Spirituality: Nothing to Be Afraid Of

Many good Christians have been afraid of the term "spirituality." True, there has been an inordinate emphasis on it from every quarter, reducing it's intended meaning to whatever suits one's fancy. We must not "throw the baby out with the bath water," and thus lose this good term. 

Help from Eugene Peterson

Who better to help us plow our way through this issue than Eugene Peterson, most popularly known for The Message, his paraphrase of the Bible. My experience with him has been through his very practical and very well-written books on pastoral ministry, Under The Unpredictable Plant, Five Smooth Stones for Pastoral Work, and Working the Angles, to name a few. His name has become associated with spirituality, though he does not particularly like it. In an interview with Mark Galli of Christianity Today, Peterson "exposed the shallowness of American Christianity and offered a bracing and invigorating alternative." I present but a snippet from that interview.

Many people assume that spirituality is about becoming emotionally intimate with God.

That's a naïve view of spirituality. What we're talking about is the Christian life. It's following Jesus. Spirituality is no different from what we've been doing for two thousand years just by going to church and receiving the sacraments, being baptized, learning to pray, and reading Scriptures rightly. It's just ordinary stuff.

This promise of intimacy is both right and wrong. There is an intimacy with God, but it's like any other intimacy; it's part of the fabric of your life. In marriage you don't feel intimate most of the time. Nor with a friend. Intimacy isn't primarily a mystical emotion. It's a way of life, a life of openness, honesty, a certain transparency.

Doesn't the mystical tradition suggest otherwise?

One of my favorite stories is of Teresa of Avila. She's sitting in the kitchen with a roasted chicken. And she's got it with both hands, and she's gnawing on it, just devouring this chicken. One of the nuns comes in shocked that she's doing this, behaving this way. She said, "When I eat chicken, I eat chicken; when I pray, I pray."

If you read the saints, they're pretty ordinary people. There are moments of rapture and ecstasy, but once every 10 years. And even then it's a surprise to them. They didn't do anything. We've got to disabuse people of these illusions of what the Christian life is. It's a wonderful life, but it's not wonderful in the way a lot of people want it to be.

Read the interview. It'll bless you.