Jr. Invitation to a Journey

1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8308-9373-7
Verlag: InterVarsity Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 224 Seiten

Reihe: Transforming Resources

Embark on a Journey of Becoming More Like Christ M. Robert Mulholland Jr. defines spiritual formation as 'the process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.' Compact and solid, this definition encompasses the dynamics of a vital Christian life and counters our culture's tendency to make spirituality a trivial matter or reduce it to a private affair between 'me and Jesus.' In Invitation to a Journey, Mulholland offers valuable insights for Christians both new and old, emphasizing that becoming like Christ is a gradual process, not an instant transformation. Recognizing that not all personalities thrive with traditional practices like early morning quiet times, he encourages you to express your devotion to God in ways that work for you. Mulholland thoughtfully explores the classical spiritual disciplines, demonstrating the importance of undertaking your spiritual journey with (and for the sake of) others. In this revised and expanded edition, you'll find: - Additions, revisions, and new foreword by Ruth Haley Barton, - Spiritual practices for individual and group application, and - A study guide to provide spiritual direction for groups seeking spiritual companionship for one another on the journey of transformation. Invitation to a Journey is a call to dig deeper, to slow down, and to experience the profound transformation that comes with intentional spiritual practices. Whether you're seeking renewal, guidance, or simply a richer relationship with God and others, this book will be a trusted companion for your journey.

M. Robert Mulholland Jr. (1936-2015) was emeritus professor of New Testament at Asbury Theological Seminary in Wilmore, Kentucky. He was the author of several books, including Shaped by the Word and the landmark spiritual formation book Invitation to a Journey.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Jr., M. Robert Mulholland

Leseproben

- one -

THE PROCESS

Gracious and loving God, you know the deep inner patterns of my life that keep me from being totally yours. You know the misformed structures of my being that hold me in bondage to something less than your high purpose for my life. You also know my reluctance to let you have your way with me in these areas. Hear the deeper cry of my heart for wholeness and by your grace enable me to be open to your transforming presence in this reading. Lord, have mercy.

When we say that the Christian journey is a process, we express a truth that is both well-known and well-nigh unknown at the same time. If you ask most Christians about their spiritual pilgrimage, they will say that it is a day-by-day experience with its ups and downs, its victories and defeats, its successes and failures. In brief, it is a process. But if you were to ask them how God works transformation in their lives, many would indicate that God zaps them at some point and instantly changes them. How often Christians struggle to create the setting in which God can zap them out of their brokenness and into wholeness!

We live in an instant-gratification culture. Just sit near a vending machine and watch what happens when people do not get the product they have paid for. They will begin to complain to anyone handy or even begin to abuse the machine. This silly example illustrates a deeper dimension of our culture. We have generally come to expect immediate returns on our investments of time and resources. If we have a need, we have only to find the right place, product or procedure and invest the right amount of time, energy and resources, and our need will be met. It is not surprising that we, as members of an instant gratification culture, tend to become impatient with any process of development that requires of us more than a limited involvement of our time and energies. If we do not receive the desired results almost instantly, we become impatient and frustrated.

Often our spiritual quest becomes a search for the right technique, the proper method, the perfect program that can immediately deliver the desired results of spiritual maturity and wholeness. Or we try to create the atmosphere for the “right” spiritual moment, that “perfect” setting in which God can touch us into instantaneous wholeness. If only we can find the right trick, the right book or the right guru, go to the right retreat, hear the right sermon, instantly we will be transformed into a new person at a new level of spirituality and wholeness. Kenneth Leech, a leading Anglican writer in spirituality, sums up the situation well:

In the years since the 1960’s we have seen “the popular unfolding of an authentically spiritual quest. . . . ” Yet linked with this search for authentic experiential knowledge of God and of “inner space” there has been a narrowing of vision, a desire for instant ecstasy, instant salvation. . . . It is the quest for the correct method, the right mantra, the short cut which brings insight, which has marked so much of the recent spiritual undergrowth.1

It is not that right techniques, right methods and right programs are not beneficial. Nor should we minimize the importance of transforming spiritual moments on our pilgrimage. All these are important. But there is something about the nature of spiritual wholeness and the growth toward that wholeness that is very much a process.

THE REALITY OF PROCESS

Spiritual growth is, in large measure, patterned on the nature of physical growth. We do not expect to put an infant into its crib at night and in the morning find a child, an adolescent or yet an adult. We expect that infant to grow into maturity according to the processes that God has ordained for physical growth to wholeness. The same thing is true of our spiritual life.

Yes, there are spurts of growth in our spiritual development. A few years ago I had a little boy. Then, within a year, he became a man. He went through one of those adolescent growth spurts. He grew almost a foot in height, his voice dropped into a deep bass, he began to shave, his body filled out—he was a different person. The same thing happens in our spiritual life. For a while we may live on a plateau of life and relationship with God. Then one of those moments comes in which we experience a growth spurt and find ourselves on a new level of life and relationship with God. We experience God in a new and different way. We see ourselves and life in a new perspective. Old things pass away, and new things take their place. But if we mistake such a growth spurt for all there is in spirituality, then we are not prepared for the long haul toward spiritual wholeness. We will tend to languish as we wait for another spurt to come along. Or we will try to reproduce the setting in which the previous spurt took place, hoping to create another such experience.

What we don’t realize is that often a period of apparent spiritual stagnation, a time in which we don’t feel as if we are going anywhere, a phase of life in which our relationship with God seems weak or nonexistent, the time of dryness, of darkness—what the mothers and fathers of the church speak of as the desert experience—is filled with nurturing down below the surface that we never see. The great Scottish Christian novelist George MacDonald puts it this way:

To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much work that we can be aware of only in the results. . . . In the gulf of our unknown being God works behind our consciousness. With His holy influence, with His own presence. . . . He may be approaching our consciousness from behind, coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light, long before we begin to be aware that He is answering our request—has answered it, and is visiting His child.2

Or, as the seventeenth-century French spiritual writer François Fénelon says, “God hides his work, in the spiritual order as in the natural order under an unnoticeable sequence of events.”3

This hidden work of God is a nurturing that prepares us for what appears to be a quantum leap forward. What we see as the quantum leap may actually be only the smallest part of what has been going on in a long, steady process of grace, working far beyond our knowing and understanding, to bring us to that point where we are ready for God to move us into a new level of spiritual awareness and a new depth of wholeness in relationship with God in Christ. There simply is no instantaneous event of putting your quarter in the slot and seeing spiritual formation drop down where you can reach it, whole and complete.

Our culture, however, tends to train us in this manner. You do the right thing, put the money in the proper slot, push the right button and get the product you want at the bottom. Remember the vending machine where people do not get the product instantly? They start kicking and pounding on the machine. We have a tendency to do the same thing with God. We adopt some new spiritual technique. We find a new coin and a new slot to put it in. We put it in and push a new button, but nothing seems to happen. What do we do? We start kicking and beating on God: “Why don’t you do something?” Or we discard that technique and go to find another coin and another machine.

The idea of spiritual growth as a continuous process rubs harshly against the deeply ingrained instant gratification mode of our culture. Perhaps one of our first spiritual struggles for genuine growth toward wholeness will be against this strongly entrenched approach to life. There is much in our culture that infiltrates our attitudes unconsciously and makes us expect spiritual formation to happen instantaneously rather than through the steady progress of a process.

OPTION OR NECESSITY?

Once we begin to realize that genuine spiritual growth is a continuous and sometimes difficult process, we may be tempted to think that it is an option we can take or leave. For many Christians, the quest for the deeper life in Christ is viewed as a discipline for the dedicated disciple, a pursuit for the particularly pious, a spiritual frill for those who have the time or inclination, a spiritual fad for trendy Christians.

We fail to realize that the process of spiritual shaping is a primal reality of human existence. Everyone is in a process of spiritual formation! Every thought we hold, every decision we make, every action we take, every emotion we allow to shape our behavior, every response we make to the world around us, every relationship we enter into, every reaction we have toward the things that surround us and impinge upon our lives—all of these things, little by little, are shaping us into some kind of being. We are being shaped into either the wholeness of the image of Christ or a horribly destructive caricature of that image, destructive not only to ourselves but also to others, for we inflict our brokenness upon them. This wholeness or destructiveness radically conditions our relationship with God, ourselves and others, as well as our involvement in the dehumanizing structures and dynamics of the broken world around us. We become either agents of God’s healing and liberating grace, or carriers of the sickness of the world. The direction of our spiritual growth infuses all we do with intimations of either life or death.

C. S. Lewis states it in his inimitable way:

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was...