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The Spiritual Discipline of Learning a Language

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I was driving to Publix Sunday afternoon and on the way there and back I was able to catch a few snippets of Krista Tippett’s interview with Cory Booker, U.S. Senator from New Jersey. Cory was discussing his mornings with Krista, outlining practices that help him stay energized and focused. He had some of the usual practices you might expect – meditation, exercise – but he added another that made me take note. Senator Booker uses 10 minutes of his mornings to study Spanish, and he sees this as a spiritual discipline.

I thought this was an interesting idea, and I wanted to do some thinking about the connections between learning a language and faith formation. So, here are three ways I think learning a language is a spiritual discipline.

  1. For the Sake of Others –  If a major aspect of spiritual formation is learning to think outside of yourself and to think about others, learning a new language gives you the opportunity to open up worlds of customs, language, and culture that would be previously unavailable. Booker latches onto this idea in his interview, connecting his pursuit of Spanish as a way of building relationships with other humans.

    In Invitation to a Journey, Mulholland makes the audacious claim that “If you want a good litmus test of your spiritual growth, simply examine the nature and quality of your relationships with others.” Mulholland goes on to claim that “Our relationships with others are not only the testing grounds of our spiritual life but also the places where our growth towards wholeness in Christ happens.” Growing in relationships and making connections with people different from you fosters spiritual growth. How might learning language help us in this endeavor?

  2. Teaches Process – Nobody learns a world language in a day. It’s a process that can last years and years. I know a missionary who has lived in France for over 40 years and he said it took three years after moving to France to fully comprehend the language. This was after spending considerable time in college studying French. Spiritual growth happens in a similar way.

    Again, Mulholland, but this time on the process of spiritual formation, “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.” The starts and stops of learning a language opens you up to learning the process of going through a process.

  3.  The Ends of the Earth – God’s church is global. It’s not confined to the United States or to Mexico or Kenya. Jesus followers very early on saw God’s spirit working to spread Jesus’ gospel around the world. As Jesus claims in Acts 1:8, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Jesus followers have a global mindset.

    So, of course, learning a world language takes you outside of the parameters of when you were born, your culture, its norms and mores, and very quickly ushers you into another culture where distinct practices give you the opportunity to reflect on your own culture. Philip Jenkins has done considerable work on investigating the global nature of Christianity, especially its rise in the global south. Reflecting on the nature of this worldwide view, Jenkins claims, “Looking at Christianity as a planetary phenomenon, not merely a Western one, makes it impossible to read the New Testament in quite the same way ever again. The Christianity we see through this exercise looks like a very exotic beast indeed, intriguing, exciting, and a little frightening.” What if we showed our students, through the study of language, a faith that extends beyond our preconceived borders?

What if our conscious attending to language development helped to give us a deeper sense of God’s presence and work in our lives? How might it change our courses, and our students, to see their pursuit of language in this way?

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Spiritual Formation and the Real World

Christian discipleship is the process of becoming more human. 

As a person who works at a Christian school, I’m always curious to see just how people will respond when they ask me what I do. Even beyond the elitism, dogmatism and narrow-minded stigma of Christian Education (as if that wasn’t enough) there is my rather unusual title that I always say with a bit of a grimace: Director of Spiritual Formation. It’s gotten to the point that, when asked, I usually begin with a disclaimer about my title before telling people what it is.

I think one of the reasons I’m reluctant to throw that title around is because nobody really knows what it means. What in the world is ‘spiritual formation’ and how in the world can anyone direct that process? I think most people probably have a rather unhealthy idea of what it means to be spiritually formed. It’s about spiritual things, heavenly things, notions and ideas that are outside the confines of this world and its problems. However, Jesus was very much concerned about the pain and problems of this world as well as being very much concerned about how we live in this world.

Jesus is often described as fully human and fully divine, but I also think the gospel writers are also trying to show that Jesus is truly human. What I mean is that Jesus’ life and ministry was not about escaping this world to fly off into the great heavenly beyond to sit on a cloud and sing for eternity, but it was about how to live as the true human God created you to be. This isn’t spiritual in the heavenly-leaving-earth-for-the-great-beyond sense, but rather a spirituality that takes seriously this world and interactions with other humans. It’s a process of becoming more human, and growing closer to God as we think about what it means to love those inside and outside of our communities.

Ultimately, I think spiritual formation is a process of seeing God at work in the reality of this world, and a process of seeing how our actions, and the way we spend our time in this world, form us as human beings.

 

 

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2013 Camp Resources – Missional Living

One of the highlights of my summer is going to camp. I’m lucky to still have time to go to Carolina Bible Camp, where I grew up going as a kid. In college I was a counselor and a teacher and this is my second year to be the Educational Director for the camp.

The week I serve as Educational Director is for teenagers between the ages of 13 and 18. We usually have four classes planned for the week with campers taking one day to do a service project either on or off campus. We also have a morning and evening devotional throughout the week.

The theme for 2013 was Missional Living, and I’m going to provide the resources I created at the end of this post. I used Hirsch and Ford’s Right Here, Right Now as my main resource. If I used another resource I tried to provide a link or a citation.

If you’re looking to create some curriculum for a camp or class, and are thinking about using missional living, my hope is that this will be a good place to start.

2013 Camp Devotionals Missional Living

2013 Camp Classes Missional Living

 

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Prayer of Examen

I’m currently reading a book on Ignatian spirituality written by a Jesuit, Father James Martin. The title is a little embarrassing so I won’t type it out. It’s a good introduction to Jesuit spirituality and the rule of life established by Ignatius.

I’ve learned that Ignatius came to church and faith later in life. At 30 his leg was shattered by a cannonball and he was left left with a rather severe deformity. In order to fit in with current fashions that showed off slender (yet still manly) legs in tights, Ignatius had a painful, cosmetic surgery to remove a bone fragment protruding from his limb. This increased his recovery time, and, looking back on the ordeal, he thought it was a vain decision.

But, it was while recovering from his injury and surgery that Ignatius began to read books on the lives of the saints and the life of Jesus. Before reading these accounts, Ignatius was taken with tales of chivalry and knights coming to the rescue of fair maidens. In the tales of the saints, Ignatius discovered a different kind of honor, one directed towards God. Ignatius went on to establish the Society of Jesus, creating a religious order that refused to withdraw from society but sought a spirituality for the real world of business and school and marriage and life.

At the heart of Ignatian spirituality is the Prayer of Examen. Instead of retreating from this world to the “spiritual” or “ethereal” or “getting lost in prayer,” Ignatius wanted people to think about the ins and outs of their everyday life and look for places where God was working. Here are the five steps to the prayer of Examen:

1. Gratitude: Recall anything from the day for which you are especially grateful, and give thanks.

2. Review: Recall the events of the day, from start to finish, noticing where you felt God’s presence, and where you accepted or turned away from any invitations to grow in love.

3. Sorrow: Recall any actions for which you are sorry.

4. Forgiveness: Ask for God’s forgiveness. Decide whether you want to reconcile with anyone you have hurt.

5. Grace: Ask God for the grace you need for the next day and an ability to see God’s presence more clearly.

Many times I go through life wondering where God is, or if he’s even there. The Prayer of Examen is an opportunity to see God in what’s happened, not what’s happening. Like a ship moving through water and leaving wake, perhaps God’s movement is best found by looking behind, not ahead.

My days are filled with books and classes and people and deadlines, and I don’t want to leave all of that behind when I pray. My fear is that I will go to pray and then return to my classes and family and people and deadlines and leave God behind. The Prayer of Examen helps me to focus on God’s daily provision and gives me hope that those mercies will continue into the next day.

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Leaving Church

I read BBT’s Leaving Church in three nights. Her descriptions of faith and people and the ins and outs of ministry play with your mind and imagination. She has the ability to create a longing for another life as well as help you feel that that the life you have is so grand that it’s more than you could ever have asked for. My copy of the book came from the local public library, and I found myself dog-earring pages of the book, something I refrain from doing to even my own books much less one that belongs to the public. I noticed that previous readers had done the same, and I found myself turning down the corners of pages that had already been folded once before, smoothed back leaving  a faint crease. Soon I began to look for these invisible lines. When I found one, I would search the page trying to discover what caught another’s mind. Here are some of my, and Nashville’s, favorite sections.

When discussing the visibility of being a minister, her husband Ed says,

‘You probably won’t be much worse than other people,’ he said, ‘and you certainly won’t be any better, but you will have to let people look at you. You will have to let them see you as you are.’

BBT gives some quotes by Christian mystics on revering God’s “big book” of creation alongside the “little book” of scripture.

‘I have had no other masters than the beeches and the oaks,’ Bernard wrote in the twelfth century, while Julian (of Norwich) recognized the love of God in a hazel nut in her hand. Hildegard of Bingen coined the word viriditas (“green power”) to describe the divine power of creation, while Francis of Assisi composed love songs to Brother Sun and Sister Moon.

You never enjoy the world aright till the sea itself floweth in your veins, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars; and percieve yourself to be the sole heir of the whole world, and more so, because men are in it who are every one sole heirs as well as you.  – Travis Traherne

On church people fighting over the Bible,

What I noticed at Grace-Calvary is the same thing I notice whenever people aim to solve their conflicts by turning to the Bible: defending the dried ink marks on the page becomes more vital than defending the neighbor. As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.

People of the Book risk putting the book above people.  – Arun Gandhi

On the difference between believing and beholding (‘Behold, I bring you glad tidings of joy…,’ ‘Behold the Lamb of God,’ ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock…’)

I wanted out of the belief business and back into the beholding business. I wanted to recover the kind of faith that has nothing to do with being sure what I believe and everything to do with trusting God to catch me though I am not sure of anything.

On church,

What if people were invited to come and tell what they already know of God instead of to learn what they are supposed to believe? What if they were blessed for what they are doing in the world instead of chastened for not doing more at church? What if church felt more like a way station than a destination? What if the church’s job were to move people out the door instead of trying to keep them in, by convincing them that God needed them more in the world than in the church?

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Like An Unseen Rotting Tree

TreeA couple of weeks ago a storm blew into Nashville. The sky grew dark against the green hills, the winds picked up, the rains came down, all that stuff. It wasn’t long before someone noticed that a rather large section of a tree outside the school had sheared off, tumbling to the ground and making a pretty big mess.

When all of the debris and old limbs were cleared away and ground up into mulch, you could tell that, though the wind and rain might have helped to tear off the section of the tree, there was something else wrong. Inside, the tree was dying. There’s a cavity inside of this tree I could just about climb in. I don’t know what caused this decay, but the wind and rain had exposed the weakness, and the tree will never be the same.

I walk by this tree every now and then and the shame of its rottenness, what it was once able to hide, is now exposed. A couple of weeks ago you would have said that the tree was large and stately and marvelous, now it’s decaying and ugly.

This got me thinking about humans and specifically those young humans who make it into my classroom. Every now and then I’ll hear about something a student is going through at home or in their personal life, and I’ll look at them and wonder if I can tell something is wrong. Usually when I find out there’s a problem, I’m shocked because I couldn’t tell. I wonder what other students are hiding. How many are going through life with everything seemingly together yet dying on the inside?

Many times a beautiful, flowering, fruit-ripe tree is the epitome of spiritual formation. But is the inside as healthy as the outside? Jesus spoke words along these lines to the pharisees and teachers of the law in Matthew 23:

25 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. 26 Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean.

27 “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. 28 In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.

So, I think I must also think about myself when I see this tree. Am I dying on the inside? What captures my imagination? What do I internalize that’s weakening me? Am I like an unseen rotting tree?

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WWTAWWTAG

Reading Rob Bell is like listening to pop music. It’s catchy, fun, and, when you turn it off, you walk around humming it just above a whisper. I’ve read a few of Bell’s books (Velvet Elvis, Sex God, Jesus Wants to Save Christians, Drops Like Stars), and I always get this feeling inside that I have to finish it as quickly as possible. Like it’s a race. I scan from one sentence to the next. You can’t linger over Bell. I don’t really know what this means; it’s just the way I read Bell.

I was surprised to read that Bell’s title was inspired from Haruki Murkami’s memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. I have vivid memories of staying up late at church camp a couple of summers ago and reading that book by the light of my iPhone.

Bell has three talking points when he talks about God. He is With us, For us and Ahead of us.

I don’t really want to lay out those three points. Instead, when I talk about Bell, I want to talk about his use of the “profane”, the cultural vernacular. Bell is pop-theology, and that’s why he can draw such a large audience. He’s relative. He knows culture, high and low, but I’m not sure he distinguishes between the two. I think he sees all of life as this huge playground. He plays, skins his knees, deals with a bully, goes down the slide, climbs across the monkey bars, knowing God is with him, for him and somehow leading him as he plays. If he finds something interesting, he’ll tell you about it, but he doesn’t really care if you find it interesting or if it insults you. He’ll tell you how to define a word in Hebrew and then quote Ricky Bobby. He will make you listen.

I don’t read Bell because he offers great theological insight. I read Bell because Bell reminds me that all this writing and speaking and teaching involves real people in real lives who have other things on their minds and easily get bored and distracted when people talk about God. This isn’t just happening in my head for the sake of me becoming smarter, better, whatever. It’s happening because I want it to get in other people’s heads.

Bell was recently in Nashville speaking at Vanderbilt, and he did a Q&A session at the end of his talk. Someone asked for some advice, and one of the interesting things Bell suggested is that the guy should become a student of culture. I get the sense that this is what’s at the core of Bell’s speaking and writing, culture. I think he does his best to communicate – which, whatever you think about him, he’s pretty darn good at – and then he let’s God take it from there. Really, there’s not much else you can do.

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Four Moves of Transformative Learning

I pulled these four movements in transformative learning from from Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian. As someone who works in a school context, this was a good reminder that teaching is ultimately about action.

Before the four  movements, I should mention two ways we can think about our understanding of a subject: Logical Consciousness and Mythical Consciousness. Logical Consciousness is an attempt to explain the world by how it works. There are theories, laws, concepts at play in our world, and this way of understanding focuses on these ideas. Much of western education is built on this framework. Mythical Consciousness is the unspoken, ‘Why?’ questions that challenge the way the world operates. What are the symbols, the myths, that we hold close and why are they important to us?

Transformative learning attempts to address both aspects of learning. We examine the way the world works and then question why it works that way, refusing to merely accept something because it exists.

Disorienting Dilemma – Transformative learning engages a student with an idea, a thought or position that drastically alters their perception of the world. This is different from creating an experience to elicit an emotion or a conversion. A disorienting dilemma is a paradigm shift, a call to re-examine our current actions and beliefs. Once this shift occurs, it becomes difficult, if not impossible to go back to seeing the world the way it was before the experience. Encountering this kind of information causes us to create new folders in our brains to hold this information.

Critical Self-Reflection – Spiritual Formation and the Ignatian prayer of examen are critical components necessary to understand the movement of self-reflection (Recall, Return, Reveal, Review, React and Respond). I heard this recently from a student who spoke in chapel about her experiences in Honduras and, when asked what she learned, she spoke on how God challenged her sense of entitlement. She was convicted of the fact that she was living her life in such a way that she believed she should automatically receive what she wanted. Seeing people living with great needs caused her to reflect critically on her own life and passover a need for more stuff.

Discourse – As students reflect, it is important to have a community to engage them in what they are thinking. This is why we had a special day in chapel for students to think out loud about their experiences. My hope is that other students would ask them about something that was said and the conversation might continue. This is the shaping and echoing of ideas. It could also be seen as a method of spreading ideas cultivated during a time of self-reflection.

Action – Transformative learning seeks an action. For a student who experiences  as de-centering experience like a mission trip to Honduras and, after reflecting and talking with others she realizes her own sense of entitlement, a logical question should follow, what are you now going to do? Perhaps it’s sign up for the same trip next year, but it might be that she begins to de-clutter. Perhaps someone gives her a book on simplicity and continues to engage her on this path of discovery about letting go of her possessions as Jesus taught his followers.

I’ll let Deans’ own words wrap it up:

Like transformative learning, Christian teaching aims to enlarge consciousness – though the church credits expanded consciousness to the work of the Holy Spirit, not to teaching methodologies…Christian teaching seeks morphosis, an epistemological transformation so profound that it changes not just what the learner knows, it also changes the learner.

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The Professor and the Madman

In 2011 I was able to hear Simon Winchester speak at the Carter Center in Atlanta about his most recent book, The Atlantic. He even signed my copy! I had read the book over the summer while on a trip to France, and was enamored with Winchester’s tales of the open sea and the fact that I could look out of the plane window and see the very waters I was reading about below. I quickly became a fan. Winchester is an excellent mix of the professorial and the accessible, and it’s clear from his writing, and the stories he uncovers, that he is a serious and dedicated researcher who has a knack for uncovering the absurd historical narrative.

The Professor and the Madman is just such a story, and I waded through it in just a few days. Winchester tells the story of a Dr. Murray and a Dr. Morris who come to work together on one of the greatest undertakings in Victorian philology, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Dr. Morris is an American Civil War veteran who, though clinically diagnosed with a mental disorder and convicted of a crime, attributes thousands upon thousands of references to the completion of the first exhaustive English language dictionary. It takes Dr. Murray and his team several years to discover that the man who is mailing thousands of word references a year lives in an asylum for the criminally insane just a few miles away from Oxford.

When I finished The Professor and the Madman, I wondered why this story was so appealing to Winchester, and why I could not put it down. What is it about this story that Winchester would dedicate several months (years?) of his professional career to tracing out the minutia and composing the prose? I expected Winchester to provide an answer to this question once he completed his story, but the most he offers are a few lines about society’s view of mental illness and juxtaposes the lives of Dr. Murray and Dr. Morris as being strangely similar. One labors on the dictionary from a hastily constructed study behind his house and the other from a plush cell in an asylum.

Perhaps Winchester chose this story because it leaves the reader with questions. Was Dr. Morris’ life in the asylum tragic or was it somehow providential? Did his work on the OED offer him a form of redemption in this life? Or was his role as a medical doctor in the Civil War, murder, and work on the dictionary merely coincidental?

History has several functions, but it appears that Winchester has found a way to uncover historical narratives that ask us to probe at classical questions that have stood just out of reach of mankind for millennia. In Victorian England, when so much of the world was thought to be understood, and within a project seeking to define, classify and deconstruct every English word, lies a tale asking us to reconsider questions at the core of humanity.

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Bonhoeffer’s Three Questions of Theology

In a previous post, I briefly described Andrew Root’s Revisiting Relational Youth Ministry and the tagline from the book of taking the relational aspects of youth ministry and turning it into a more robust theology.

Root draws heavily from Bonhoeffer throughout his book, and while the choice of Bonhoeffer may seem strange, Root points out that Bonhoeffer served as the secretary of youth in the ecumenical movement. So, it could, as Root argues, be true that though Bonhoeffer never explicitly wrote about youth ministry, his theology was probably written with teens in mind.

Here are Bonhoeffer’s three questions of theology with commentary and notes by Root.

Where is Jesus Christ? Christ is in the world and in the church. He is present in the relational aspects of this world and stands in between the transcendence of human relationships. As I can never know, completely and fully, my daughter as she grows and matures, we can never fully know each other. Humans are transcendent from one another. With this in mind, Root describes Christ as standing within this otherness, mediating the humanity of one person to another as the true human. With such a serious perspective of relationships, it becomes difficult to use the presence of Christ in such a utilitarian manner. “One does not love God in the neighbor, nor are neighbors loved to make them Christian-neighbors are loved for their own name sake, and in this love of the human companions one serves the will of God.”

What then shall we do?  Root uses ‘place sharing’ as a term to describe the formation of relationships. We “take the self of the other into my own self.” We do not lose ourselves in this process, but we make their suffering our own and as we stand with and for them, we come to know God. And this act is consistently done only through the presence of Jesus. We take on guilt in this process which is why, for Bonhoeffer, he made the decision to renounce his pacifism and become complicit in the assassination of Hitler. When we ignore the humanity of others, we violate our belief that Christ is place-sharer for all of humanity.

Root ends his work with some ideas about youth ministry, describing ways to create a youth ministry with a healthy focus on the relational. I valued, as a bit of an introvert, his insistence that the youth worker need not be “crazy, wild and maniacally outgoing.” Instead the youth worker should look for ways to foster organic relationships between teens and adults. It is around common, shared interest or task that relationships organically form. The youth worker’s job is to think about ways to have the humanity of those whose are other interact and, through that interaction, share in the presence of Christ.

Root has given me some theological chops to hold onto while I talk about the importance of a relational youth ministry. He has provided several good counters and corrections to the problems that can come from a relational ministry which fails to take seriously the relationship as the place where Christ is.