Help for the hyper-spiritual
“One of the blunders religious people are particularly fond of making” writes Frederick Buechner, “is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.” That’s quite a feat isn’t it, to out-spiritualize God since God is spirit.
Our creatureliness has long been a problem for humans, a form of rebellion against our Creator. This tendency to snub everyday aspects of created life is an ungrateful impatience with the given conditions of our earthiness, often seen as weakness or sinful. It’s the old story of Gnosticism which figures our created life is not a gift but a burden to be shed along the way towards a deeper truth and a better grace. It fools us to conceive genuine experiences of God as located in another zone beyond our ordinary lives.
This tendency is everywhere. What comes to mind when you hear the word “spiritual”? We’re mostly thinking retreat centers and mystical experiences instead of changing diapers, answering emails, or making morning coffee. Attach “spiritual” as an adjective to anything and suddenly it gets lifted out of daily life.
Yes, there are non-physical dimensions in created reality - love or the presence of God, for example - but they are always perceived and received in the stuff of ordinary living. Our humanity and the created world are God’s greatest gift to us.
So many of us have a little Gnostic streak going on and could use remedial lessons to know and feel the glory of God in our everyday and human lives. Enter a rule of life, which is an antidote to so much hyper-spirituality that gets lost in the ether, a way-finding tool for a life with God tethered to the ordinary.
A rule of life simply is a support structure for life to grow. It’s a pattern of habits and practices - of mind and body - that nurtures a distinct way of life, a way of faithfully following Jesus. As Andy Crouch notes, “The most powerful choices we will make in our lives are not about specific decisions but about patterns of life: the nudges and disciplines that will shape all our other choices.”
A rule of life might initially strike you as something exclusively for very “spiritual” people, like monks and mystics. As noted last week, a rule of life is more like a crutch for people who need help; for created people who struggle to meet God in the given conditions of this life. The beauty of a rule of life is the way it is congruent with the creaturely realities of our gloriously everyday human lives.
There are three key creaturely realities to pay attention to when considering how we live with God:
1) We are embodied creatures: you don’t have a body, you are a body. The capacities to create, move, feel, and act, along with the needs of growth and the limitations of sleep and hunger, are good and the very location to meet God. Life with God is a body-soul existence and the Spirit will not (cannot?) meet us except in our fully humanity as embodied persons.
2) We are social and relational creatures: surrounded by the splendour of a fresh creation, God notes that “it is not good for the man to be alone.” (Gen. 2:18) Throughout the Christian story, other people are not exceptions or barriers to our formation but the very context in which to know God’s life.
Theologian Julie Canlis, writing about our embodied and, therefore, limited nature, notes that “our very limitations imply the need for relationship. To be a creature is to refuse to make ourselves …” (A Theology of the Ordinary). Any “self-made” notions are pure illusion. We are beautifully, necessarily, relational and social, made to be in communion with God and others.
3) We are temporal creatures: time is a created reality yet it is so very easy to remain blind to our temporal nature. Sure we can be hounded by clock time yet still unaware of how embedded in time we are. It leads us to neglect the seasons of life (my girth betrays my wish to enjoy food like I have the metabolism of a 25 year-old body) and the swells of history (too long Canadians have told a history free from the abuses towards First Nations). Psalm 90:12 calls us to “number our days,” which, writes James K.A. Smith, is the wisdom “to know when we are, to find our bearings by an orientation to time and history.” (Highly recommend his book How to Inhabit Time)
Bodies, relationships and time - it is within these creaturely realities that we are made to live in communion with God. So what does it mean to know God with my body? How might I enter a deeper communion with God through community? How do I live Christ’s call to follow him differently today than say someone in the 18th century? A rule of life helps us to practice being fully human creatures by connecting us to these embodied and earthy realities of life with God.
How so? Through rhythms, relationships, and renunciations that correspond to our created realities and form the architecture of a rule of life.
Rhythms and routines: a rule of life consists of routines, the repeated rhythms of daily, weekly and seasonal practices that shape our daily and weekly living. For example, the practice of a mid-day prayer feels like an interruption to my day but is a bodily and temporal reminder that my time is not my own but I am organizing my day around life with God. These embodied practices are “habitations of the Spirit,” the places where the Spirit meets us.
Relationships: a rule of life embeds us in intentional relationships and community, orienting daily life around communion with God and a just and loving life with others. Relationships and community are the necessary social environment for life and growth.
Renunciations: we live within the sweep of history, and each cultural moment has its own zeitgeist and particular idols that disciple us away from Jesus. As creatures of our particular time, a rule of life involves discerning renunciations, strategic “no’s” in order to give ourselves to a more robust “yes” to the way of Jesus. We use our freedom and agency to restrict our choices, willingly renouncing certain things and patterns of living as part of reorienting our lives around that which is life, Jesus Christ.
God says in Jeremiah 6:16: “Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it, and you will find rest for your souls.” A rule of life is an ancient, now-quite-modern path that guides us to the good way; it’s remedial lessons for unwitting Gnostics as we learn how to commune with God, bear witness to the gospel, and live out the obligations of love as marvellously created persons.