Ordinary Spirituality
Written by admin June 28th, 2008 in SaturdaysLast week Kayla was at a writing workshop in Minnesota facilitated by Eugene Peterson, so we decided to offer an excerpt of an interview with Peterson by Christianity Today managing editor Mark Galli, published in March 2005:
Many people assume that spirituality is about becoming emotionally intimate with God.
That’s a naive view of spirituality. What we’re talking about is the Christian life. It’s following Jesus. Spirituality is no different from what we’ve been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It’s just ordinary stuff.
This promise of intimacy is both right and wrong. There is an intimacy with God, but it’s like any other intimacy; it’s part of the fabric of your life. In marriage you don’t feel intimate most of the time. Nor with a friend. Intimacy isn’t primarily a mystical emotion. It’s a way of life, a life of openness, honesty, a certain transparency.
Doesn’t the mystical tradition suggest otherwise?
One of my favorite stories is of Teresa of Avila. She’s sitting in the kitchen with a roasted chicken. And she’s got it with both hands, and she’s gnawing on it, just devouring this chicken. One of the nuns comes in shocked that she’s doing this, behaving this way. She said, “When I eat chicken, I eat chicken; when I pray, I pray.”
If you read the saints, they’re pretty ordinary people. There are moments of rapture and ecstasy, but once every 10 years. And even then it’s a surprise to them. They didn’t do anything. We’ve got to disabuse people of these illusions of what the Christian life is. It’s a wonderful life, but it’s not wonderful in the way a lot of people want it to be.
Yet evangelicals rightly tell people they can have a “personal relationship with God.” That suggests a certain type of spiritual intimacy.
All these words get so screwed up in our society. If intimacy means being open and honest and authentic, so I don’t have veils, or I don’t have to be defensive or in denial of who I am, that’s wonderful. But in our culture, intimacy usually has sexual connotations, with some kind of completion. So I want intimacy because I want more out of life. Very seldom does it have the sense of sacrifice or giving or being vulnerable. Those are two different ways of being intimate. And in our American vocabulary intimacy usually has to do with getting something from the other. That just screws the whole thing up.
It’s very dangerous to use the language of the culture to interpret the gospel. Our vocabulary has to be chastened and tested by revelation, by the Scriptures. We’ve got a pretty good vocabulary and syntax, and we’d better start paying attention to it because the way we grab words here and there to appeal to unbelievers is not very good.
This corruption of the word spirituality even in Christian circles—does it have something to do with the New Age movement?
The New Age stuff is old age. It’s been around for a long time. It’s a cheap shortcut to—I guess we have to use the word—spirituality. It avoids the ordinary, the everyday, the physical, the material. It’s a form of Gnosticism, and it has a terrific appeal because it’s a spirituality that doesn’t have anything to do with doing the dishes or changing diapers or going to work. There’s not much integration with work, people, sin, trouble, inconvenience.
I’ve been a pastor most of my life, for some 45 years. I love doing this. But to tell you the truth, the people who give me the most distress are those who come asking, “Pastor, how can I be spiritual?” Forget about being spiritual. How about loving your husband? Now that’s a good place to start. But that’s not what they’re interested in. How about learning to love your kids, accept them the way they are?
You make spirituality sound so mundane.
I don’t want to suggest that those of us who are following Jesus don’t have any fun, that there’s no joy, no exuberance, no ecstasy. They’re just not what the consumer thinks they are. When we advertise the gospel in terms of the world’s values, we lie to people. We lie to them, because this is a new life. It involves following Jesus. It involves the Cross. It involves death, an acceptable sacrifice. We give up our lives.
It involves a kind of learned passivity, so that our primary mode of relationship is receiving, submitting, instead of giving and getting and doing. We don’t do that very well. We’re trained to be assertive, to get, to apply, or to consume and to perform.
This impatience to leave the methods of Jesus in order to get the work of Jesus done is what destroys spirituality, because we’re using a non-biblical, non-Jesus way to do what Jesus did. That’s why spirituality is in such a mess as it is today.
One test I think is this: Am I working out of the Jesus story, the Jesus methods, the Jesus way? Am I sacrificing relationship, personal attention, personal relationship for a shortcut, a program so I can get stuff done? You can’t do Jesus’ work in a non-Jesus way and get by with it—although you can be very “successful.”
One thing that I think is characteristic of me is I stay local. I’m rooted in a pastoral life, which is an ordinary life. So while all this glitter and image of spirituality is going around, I feel quite indifferent to it, to tell you the truth. And I’m somewhat suspicious of it because it seems to be uprooted, not grounded in local conditions, which are the only conditions in which you can live a Christian life.
The author of over 30 books, including the contemporary translation of the Bible called The Message, Eugene Peterson was the pastor of Christ our King Church in Bel Air, Maryland, for 35 years.
Great passage for today.
I think Peterson hits the nail on the head.
Those opportunities to take the short cuts are very seductive. But, the joy comes through obedience and submission.
This last week I attended a training where the speaker talked about humility. He said it is not the opposite of pride, but more a grounded look at the ways things really are. I am not God, nor am I perfect, nor am I valueless.
Greetings I/O! Thanks for picking up this bit on Peterson. I should know him better. His paraphrase “The Message” is enlightening for our English (at least American) language! This selection helps confirm his wisdom about the Christian Way, the daily Christian walk, and spirituality. On the latter, his is keen insight and definition. Evidently he has been on the way to sainthood for a long time (he well quotes a saint), and he has my vote! Above all he has been and is a fine witness for Jesus, proper understanding of the Bible, and daily life. I/O commends itself for choosing wonderful inspirations for each day!
What a great passage. Thank you for that. I have noticed as well that many people seem to have an expectation that a relationship with God implies intense experiences, euphoria, ecstasy, and they seem to want this to be something that they can turn on or off with a button. i.e., now it is time to be “spiritual and to have an experience”. “We’ll do God now”. Whereas, my experience is that this is something that permeates our entire being or it is not really authentic. I know someone who went for a week retreat at a monastery hoping to have an experience of God which did not come in the way my friend expected and according to my friend, did not come at all. But I think many of us have become blinded to the presence of God who often comes in the mundane, the dirty dishes, the relationship with spouse and whatever the difficulties and small successes of our live are….the whisper of the breeze. And yes, as Rev. Peterson so eloquently reminds us….it isn’t all consolation and warm fuzzy. We also experience God in the suffering, the routine, the drudgery of our lives. It is difficult to remember and live that. at least for me. Thank you….to all of you…
Interesting. I wonder if at least some church members who agree with Peterson’s downplaying of emotional intimacy with God, and his emphasis on spirituality as “just ordinary stuff … receiving sacraments … being baptized” — I can almost see him adding choir rehearsal and genuflecting—aren’t people who also tend not to have much emotional intimacy with God, or are struggling with having it. Social gospel Christians who get more excited about marching in an anti-war protest than attending a prayer meeting might come to mind.
“In marriage you don’t feel intimate most of the time…. There are moments of rapture and ecstasy, but once every 10 years.” Telling. As Mark Galli says to him: “You make spirituality sound so mundane.”
But Peterson has a point. Those who see spirituality as primarily emotional intimacy with God, rather than seeing emotional intimacy as the central core or foundation of spirituality — there is a difference —sometimes take other aspects of practical Christian life for granted. Some of the time you in fact don’t feel intimate with God, and equating emotional intimacy with God with spirituality makes it more likely that you will get down on yourself or become anxious when you don’t feel that intimacy.
Emotional intimacy with God, as Peterson reminds us, is not the only thing that makes us grow spiritually. But born-again evangelicals have grabbed onto it like the Holy Grail. One sees this in the diet industry all the time. “Carbs!” And so for an entire season, everything in the grocery aisle is labeled “Low Carbs” as if that will get us there. Life is a balance, and we make more progress by moving forward slowly in a balanced way than by seizing on some latest shortcut that promises magical returns.
But that balance includes regular emotional intimacy. Indeed, the enchanted life, to use a Richard Rohr expression — the mountain-top experiences of feeling as if you’re floating in a pristine bubble one-on-one with the Holy Spirit, who is directing you through the day hour by hour — are there for the asking, with a little inward journey work. Many believers live it daily. It’s not a naïve view, as Peterson seems to hint. We only shortchange ourselves if we immerse our minds in a this-worldly theological perspective that robs us of altitude and slowly substitutes a five-sensory, purely rational-bound, horizontally-oriented existence for what Jesus came to give us — and what John the Baptist announced with such great excitement, and Paul preached with almost spastic enthusiasm. “Out of your belly, your innermost being, shall flow rivers of living water.” But that river starts in the innermost being, and there’s no substitute for it.
Initial thoughts:
Receiving/Submitting:
God’s been working a lot with me in this area lately. Showing me that He is in control, that I need to wait upon Him to receive what He has in mind, not to try to conjure up on my own what He has in mind, just to wind up wearing myself out as I “twist in the wind”.
Submitting is tough for me. I am so used to being taken advantage of that I am very suspicious when people ask of me. I need growing discernment in this area.
Intimacy:
I have guests this week from a mission group called Covenant Players. They are stationed all over the world. I’ve had a chance to get acquainted with the one missionary who was stationed with the group in Germany for 30 years. We got into the subject the other evening of the sexual connotations placed upon words, especially of the word intimate. It is very challenging to have relationships with all types of people, male, female, various ethnic backgrounds, etc., without having prejudical and sexual connotational meanings being superimposed upon the relationships by people outside of the relationships.
A lot of people believe the bad press the Christian Church has been given, and are very suspicious and stand with folded arms just waiting for me as well as others, to start “bible thumping” them, etc.
I continue to find it to be very interesting when the occurrences and issues of my everyday life show up in the pieces presented here on Inward/ Outward.
Later,
A sidebar to Deanna - Don’t be surprised about occurrences and issues of your life showing up here or anywhere else, for that matter. Life is about syncronicity. There are no accidents. I suggest you are in tune with your life. We are spoken to in many different ways. Inward/Outward is significant in my life - particularly on Saturday for some reason. Keep loving and living. Life is pretty simple. It is just very difficult to be simple with all the trappings around us.
A Sidebar to Gary -
Thank you for your words. I am in agreement with you.
Deanna
That’s reassuring to me. I sometimes wish I had a closer relationship with God. Rev. Peterson makes me think maybe I’m closer than I think. I tend to look for the “burning bush” or the light shining down on me. I certainly could learn to submit to His will more, though. As I look over my life it didn’t turn out the way I expected when I was growing up.
My struggles with bipolar disorder sent my life in a different direction. It wasn’t until I stopped blaming God for all my troubles and stopped asking “why me?” that I found a way forward. I began asking the right question: “now that I’ve got it, what am I going to do with it?” That acceptance has allowed me to go forward. Not all my problems are solved for me, but I do have a purpose in life. It’s stated in the slogan of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance: “We’ve been there and we can help.”