01. Introduction
“How do you get good people?”This phrase is taken from Dallas Willard, “Chapel Message,” Westmont College, 12 Sept, 2011: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzzzH9z0SRE
This kind of question falls between the registers in our contemporary society. It neither fits neatly into the public sphere (the space of politics and movement building), nor does it sit easily in the private (where individuals can decide to use their leisure time however they wish).
The question, however, has a strange power to it. It summons up categories that are rarely used like virtue and character. It hints that there might be purpose to life that transcends the public / private distinction. It suggests that living well is something one can actually learn. Precisely because it does not fit neatly within our familiar categories, it is able to cut across them, diffusing polarizing debates. And it is a question of critical importance for a flourishing society, perhaps particularly in a time of turbulence. With this in mind, the project was started to look at the spiritual formation paradigm and accompanying resources in order to gain a sense of the insights it might offer. What follows are reflections based on that report.
02. The Roadmap Report
“The Spiritual Formation Roadmap,” commissioned by the Martin Institute for Christianity and Culture and co-sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, examined the state of the Christian spiritual formation paradigm seeking:
- To gain a sense of its basic principles and the reasons for its power over the past four decades in American Christianity.
- To assess the health of the paradigm in the current context, examining both tensions in the model and latent resources that seem ready to address broader cultural crises related to isolation, fragmentation and purposelessness.
In addition to drawing heavily on the history of the spiritual formation tradition and its impressive record of publication, 28 significant voices were interviewed, including Richard Foster, one of the founders. Then three roundtable discussions were conducted on isolation, meaning and upheaval.
Significant findings:
- For many of our interviewees, the allure of the paradigm sat in its ability to communicate not only a vision of reality but also a set of practices for tangible spiritual growth—the concrete development of virtue.
- In younger generations, there was a significant desire for correcting misunderstandings of the paradigm that have attempted to privatize its ideas and instead to communicate its true strength as a communal vision that is able to rise to the political questions of the day.
- There was agreement that formation ought to be involved in society but some lack of confidence about what that might mean. Interestingly, the few international interviewees offered more robust and creative theoretical bases for overcoming the personal / public tension.
The interviews emphasized the uniqueness of the paradigm in two respects in particular. First, there was striking confidence that both human life, and reality more generally, hold together and second, encounters with the challenges of the contemporary world seem to happen less on the level of theory or argument and more in the capacity simply to cultivate direct, sustained practices of virtue.
The full report can be accessed here.
03. Private Devotion and Public Life: Models of Formation
For the purposes of this article, I want to zoom in on a theme in the second chapter of the report, the relationship between private devotion and public life. Our sense is that reflection on this question is able to open up broader points regarding tensions and opportunities in the paradigm. When looking at this relationship, two strikingly different models for transformation arose from the interviews.
The first is a linear model. The linear emphasis is on first cultivating inner change so that actions can naturally flow outward in engagement with society and culture. Mimi Dixon stated it this way, “So the first place that light shines is inner . . . and then it pours out . . . Our public behavior is evidence of the personal transformation occurring deep within.”Cultura Research Interviews, with Mimi Dixon. March 4, 2021.
Richard Foster’s Streams of Living Water offers six great streams within Christianity that are all founded in Jesus and complement one another. In describing them, James Catford emphasized that the streams appear to be in an intentional order that begins with the contemplative tradition, moves to the social justice tradition and concludes with the incarnational tradition.Cultura Research Interviews, with James Catford. April 9, 2021.
While the linear model offers a useful framework, it also has some weaknesses. American Christianity in particular has a propensity to privatize faith, and many who have had only a brief exposure to Christian Spiritual Formation may have become excited about practices that develop their personal life without understanding the way in which it necessarily flows outward. Because of the propensity toward privatization within the American Christian culture, the spiritual formation paradigm must work against this current to have an impact outward.
Another model that emerged through the interviews suggests viewing formation in a more cyclical way. In fact, as Catford went on to mention, Foster’s Six Streams can be seen as a circle rather than a line. A life filled with prayer can lead to virtue which leads to empowerment of the Spirit, to compassion, to centering the Word and sacrament. And then the streams of Word and Sacrament lead back into deeper contemplation and prayer.
In Jesus’ life, one can see a rhythm of movement from solitude to public ministry and back to solitude (e.g. Mark 1:21-35). Carolyn Arends, Director of Education for Renovaré, expresses this model well saying, “What we do in public shapes us personally. What we do personally shapes us in public. And we just have to keep going around the circle.”Cultura Research Interviews, with Carolyn Arends. March 12, 2021.
And this is not a new idea. As one commentator on Gregory the Great writes,
“Gregory holds . . . that while a strictly contemplative life is a good and true and possible calling, the ultimately higher calling is rather to bring the fruits of that contemplation back into the world, especially in the work of preaching, teaching, and pastoring. This is not the higher calling, moreover, merely because it is more selfless. Rather, it is higher because such active work in the world leads, in the end, to a greater contemplation than would otherwise have been possible precisely to the extent that this contemplation has been elevated by the virtue of compassion.”Mac Stewart, “Gregory the Great on Compassion and Contemplation,” Covenant, May 3, 2019, emphasis added: https://livingchurch.org/covenant/2019/05/03/gregory-the-great-on-compassion-and-contemplation.
So, contemplation can inform compassion, which then informs contemplation. Learning happens not only in solitude and contemplation but also in action.
James K.A. Smith, in pushing back against the gnostic tendency that culture is bad, said, “What you don’t want to do is set it up with a posture where the church always has all the secrets and it’s just a matter of whether we live it out. No, the church doesn’t have all the secrets. And there’s a listening and an attention and an attunement that requires us to be also receptive.”Cultura Research Interviews, with James K A Smith. March 30, 2021.
This perspective helps one remember that there is much to learn from others and can be seeking God out there as well as within the walls of the church.
While in theory both of these models stress the importance of social and political formation, they still can fall prey to a kind of mechanical switching between contemplation and action or internal and external that may inhibit the extent to which spiritual formation acts as a real agent for cultural change and cohesion.
04. An Organic Model
In this regard, it seems worth beginning to work on alternative models of formation that can help reformulate old dichotomies between inner and outer, private and public, action and contemplation. The image that is needed must not merely overcome the rigidity of these categories, but never quite start from this kind of divided sense of existence in the first place.
An organic model may help break down these distinctions in a way that linear or cyclical pictures are not able to do. What other models might call inner life, ends up not exactly being inner at all. All organic life, but perhaps plants in particular, emphasize just how hard it is to draw strict lines between self and world.Grappling toward a similar insight, the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes a kind of being in the world that was never first separated between subjectivity and objectivity or interiority and exteriority but rather suggests, “there is reciprocal insertion and intertwining of one in the other.” Merleau-Ponty describes the body as a “chiasm” where subject and object intertwine. He most profoundly articulates this paradigm in his meditations on organic life. To be a seeing subject is also simultaneously to be in the world, to be available to touch is by definition to be available to be touched. See, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “The Visible and the Invisible: The Intertwining—The Chiasm:” http:// timothyquigley.net/cont/mp-chiasm.pdf A stalk does not choose when to interact with “the world” but is actually in a constant interplay, as its existence influences what is around it and is influenced in turn. It has resources on which to draw (a deep taproot and secondary roots, which provide sustenance) yet it remains open and exposed. To have a root or leaves for photosynthesis emphasizes directly just how much existence is intertwined with the world as it is. A leaf makes no sense without the sun; roots have no purpose without soil or water.
A particularly notable case here is a heliotropic plant like the sunflower. As it grows its interaction with the world increases, both above and below ground. It is, in a key sense, active—but its activity is specifically about its intertwining—it moves to track the sun. Similarly, Jesus seems to carefully watch the movements of his Father and is dependent upon him: ‘Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own but only what he sees the Father doing, for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing, and he will show him greater works than these, so that you will be astonished.” (John 5:19-20 NRSV)
This seems very close to many of the key sentiments that spiritual formation has been developing. The principal goal is to gain agency specifically through attunement to God and to reality more generally.For more on the role of the will in attunement, see Dallas Willard, Chapter 8, “Transforming the Will (Heart or Spirit) and Character” in Renovation of the Heart. The more persons become aware of all of reality and interact with it, the more whole the person and community become. As Trevor Hudson puts it, “spiritual formation takes us into the world of interaction, into the world of interactivity. And I think it plunges us into interaction with God, with others, with our context.”Cultura Research Interviews, with Trevor Hudson. March 15, 2021.
Moreover, as a plant is vulnerable in its interactions, it also contributes directly to the surrounding environment. A sunflower’s beauty catches the eye and makes one pause. Its nectar, seeds and oil offer nutrients to humans and animals. Perhaps most astonishingly, as a hyperaccumulator the sunflower is able to absorb high levels of toxins from the ground, renewing the soil even after nuclear explosions.Molly Beauchemin, “Scientists Are Using Sunflowers To Clean Up Nuclear Radiation,” Garden Collage Magazine, May 12, 2016: https://gardencollage.com/change/sustainability/scientists-using-sunflowers-clean- nuclear-radiation/#:~:text=“Sunflowers%20are%20what%20environmental%20scientists,of%20variety%20of%20their%20genome
Similarly, as a person begins to be transformed, it is not a separate act of “outward motion” stepping beyond contemplation, but rather that the virtuous person simply is in the world. At first this may be in very subtle, almost unnoticeable ways. However, as a person grows in virtue, her impact will grow as well.
05. Conclusion
Formation is nothing if it is not in a very basic sense the capacity to live well—to become a good person. From the start, the force of the spiritual formation paradigm has been in prompting insular versions of Christianity to move away from their insulation into larger less protected worlds. Only in this way does one discover what Willard meant when he said, the “universe is a perfectly safe place for us to be.”Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy, 66 & 321.
06. For Further Reading
- “Spiritual Formation Roadmap”
- Good and Beautiful and Kind: Becoming Whole in a Fractured World by Rich Villodas
- For the Life of the World – Classics Series, Vol. 1 by Alexander Schmemann, see especially Appendix 1 “Worship in a Secular Age.”
07. Suggested Practice
Take a few deep breaths, a moment of silence to become aware of the sensations in your body and the environment around you. When you are ready, take a few moments to consider these questions, perhaps doodling with a pen as you do.
- What idea or image are you pondering from what you read?
- Are there any new images or metaphors that come to mind, like the sunflower, that can help us to grow in Christlikeness and to address the critical needs of today?
- What do you sense God inviting you to right now?
Mariah Velásquez is the director of the Incarnatio Center and associate director of the Martin Institute for Christianity & Culture at Westmont College.