Tension

Tension. Tension is something that most, if not all, of us don’t really care to live in and yet it’s something that brings balance and is a great teacher.

We all need to walk the path of spiritual formation--daily reading of the Word, entering into daily prayer and reflection upon the days happenings. I see this approach more habitual; routine; automatic: the practice of steps until it becomes mechanical—part of who you are. Yes, there is the danger of our spirituality becoming a process souly done on our effort. But, there in lies the same danger of our spirituality becoming “willy nilly” and sort of “pie in sky” in that we are unwilling to engage in the process and think God will take care of it in his time.

For me spiritual formation has been an interesting process and one not without tension. It has been hard to peer deep within the core of who I am to see something I don’t like—a sinful person. It’s kind of like those instances when you’re around someone doing a task and something just slips out—a word or a comment. And, it’s like, Where did that come from? Or, That’s totally not me! Well, we just got a glimpse of the person deep within the core of who we really are.

This is why I would advocate a very deliberate and intentional, mechanical if you will, approach to spiritual formation. There are just a lot things we know about ourselves and I think we would agree, as followers of Christ, that sinful nature is one of them. How do we overcome that part of who we are unless we embark upon an intentional journey to engage this core issue of the heart. This is not something that one prayer or one study Bible can get rid of. We are talking about something that cannot be fully overcome until Christ’s return.

Having said that, we can and need to be about taking a proactive approach to our spirituality. Just like in the book of Genesis, we are part of the restoration process and spiritual formation is part of that restoration we are engage in. It is an inward outward focus. Margaret Silf says it so well when she says, “When I move inward toward the center of myself, I move closer to the person I most truly am before God. This is dangerous ground. As I begin to see who I am—truly and without protective masks—I may find serious discrepancies between the person who lives in the Where and person God created me to be, in my deepest self. I will find shame, but I will find glory. I will move closer to the God who dwells in my heart, and the encounter will challenge me in ways I cannot predict. This is the power of prayer. It is the risk of the inner journey” (Silf, 1999; 22).

It is a process that is filled with tension and fear, but out of this comes true transformation through God’s grace.

Power in weakness

The heart of anti-imperial theory is that liberation comes from the victims of the empire. To undermine and eradicate the empire of course requires the appropriate use of power, but in the long run, power in itself is not enough to bring about a humane and humanizing liberation. For this reason, in the Christian biblical tradition, salvation arises from the weak and the small, from the powerless: a barren old woman, a small people, a marginal Jew; even more a suffering servant, chosen by God to bring salvation.... When we think of liberation from the empire today, we have to draw on this same powerful logic of the powerless--Jon Sobrino. We see that the apostle Paul's power is brought to an end in his weakness. He embraces this weakness all the more because that's where Christ's presence is revealed in him in a very real way.

Finding Value

I ran across this quote upon returning from the Dominican Republic and was struck by the fact that I still have to fight against this tendency. "We human beings have a great facility for living illusions, for protecting our self-image with power, for justifying it all by thinking we are the favored ones of God.... How difficult it is for human beings to move from the recognition of the ultimate value of their own particular culture and way of life to the acceptance of the value of other cultures and ways of living" –Jean Vanier. I think this quote speaks to many issues we deal with in our everyday life--politics, social status, and how we view our Christianity.