Читать книгу Protestant Spiritual Exercises - Joseph D. Driskill - Страница 7

Some years ago when I was a campus minister, I was invited to preach at a small rural church a few miles from the city where I lived. A student minister taking classes on the campus where I was serving needed someone to fill the pulpit for him. Acceding willingly to a routine request, I did not anticipate that a person in his congregation would share a story with me, one I have never forgotten.

The sermon that morning attempted to address the way in which God sometimes speaks to us in the quiet of the desert. Using the last several verses from Isaiah 40, I reflected on Isaiah's observation that in the end we will mount up with eagles’ wings, but that when things are really difficult we must be satisfied simply to take a step and not faint. I distinctly remember feeling that the sermon had not gone as well as I would have hoped. But my homiletics professor had taught me not to apologize for a sermon, because it was possible, no matter how inadequate it appeared to me, that it might have spoken to someone in the congregation. It was good advice, given what happened that morning.

As I greeted people at the door, I noticed that an older woman lingered to have a word with me. She told me she had a son for whom she continued to care because of his special needs. She said that for twenty-five years she had had to get up every night to look after him. No matter how tired she was, duty required a significant interruption of her night's sleep. She recalled how in the early days she would sometimes sit on the steps to the upstairs to catch her breath after she had tended him. She said it was not long, however, until she discovered that the quiet of her home at two in the morning drew her to prayer. She would sit in the quiet to spend time with God. Over the years these few minutes grew until she found herself praying every night for about a half hour in the hushed stillness of her home. This period of quiet and prayer had become one of the most important times of her day. It was the time she spoke with God and found the strength to carry on with her responsibilities.

I was quite touched by this story. My attempt to address how God may speak to us in the quiet and pain of the desert was suddenly incarnated in her deeply moving witness. With tears welling up in her eyes she added the statement that stopped us both: “I have been praying this way for twenty years and never once have I felt I could tell anyone in this church about this experience. I was afraid they would think I was unbalanced or a Bible thumper if I said anything about it.” Then followed her gift to me: “Thank you for coming today. I needed to tell someone in my church about this.” Now the tears were welling up in my eyes. On reflection, those tears were not simply tears of gratitude for the gift she had shared with me; they were also tears of sorrow for a church where deep experiences of faith could not be shared without the fear of being judged.

The attitudes and beliefs of this woman's mainline Protestant church shaped not only what she could say about God, but the nature of her relationship with God. For her to experience God's presence in the silence of the night and also speak about the importance of this was to move across the divide that separates evangelical and/or fundamentalist churches from their mainline Protestant counterparts. The fear of being ostracized silenced her voice. Her story reveals the discomfort mainline Protestants have with things identified as “spiritual,” for example, a personal relationship with God. It also demonstrates two serious spiritual needs in many churches—the need to nurture an experiential relationship with the holy and the need to recover practices that invite spiritual growth and development.

In mainline churches believers can affirm the existence of God, the importance of the Scriptures, and the need to hear the Word in sermons, but discourse that claims a personal relationship with God at an experiential rather than an intellectual level is largely discouraged. The God of mainline Protestant churches is the “ground of one's being,” the God who requires ethical behavior, especially at the social and political levels. However, this God is not a power with whom one would admit to having an experiential relationship. How could the sovereign God of the cosmos truly care about the mundane matters of daily life? Many Protestants find repugnant the joy expressed by those who believe that the acquisition of a parking place results from divine intervention. At a deeper level they are troubled by the intimacy evangelicals appear to have in their personal relationships with God.

The derision mainline Protestants feel about a personal, experiential relationship with God is reflected in their lack of attention to spiritual practices. Prayer, a practice commonly associated with being in relationship with the divine, often remains a child's activity. Children are taught to pray for “mommy and daddy,” friends, and pets at bedtime, and to give thanks before meals. These prayers, appropriate for the spiritual nurture of children, do not meet the emotional and social needs of growing adolescents. Yet other forms or types of prayer are seldom taught. Adults fare no better. They replace the “now I lay me down to sleep” prayers of childhood with more altruistic requests couched in more sophisticated language, but the petitionary prayer framework of childhood remains the primary option. Other forms of prayer—such as centering prayer or an examination of conscience—have been virtually unknown to many mainline Protestants.

The disdain for emotive expressions of intimacy with God is also present in many acts of public worship. As evangelical churches offer increasingly lively hours of worship, mainline Protestants exhibit great tenacity in clinging to modes of worship viewed by significant segments of their own members as dry, boring, and irrelevant. Passionate adherence to passionless orders of worship—where oft-used hymn tunes punctuate words, words, words in introits, litanies, and sermons—characterize many mainline Protestant services. Public prayers in free church worship frequently take the form of lengthy pastoral prayers focused solely on verbal content. Times for silence, for quiet meditation or quiet reflection on Scripture readings, are minimal. This lack of vitality in worship is pervasive whether shaped by established liturgies or free church approaches where spontaneity often acquires a patterned uniformity. As a result, people seeking spiritual guidance and growth commonly feel that mainline churches have little to offer either at the personal or the corporate level.

For the last quarter of the twentieth century mainline Protestant churches have witnessed the exodus of those whose religious needs have not been met. The failure of mainline Protestant churches to nurture the spiritual lives of their members reflects a religious ethos that is out of touch with the spiritual needs of many human beings. People who formerly would have participated in mainline congregational life have been looking for other alternatives. New Age spirituality, Jungian psychology, charismatic renewal, eco-feminism, new religious movements, Eastern religions, and Wicca have provided arenas for spiritual exploration and in some cases nurture.

Beginning in the 1960s, there was a breakdown of the appeal of mainline Protestant churches and a turn to other spiritual alternatives that indicated substantial cultural shifts. Since the early days of the Republic in the late eighteenth century, Protestant churches had been at the center of a synthesis between faith and culture.¹ Public life was characterized by a commitment to rationality. The age of science and the age of reason fostered by the Enlightenment had given rise in the United States to a worldview that trusted science and reason. In contrast to fundamentalist religious groups who proclaimed the literal truth of biblical creation stories, mainline Protestants argued in favor of the theory of evolution. The popular movie “Inherit the Wind,” which brought together veteran actors Friedrich March and Spencer Tracy, told the story of the Scopes trial in 1925. The song “Give Me That Old-Time Religion” reverberated through the trial of John Scopes, a Tennessee school teacher who had taught his students the theory of evolution. Progressive mainline Protestants identified with the struggles of John Scopes in support of the synthesis they had created between a worldview supported by science and the tenets of faith. The power elites and the great middle class of mainline churches joined on Sunday mornings to worship a God who created the world not in seven days, but through the rational process of evolution.

The 1950s, as it turned out, were the last halcyon days of this synthesis. The worldview that had prevailed since the Enlightenment was disintegrating. Modern physics had discovered two decades earlier that the search for timeless, objective truths was not possible. The very act of observation altered the course of subatomic particles. In the human sciences, theories that gave birth to the sociology of knowledge—for example, Karl Mannheim's Ideology and Utopia in 1929—revealed the extent to which human knowledge is socially conditioned. How could one hope to find the truth in a world where knowledge itself was contingent on the vantage point of the observer? Consequently, in the 1960s and 1970s the theological assertions of white, male, European and American theologians were critiqued and found inadequate by women, African Americans, and Latin Americans. If the God of white, Euro-American academic theologians was too distant to be involved in daily life—too high (Karl Barth) or too deep (Paul Tillich)—the God of the disenfranchised of the Third World was present and available in the joys and sorrows of daily life. This theological challenge provided by women and men from other churches and cultures shook the foundations that supported mainline beliefs in the reasonableness of God. If it had been reasonable to assume that God was too preoccupied to get involved in the nitty-gritty of personal relationships with believers, the collapse of the worldview that supported this belief reopened the possibility for developing a personal relationship with God. If groups as diverse as Roman Catholics, evangelicals, and African-Americans could affirm the experiential aspects of a relationship with the holy, many mainline Protestants were now willing to revisit this issue.

At the present time there is neither a theological consensus nor a worldview that binds people of various races, cultures, creeds, classes, and nations together. The absence of consensus produces chaos as well as excitement. Chaos often reigns as old truths are discarded and former authorities are questioned. Yet there is also excitement, for new possibilities can emerge when plurality and ambiguity are the order of the day. In the midst of this turmoil a seemingly intense spiritual yearning has resulted in an unquenchable thirst for reliable tools in the area of spirituality.

Titles at local bookstores across the country have proliferated exponentially. The emergence of this plethora of spiritual materials is both encouraging and frightening. Ten years ago, who would have guessed that Gregorian chant would become a “best seller” in the United States? Would anyone have dreamed that classics from the Middle Ages—for example, the Cloud of Unknowing or the works and music of Hildegard of Bingen—would be not only marketable but also profitable? How will these classics be understood by persons who know little of their context? Will uncritical readings of these works bring the meaning for which people are searching?

The consumer society that produces these literary works is also busy merchandising spiritual techniques for a fee. The symbols and signs of things spiritual—for example, the cross—are unabashedly exploited by savvy advertising entrepreneurs. Only three years ago, Vogue magazine reported that “spiritual equanimity…is only a credit card receipt away.”²

In the midst of this so-called postmodern time, people need guideposts and tools with which to work their way through the spiritual chaos to a more stable place. Such a place may not be terra firma; rather, it may be more like a lifeboat where shelter from the winds allows the testing and evaluating of the available spiritual alternatives.

There are numerous signs of hope today. Committed leaders remain in mainline Protestant churches even as some of their contemporaries leave. These leaders, both clergy and laity, are searching for spiritually enriching paths that will augment the nurture provided by their own congregations and denominations. During the last two decades, a number of these Protestant leaders have sought renewal and guidance by turning to Roman Catholic retreat houses for spiritual guidance. There they learned their spiritual practices and disciplines that focused on developing an experiential relationship with God. In many instances the religious leadership at these retreat houses provided spiritual direction. Protestants who were recipients of this ministry found that spiritual growth added a depth and richness to life that had been neglected by their churches.

Mainline Protestants have also discovered that they have a spirituality even though they have not recognized it as such. Traditionally, Protestant spirituality has focused on the social needs of the society, deliberately separating prayer from social action. Prayer is often described as a pious, self-absorbing activity and is contrasted with the outward ministry of social action. However, in many Roman Catholic retreat houses Protestants have encountered religious leaders who are committed to both prayer and justice. This stance has provided an infusion of spiritual growth and development that many mainline Protestant leaders have taken back to their congregations.

As these leaders have brought their renewed sense of God's presence to the experience of worship, wonderful things have begun to happen. Today, in a significant number of mainline churches a sense of God's presence in worship has been rediscovered. These churches are growing. According to Hadaway and Roozen in Rerouting the Protestant Mainstream,³ this growth is not dependent on congregational size, denominational heritage, or liturgical style. It is happening in large and small congregations, in services with formal liturgies and those with freer forms of worship, and in a variety of mainline denominations. Growth seems to depend on having leaders and worshipers who are persons of faith who believe that God is present when the community gathers to offer worship and praise. When leaders and worshipers believe that God's presence surrounds and infuses them, there is a compelling sense of the holy that touches the depths of their spiritual yearning. For those who have discovered that God is present in the midst of life, the search for a more meaningful and authentic spirituality has not been in vain.

Mainline Protestants are poised to make a contribution to the spiritual lives of individuals and communities of faith who take seriously the pluralistic context of the late twentieth century. Mainline Protestants may not know precisely where they are going, but their contribution comes in part from their knowledge of where they have been. Commitments to critical reflection, to hearing the voices of the dispossessed, to inclusiveness, and to racial equality position them well for evaluating the marketplace of contemporary expressions of faith. Mainline Protestants also tend to recognize the limitations of their knowledge. There is both a critical astuteness and a sense of humility that allows them to honor the spiritualities of others while at the same time recognizing that spiritualities must be subject to critical evaluation.

Yet with all that mainline Protestants can offer, they continue in significant numbers to lack an appreciation for the importance of spiritual nurture per se. If this lack is not addressed, the contribution of these Christians to debates in the public square will be irrelevant. If mainline Protestants do not acknowledge their past blindness in this area and work to understand more fully humankind's spiritual needs, their other contributions to the wider religious context may well be overlooked.

An examination of the Protestant heritage reveals that many of the spiritual practices that leaders and members felt they had to seek from outside sources were already present within Protestantism. Those who are the inheritors of the Reformation have within their own tradition spiritual practices that are life giving. These spiritual practices provide a number of alternatives for spiritual growth. They honor such Protestant principles as freedom of religious practice, the right to question authority, and the need to balance personal devotion with concern for God's world.

By turning to the Protestant heritage, especially the spiritual life of the early movements and leaders, we discover a spiritual legacy that affirms the Protestant tradition and provides spiritual practices that deepen our faith and our commitments to love and justice. The spiritual practices and disciplines used by the thinkers and doers of the various Protestant traditions fostered an experiential relationship with God (the holy). In many cases, the spiritual practices of Protestants owe much to Roman Catholic prayer practices. Before Martin Luther was a reformer, he was an Augustinian monk who knew intimately the prayer life of that religious community; John Wesley was an avid reader who studied the lives of the early church leaders. Protestants who fail to claim the pre-Reformation church as a significant part of their heritage lose much that is spiritually meaningful.

Developing and nurturing a relationship with God both personally and within a community of faith are essential aspects of being human. Human beings have spiritual needs that transcend the limitations of analysis and reason. Mainline Protestant churches are well positioned to advocate the importance of integrating reason and faith, head and heart, prayer and social action. As we move into the twenty-first century, we are again in a period of cultural and religious diversity, a time during which there is much religious experimentation. The Protestant heritage offers tools that will serve the mainline denominations well as they separate bogus from authentic spiritual practices.

Insofar as an explicit focus on spirituality is a relatively new development in the life of mainline Protestants, it is hoped that this book will provide both congregations and individuals with resources for the journey. The often-unrecognized spiritual gifts of the past are as rich in their contribution to us as the hopes and dreams they engender. Using the lens of spirituality, Chapter 1 takes a fresh look at five theological affirmations that have contributed to Protestants’ self-understanding. These life-giving affirmations give an exciting new depth to our Protestant heritage and contradict those who claim “Protestant spirituality” is an oxymoron! In addition, they undergird the spiritual practices contained in this book and provide the theological context for participating in them. Chapter 2 is intended to help persons who want to incorporate spiritual practices into their daily lives. The focus is on the relationship between spiritual development and personal growth. Chapter 3 describes guidelines for teaching and leading the spiritual practices contained in Chapter 4. These suggestions will aid those providing spiritual leadership by raising issues that should be considered before attempting to lead others. For those with limited experience in teaching spiritual practices, cautions are included.

Chapter 4 of this book is composed of eight spiritual exercises that either emerge from the Protestant tradition or are in harmony with its theological stance. These practices are not attempts to impose outdated and outmoded forms of spiritual development on others in the interest of nostalgia or in the hope of restoring the ancient order. Rather, by reclaiming these practices we can renew an experiential relationship with the divine that offers meaning and hope for contemporary life.