Spirituality: A Journey, a Practice, or Relationship: Part 1 - the Journey
Welcome to this new devotional series about spirituality. I’m delighted that you are joining me!
As you know from the introduction, I will be sharing wisdom from spiritual literature and reflecting on its application today. This collection of writing can be pretty confusing. Authors mean different things when using terms like meditation, contemplation, spirituality, and growth. They sometimes use terms like purgation, evil, sin, desolation, spiritual sweetness, justification, sanctification, illumination and union as if we all know what they mean. Authors typically speak with authority - as if theirs were the only and obvious perspective. Yet, different authors focus on different aspects of spirituality leaving you to wonder how it all fits together and maybe even whom to trust.
There is an old analogy where the perspectives of various religions are compared with blind people each describing a different part of an elephant by feel. None of them has the whole story. From my experience, spiritual literature is a lot like that.
From my own experience, spiritual literature tends to talk about three big ideas which are intertwined:
the spiritual journey,
spiritual practices (with which we engage along the journey), and
our relationship with God.
Many authors focus on the spiritual journey or path. Teresa of Avila described an interior castle that we explore finding God in the center. St. John of the Cross describes a journey up a mountain. Catherine of Siena described an interactive journey with God’s Spirit where God leaves and returns periodically to draw us forward over a bridge. As we travel, we are aided by various spiritual practices or disciplines, we experience predictable trials and receive periodic spiritual rewards from God to spur us on. Sometimes the journey is described as having different stages or steps with predictable challenges and shifts in understanding. Throughout the journey, we encounter God in different ways, and we find our relationship with God evolving. The process of the journey and the ways in which we encounter God transform us and send us back into the world a new person.
Paul talks about this kind of transformation as the inevitable outcome of a life following Jesus, “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.” (2 Corinthians 5:17)
There is a certain truth to this approach. For me it is analogous to how children learn to walk. They begin by strengthening their heads so they can hold them upright. Eventually they learn to sit up themselves, pull themselves up to their feet, walk while holding on and eventually, stumble forward. While these are the broad steps to walking, they are not the same for every child and not every child goes through them on the same timetable. Yet, every child must spend time working at it and once they learn to walk, they don’t go back to crawling. Their way of engaging the world has been transformed.
Surely one reason a child learns to walk is because they see others walking. Yet, there is probably also something within a child that draws her to her feet and calls her toward an object or person she desires – taking those first faithful steps, falling, and getting up again – over and over.
Ultimately, each of us engages with God differently, developing our own theology (understanding of God) and spirituality (relationship with God). Each of our theologies and spiritualities evolve over time – sometimes in spurts and plateaus and other times as a slow, steady trek. Our evolving understanding of God shifts our way of engaging with God and our shifting relationship with God leads to new understanding.
I’ll be sharing some of my own story of evolving understanding and relationship with God throughout these devotions. My hope is that these devotions encourage you to examine your spiritual journey and discern how God is calling you to be transformed next.
