me that the work I’m doing in the kingdom is
not paramount. I bend the knee to something that takes priority over what
contribution I happen to be making at that moment. Prayer reminds us of our dependence on
God and that the real fruit comes from him, not our efforts. It’s a way that
God chooses to involve us in the outcomes, even though He is sovereign. St.
Igantius says, “Work as if everything depends on God and pray as if everything
depended on you.”
2. Weekly
Sabbath
keeping is a counterbalance to the
idolatry of control through work and technology and the
quick pace they bring. Sabbath keeping – it provides
a detachment from the workplace, from the world’s way of doing things, from our
compulsion to take things into our own hands. Or as Eugene Petersen puts it ‘a
weekly housecleaning’ that allows us to enter the week “uncluttered with
idols”. It “erects a weekly bastion against the commodification of time,
against reducing time to money, reducing time to what we can get out of it,
against leaving no time for God or beauty or anything that cannot be used or
purchased. It is a defense against the hurry that desecrates time.” (Christ
plays in 10,000 places, p. 111)
3. Lent is an annual time to look at our
habits and weaknesses. We examine our habits and lifestyle for areas that may
seem harmless but may not be and abstain from them. It is also a time to
remember Christ’s suffering in the month leading up to Easter.
4. Pilgrimage – As mentioned, the first
four disciplines take their place in daily, weekly, annual and higher cycles. Pilgrimage
is on a very slow cycle, perhaps something you do only a few times in your
life. It is also one that few people actually do. The book, Sacred Journey
posits that pilgrimage is a counterbalance to Gnosticism, a heresy that says
that the spiritual is “good” and the body and all things physical are
“bad”. Going on pilgrimage calls us away
from the many aspects of our lives that we control (lodging, meals, who we
interact with), to follow God where he leads us, out onto the periphery of
society, rubbing shoulders with whomever, depending on the kindness of
strangers, etc. (See Journey's
End, Wielding the sword for more from this book).
5. Fasting is a way to take the focus off of things that distracts
us from Jesus. In A
man’s guide to the spiritual Disciplines, Partick Morley says “Fasting releases the participant from the confusion of
competing voices. Your personality and temperament will affect the kinds of
things that distract from your relationship with God. For me, it’s work. I’ve
discovered fasting as a way to slow down my RPM’s protecting my focus on Jesus
Christ.“ p. 121.
6.
Living in
Community is a balance to living centered on self. The Benedictine monks
placed a high-value on “Stability”: staying put to get somewhere. That
is staying with the community of people God has called you to, rather than flitting
from church to church and job to job when we come across someone or something
we don’t like. If we wander from place to place, we become slaves to our wills
and appetites. God has placed us in
communities and has called together “this particular constellation of people to
speak and hear from each other what is needed for their mutual growth in
Christlikeness.” (Monk Habits for
Everyday People, Dennis Okholm, p 91)
Community forces us to practice our gifts, and roots out our
selfishness, and develops character in us as we learn to love others, even the
difficult ones.
7. Lifestyle of Poverty – Intentionally
living with less, sharing or having things in common. This can be a balance to our
protestant work ethic and the materialism around is in the wider culture.
8. Eucharist – The Lord’s Supper – communion.
I keep bumping up against the mystery of the Eucharist, realizing its
importance and reality on a level higher than just as a symbol. As someone who
grew up Baptist, this is one of the disciplines we regularly do –not often
enough, perhaps, but we do hold to it as a practice (ordinance) to be done as a
church body.
Communion, as the name implies, is
always taken in community, and thus
is a counterbalance to our desire for
independence, to experience God on our own terms – “just me and
Jesus”. You can’t to communion by
yourself. You HAVE to have a group, and it is not even a select group of just
folks you like. Everyone gets to come to the table, rich or poor. Rob Bell calls it a “public display of
solidarity wherein we come together and carry each other burdens, elbow to
elbow.”
Thomas Merton talks of being “nourished
by the sacraments”. What does this mean? The Eucharist seems to have a deep
mystical meaning to so many, a mystical meal that nourishes us spiritually, but
how? Rob Bell says it is a “time of centering ourselves on where our real
strength lies. It is the center of the Christian experience, trust in Jesus
crucified.”
It reminds us of Christ’s
sufferings, God’s solution to our sin problem: “the fellowship of sharing in
your sufferings and so somehow to attain to the resurrection from the dead”.
At one level, the Eucharist very
obviously replaces the Passover meal,
which was tied to the first covenant. Jesus established the Lord’s Supper as he
ushered in the new covenant, sealed with his own sacrifice. The first meal was
to be “a memorial day, keep it as a feast to the Lord, an ordinance
forever”. Exodus 12:14. If Passover is no longer to be observed
forever, then it must be only because it is superseded by this new meal. And so we do what believers have done since
that first Lord’s supper: Eat the bread,
drink the cup. Receive Christ crucified.
Petersen says participating in the
Eucharist “keeps our participation in salvation healthy and not just ‘our
thing. It prevents salvation from “being dominated by our feeling and our
projects”. (Christ plays in 10,000 places, p. 170, 202). We are tempted to make
salvation about what we do, but communion is not about what we do, it is just about reenacting in
the meal a picture of what Christ did
for us. We proclaim the Lord’s death and receive over and over again what we
cannot take or perform as our own.
Finally, the Eucharist keeps Christ before us as central to
salvation. Otherwise we might think of Jesus only as our Great Example,
Great Teacher, or Great Hero. When we take communion, we are not receiving just
ideas ABOUT Jesus, but rather receiving life from Jesus. (Peterson, p 202).
Okay, there they are - 8 practices or disciplines, among others.
Lord, grant me the grace to practice these and stay on course to destination’s
end.
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