I am reminded…

I am more convinced than ever that the deepest changes in how Christianity does it’s work will center around a new type of spirituality.  We haven’t done a good job at helping people see how change and formation happen.  And my personal hunch is we have defined the problem wrong.  We seem to be sin-centric instead of imago dei-centric.  Problem solving and holiness fixing, rather than freedom granting and life giving. 

I spoke at a spirituality congress in South Africa where quite honestly I was a spiritual peon amongst giants.  Willem Nichol, Trevor Hudson, Johan Geyser, Gys Du Plessis and Stephan Joubert all my elders and all more deeply experienced, were the docket of speakers at this conversation on the what and how of spirituality.

More than ever I am convinced apophatic spirituality, Cloud of Unknowing type of stuff is part of the missing pattern in our formation.  We are clueless how to do Psalm 46.10 spirituality and instead of learning to be still (an interior condition) I think we have confused it with sitting still (an exterior posture). 

The most dramatic thing I am reminded of on a nearly daily basis is just how modern, textual and  information our spirituality is.  Interestingly this is not where Bonaventure sat (think Soul’s Journey to God), or St Teresa of Avila (Interior Castle) or San Juan de La Cruz (St. John of the Cross)  or earlier still John Cassian’s Conferences.  I was reminded by these great mentors I shared the platform with just how rare the work is on interior silence is where we can watch the constructed egoic self in action.  Where we take insight from what arises in our awareness and how to move toward the letting go of a centering practice (the main point of my talk Silence is the First Language of God {a quote from St John of the Cross})

We must must must move beyond the textual addiction of modernity and move toward the place of quiet. Only there can we see the judger gene, the real issue raised in the Genesis 1-3 narrative, and learn the letting go work that needs to be done for us to be deeply formed.