Spiritual Enlightenment, part 4

The Willingness to Engage in Spiritual Exercises Without Knowing How They Will Work or Even What It Would Mean For Them to Work

I am not a patient man. Seriously, if there was a way for me to finish this post faster I would take it. I want to be done with today’s projects yesterday. Ask my wife, my co-workers, my son (though he wouldn’t understand what you were saying) and they’ll all confirm my lack of patience in most things. Now, given, I’ve become more patient as I’ve gracefully and muscularly aged (those push-ups are actually working; my stomach’s a little doughy, but, hey, you can’t win’em all). I think we want things to slow down as we get older. We spend most of our toddler years in a mad dash to the independence of elementary school; we spend those years in hot pursuit of the magical land of Oz that is our teen years; we spend our teen years in a battle to become adults before we are ready to handle all that comes with that territory. By the time we reach adulthood and push into our “mid-life” we are realizing that one-third of our life is gone and we aren’t sure where it went, but we know that now we have grey hair in our beards, a patch of it on our head, and our belly is starting to bulge a bit more than it used to when we look in the mirror. We live in a hurry and it’s killing us. I am a product of a fast food, one-hour photo, get-it-while-it’s-hot-even-though-it’ll-be-obsolete-as-soon-as-you-buy-it culture that demands speed and baptizes it as a virtue of humanity.

Spiritual exercises, or disciplines, stand over and against this cultural attitude of speed and impatience. Spiritual exercises require discipline (hence the clever moniker “disciplines”) and we have an ingrained aversion to anything that takes discipline. Spiritual growth is like marinating steak. Time is essential to a well-marinated steak. You can’t slap the steak into the marinade, pull it right out and expect it to make any difference in the taste of the steak. You have to let it soak into the meat, the longer the better, usually overnight will suffice. And when it comes time to cook the steak, you can’t turn the grill on high and burn the crap out of the steak. You have to slow cook that baby and let the juices seal themselves in properly (I think I just salivated on my computer). Spiritual exercises are like that. You have to take your time with them. You can’t expect immediate “results.” And, a vast majority of the time you can expect no “results.” The point of the disciplines is not to produce an immediate “result.” Why? Because discipleship, spiritual growth, takes time, perseverance and dedication to becoming like the one the disciplines point you towards and help you become. They cannot become an end in and of themselves. They are simply the means by which we make ourselves available to God in Christ to do with what he will.

At times the disciplines feel like a waste of time. This isn’t a bad thing. The saints of old used to talk about a “holy leisure,” literally, wasting time with God. Sometimes, an Christian history confirms this, the times of exercise that seem the least fruitful are the ones that God has used the most, where our growth reaches a new level of understanding, where we perhaps move beyond trying to feel God, trying to succeed in our spiritual life, and simply rest contented in the knowledge that God is moving us to exactly where he wants us.

Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk and prolific writer on contemplation, prayer, and the like, said that we need not worry when we are beginners in prayer, because we will never be anything but beginners for the entirety of our lives. Our willingness to engage in these exercises without understanding how they “work” or even what they might help accomplish in us, shows that we have grown in our understanding and faith in God as the Perfector of our faith.

shalom, matt