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The Trouble with Spirituality

If I were to ask Christians to define “Spirituality” these days, I suspect that there would be a fair bit of humming and hawing as people struggled to sharpen vagueness into focus. Some Christians might suggest the mystical and esoteric as the plumbline by which to measure spirituality, so that the weirder you are, the more spiritual. For them, true spiritual life lies in an entranced and otherworldly dimension, where images of Christian warriors on white charges hold court as practical, everyday matters of human life pale into an insignificant and remote distance. Others would recoil in horror at this and rush to the other extreme, defining the spiritual life in terms of little beyond the painfully prosaic and “blah”. These explain their joylessness by saying that the spiritual life is a massive act of the will, and obeying God really entails a determined gritting of the teeth.

But is it the case that “Spirituality” involves only or either one of these extremes? Aren’t there healthier, more virile renderings of this troublesome word? Given the fact that the Christian life is synonymous with the Spiritual life, it is crucial for Christians to recover the proper meanings of this word. Both these bizarre extremes which I have laid out are deeply disturbing because they divide the Christian life into a series of irreconcilable opposites. They encourage a dangerous split in our minds when we think of life in Christ via the insidious proposition of an “either … or” clause rather than something more embracing and encompassing, integrated and whole, and are guilty of fostering a great divide and divorce in our understanding of Christian Spirituality.

The Great Divorce: A Tale of Two Cities

The ancient split between secular and sacred is played out most convincingly in our dichotomized view of the Christian life into two main categories called “church life” and “life in the world”.  Let me cite a classic example. We’ve all been subjected, at one time or other, to the old guilt trip of whether or not to go into “full-time Christian work”, as if to say that other full-time work “in the world” is not entirely or convincingly Christian. What do I do, then, if I work eight hours five to six days a week “in the world”, and spend less than half that time in a decidedly “Christian” environment such as church or cell group? How do I bring my faith-full Christianity into the empty places of the world? If I am an administrator in a secular job, am I less spiritual than my administrator friend who works within a Christian setting? Of course, we often pay lip service to the equal goodness and veracity of our individual callings, but somewhere in our deepest hearts, we still think in terms of this great divide. That is why we give altar calls to those chosen for “full-time” Christian work. When will we open the altars seriously to those called to be “full-time” engineers, teachers, bus drivers, copywriters, hotel managers and janitors for the glory of God? 

Such split views of Spirituality also lead naturally to other related problems in the way we negotiate our way through life. Arising out of this dichotomized view is our growing introversion and remoteness from the big, bad world. The regrettable problem with Christians is that we like to huddle together too much, simply because togetherness gives us a sense of security and safety. But what are we afraid of? We are ignorant that our life of faith as God intended it is to integrate (make whole), influence and even command, the rest of our lives and by extension, the lives of those around us. What else could the Good News of Jesus Christ mean except that all of human life can now be considered and played out from an intoxicatingly new orientation and perspective called “the Kingdom of God … within you”? 

Instead, we live disintegrated lives, divided into unconnected categories and compartments. Such dissipated and desperate lives lack a central place, an organic, coherent and forceful inner sanctum cultivated, ruled and driven by the Spirit of God alone. The wastelands of our meaninglessness and futile activities drive us further and further into an introversion that means that Christians no longer impact society as we once did. We no longer seem to know how to be “salt and light” to the world. We no longer lead others in good deeds, in standing up for the right. Instead, we are insipid and ruined souls seeking our own health and blessing alone when we should be offering transforming life and healing to a waiting world.

Wherein lies our answer out of the pit of self-absorbed dissipatedness and into the healthy, outgoing integratedness of a strong and practised godly life? How do we learn to live out of the vibrant and energetic core self that God has made whole and pure?  Our heartfelt conviction about the Spiritual life began at the juncture or crossroad when we first encountered the One who makes the difference. It is to him then, that we need to return, time and again, as we make our way through the morass of experience and knowledge in our lives on earth. Nothing marks our spiritual health quite so well as the twin indicators of our relationship with Jesus Christ: union and communion.

CommUnion

The one complaint I have about most churches is that Christians come to the Lord’s Table only about once a month. Yet I think that Communion is the one service where we are reminded in the most visual and immediate of ways that we share in the life of Jesus Christ. Certainly, our appreciation of our union and communion with Jesus through his Holy Spirit is heightened and energized by our participation in this symbolic meal. In the eating of the bread and the drinking of the wine, we enter into the sublime moment of dying to ourselves and being alive in the generating life of an irresistibly lively Jesus. Oneness and union with him through his Spirit realigns our contorted perspectives to a wholesome celebration of our freedom in him. Jesus stands centrally and crucially before us as the holy Presence through whom our transformation is effected. Our orientation must swing back to him again and again whatever the stage of our Christian lives, just as the compass needle readily and consistently swings north.

Therefore, we must begin here and end here at this point of loving communion with Jesus when we think of the Spiritual life. If he is not our preoccupation and obsession, if we do not long and yearn for him, then in fact, we have not started at all! Each of our personal dramas must recall the revolving centrality of Jesus’ intimate encounter with us. When I first became a seeker after God, it was precisely the thought of Jesus that drew me. Mine was a search occasioned by the overriding sense of the arresting irresistibility of his person, and the inexplicable longing for his presence. All of life must be imbued with this constant desire for intimacy and relationship with the beautiful One our souls love. Essentially, if our Christianity is devoid of this intimate knowing, is there meaning to it at all? Jesus is the raison d’être of our existence, the uniting/healing Person and Power who holds the broken and disconnected pieces of our shattered, divided selves together, and provides the inherent, creative and empowering tension of our lives through his Spirit. He lovingly melds and moulds us into the psychological and spiritual oneness that such words like “integrated”, “authentic” and “whole” imply. In his hands, our yielded selves begin to assume much more the portraiture of “little Christs” that God would like us to be. How the Potter shapes his waiting clay is no better demonstrated than in the Spirit leading us into a consistent, faithful and sustained practice of the Spiritual Disciplines.  

The Spiritual Disciplines: God’s Easy Yoke

“Take my yoke upon you,” Jesus said. In that way, we would learn of him and rest in him. Yokes, of course, imply discipline, effort, self-denial, self-control … things we don’t gravitate towards in these days of hedonistic and “feel good” Christianity. When we speak of the Spiritual Disciplines, we mean of course the “hard” things of the faith, such as prayer, fasting, solitude, reflection and study, simplicity, frugality, chastity, submission. There can be no consideration of Christian Spirituality without a thorough understanding of the importance of Spiritual Disciplines to us. The disciplined life of spiritual exercises is therefore not optional; but neither is it performed under great gnashing of teeth. At the heart of it lies the central motivation of love through the empowering Spirit. For love’s sake, we “train [ourselves] unto godliness”, as did Paul. In speaking of discipleship, we recognize that our lives are no longer our own, that we do need to “pummel” our bodies and wills into subjection and obedience to God. Paul’s use of the athlete and boxer who trains is the perfect image to draw the parallel between physical discipline and spiritual discipline. The hardiness and ruggedness of his faith is evidently the desired result of his constant practice of disciplining himself, never for its own sake, but always so that his subjected self could be the “worthy vessel” to accommodate the holiness of Jesus’ Spirit. Paul’s view of the human person as the jar in which the presence and life of God are contained and held is hopeful and redemptive in its outlook. How else do we explain his single and utter focus and abandonment of his entire life to the Gospel? Or the fact of his enduring effectiveness in the Christian world?

Jesus himself observed prolonged times of solitude. He understood these times as secret times with God. Jesus, of all people, knew what it was to “practise the presence of God”, not because he was the Son of God, but because he drew inspiration from his reliance on the Spirit through such engagements of solitude and prayer. He was deeply strengthened by these periods of retirement (Matthew 26:38-42), and rigorously challenged by his withdrawal into the wilderness (Matthew 4). Would the powerful and radical life that issued out of him have been as conceivable and convincing without these resorts to solitude and prayer?  As the Master, so the disciple. Spiritual Disciplines are God’s “how-to”s in our learning to walk after him. They provide an environment and setting in which the rustling Spirit can blow where he wills, as he wills. Taken rightly, these practices encourage the kind of integration we want to see in ourselves, so that like Christ, like Paul, the life which issues from us is single, transforming, radical, connected, whole, powerful.

Conclusion: “Little less than the angels”

There are no shortcuts to holiness. Devotion must be cultivated carefully, deliberately and assiduously. Eugene Peterson calls our disciplined sojourn through this learning experience of loving God on earth a long obedience in the same direction. And indeed it is. God is interested in creating human masterpieces. Of all the beauties of creation, he continues to call us his pièce de résistance: we are “little less than the angels”.  But masterpieces take time to create and attention must be paid to the smallest detail for any piece that is fashioned to perfection. What we will be one day will surprise and delight even us. In the hands of the Master, we will be reshaped and reformed to beautiful and holy proportions and lines that will make us fit to be called the bride of Christ. When our transformation is completed and accomplished under the artistry of his masterly hands, we will have occasion to say that our long obedience was worth every step we took under the yoke. On that day, we will finally know the only reason why. It will still be for love’s sake alone.  

This was first published in a Kairos monograph.

I like Don Mclean’s “Starry, Starry Night.” The song captures not only the suggestive beauty of Vincent Van Gogh’s La nuit étoilée, “Starry Night,” but more essentially, something of the artist himself. Van Gogh’s life is tell-able from his numerous paintings: it is a well-known fact that this post-Impressionist painter produced some of the most vibrant pieces of art around. His genius lay in his eccentric and extremely individualistic outlook and perspective. I love the way he saw the world in coloured, squiggly lines. He was obsessed with bright, primary colours, particularly yellow, which he used lavishly in his paintings. For a time, when he was at Arles, a town in France, he lived in a house which was called “the yellow house,” for obvious reasons. Vincent’s room in this house was predictably coloured in bright, cheerful hues.

This period at Arles was the time when he painted one of his most famous paintings, Vase avec tournesols. We know this more commonly as “Sunflowers,” that startling painting full of bright yellow sunflowers caught in a vase. This sort of painting is called still life, but there is nothing still about these sunflowers. They are a vision of liveliness and delight to jaded souls. Perhaps this joyfulness was why sunflowers and yellow caught Van Gogh’s eye. This seems a little ironic because it is common knowledge how depressed he was. He battled poverty and rejection as an artist, and in his own lifetime, he made precious little from his then unacknowledged genius as an artist with an original eye. Van Gogh suffered from various physical ills, the simplest of which were due to his own carelessness about his health: he ate little, he smoked too much. But he was also mentally ill. No one can ascertain if he was schizophrenic, epileptic or alcoholic, but he barely endured the nervous crises that plagued his life. During one of these depressed periods and fits of nervous psychosis and madness, Van Gogh cut off one of his ears, frightening his poor housemate, Paul Gauguin, silly. The threat of deteriorating sanity never left him; in fact, it was probably in one of these moods that he finally shot himself with a revolver. Although his doctor rushed over to dress his wound, Van Gogh died two days later. He spent his last day alive quietly smoking his pipe.

Like Don Mclean, I wonder about Vincent Van Gogh. His great passion was not so much art as it was life itself. He saw the wonder of the spheres above, sat and pictured that beauty on canvas, and called it by such names as La nuit étoilée, “Starry Night.” Knowing the backdrop to be “blue and grey,” he nevertheless looked beyond that darkness to the sparkling crystalline stars which spiked the skies. He sensed something of the numinous beauty which is God. Shadows could not enshroud this lightening joy, whatever else might happen in his personal life. Perhaps this was why he painted with such insistence and frenzy: his art was his only means of conveying that vision of eternal beauty to a very blind world.

It is no coincidence that the spiky rays of starlight are reminiscent in shape to the yellow blades of the sunflowers’ petals. For Van Gogh, they both represented the very joy of life bursting outwards, like the sun’s own rays. The simple English word “sunflowers” captures the whole focus of that flowery theme  (Vase avec tournesols): how these flowers blaze with life though they have been cut; though they sit in a vase, unmovingly; though they are considered “still life.” But the French word for “sunflowers,” tournesols, is even more significant. Tournesols comes from two words: tourner (to turn) + le sol (the sun). Les tournesols, therefore, are flowers which continually turn their faces sunward. No matter how confined otherwise, their faces turn in whatever direction their source of life and joy moves.

Vincent Van Gogh was that sunflower he painted. However pinned down he was by the spiritual and intellectual rigidities of his society and his own paralyzing weaknesses, his eye was forever focused on the rise and set of the sun. Knowing nothing more than the beauty he had glimpsed, he gave his life and soul to the task of capturing it in paint. How then could he not paint in squiggly lines and bright colours, when the evidence of God’s touch  in creation was vibrating with the energy and pulse that could hardly be contained?

I wish I were such a Christian as Van Gogh was an artist. I would like to blaze with the Life that already indwells me, and set to the “blue and grey” of my circumstances the energy and pulse of God’s brightness that can hardly be contained. I wish I were so clear-hearted as to look beyond the darkening foulness of a world gone wrong, and brave enough to insist with a holy frenzy that the bursting light of God’s Beauty continues to shatter the dark skies, regardless. Van Gogh makes me think again about my reason for being. If not for the fact that I have already glimpsed that numinous Beauty, why am I still here? If not me, the Christian, then in truth, who could possibly live out the poetic life of les tournesols, the single-eyed flowers whose faces turn ever Sonward?

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For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6).

The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it (John1:5).

This was published in a Kairos monograph entitled, Reinventing the Church, pp. 31-32, April 2002.

Recently, my department hosted our external examiner from Calcutta, India during his short stint here to review and assess us. He is an eminent Shakespearean scholar, well-known on English shores and Asian. An Oxbridge man, he told us how he and some friends were thick in the midst of a translation collaboration of Rabindranath Tagore’s works with Oxford Press. So passionate was he that we were duly treated to an enthusiastic reading of Tagore, during which time some ladies from the Bengalee association of Malaysia also came along, and one of them graciously sang for us an evocative song from Tagore’s extensive and impressive corpus … For me, that was afternoon delight … not because I am snooty about culture, but because the whole session was so engaging and involved. Tagore’s poetry and music came to life, words and notation took wing, so to speak. The occasion was in appreciation of an ideal I like, “beauty”.  Of course, I like Indian culture (and food), so perhaps I have too much of a bias here.

But cultural engagement, to me, means just this, that diverse peoples gather round “in appreciation” of something that is so suggestive of the ideal of beauty, or truth. As Romantic poet John Keats said, “Beauty is truth; truth beauty.” Christians should not imagine that we have absolute say over such things. I am such a fine-tuned evangelical that I think I can say this: God is sometimes pleased with the cultural renditions of other people, simply because they celebrate something of his universal attributes, namely beauty and truth.  In fact, between an afternoon of Bengalee Tagore (albeit in translation) and much of what is called contemporary Christian drama or music, I vote Tagore, every time.  

The reason is simple: Christians are always in such a hurry to be proved “relevant” to the present age that we often too hastily discard the heritage of our past. Christians are too busy throwing out what they consider “old-fashioned” in favour of the “new”.  Jingles rather than substantial songs, played out in easy musical phrases and comforting keys, flush with crooning sentimentalism. One-minute books and how-to manuals on “Christian living” rather than the tougher and more enduring beauty of Christian literature (bad word).  Cutesy bible studies rather than attempting the meat of the Bible. “Onward Christian soldier”? Hardly. We are an easy kill for all that is destructive in contemporary culture.

Tagore won the Nobel Prize in 1913 for Gitanjali, his English translation of some of his own poems. “Gitanjali” in Bengalee means “song offerings” or “offering of songs”. It is a delightful word, and for Christians, it ought to speak volumes. Gitanjali must affect us as a pebble thrown into a stream, causing the water to ripple. The ripples will always move outwards in ever-widening circles, never inwards in a life-denying introspection.  We, of all people, have the true song in our hearts, composed of the excellencies of our God, celebrating the liberty and freedom to which we have been called.  In talking about cultural engagement, Christians have a message that is at once attractive and pure, elevated and pleasing, beautiful in every way. The pebble of our offering, both to God and others of our mortal ilk, is the artistic and creative transformation of culture to something akin to the “music of the spheres”, and the songs of the angels. I take the musical metaphor, but you can supply any other cultural metaphor and it would still fit, whether dance, or art, or literature, or embroidery, or culinary skills, or travel … you choose.  Imbued with the life and breath of God’s Spirit, the forming and transforming of our society and culture will open up new vistas of engagement for us, so that the purity and depth of the Gospel will be infused for others with the same aromatic fragrance that it has for us as Christians.

For me, to be a Christian is to be among the richest and deepest people ever made. I say this with honest hope because God has seen in us such visions of healing and beauty, even if it will take our lifetime to realize his ambition. But cultural formation and engagement requires, firstly, our own awareness of the immeasurable worth of this heritage and faith, and the incredible elasticity of its nature in the work and process of integration in our lives/cultural context.  If we do not or cannot understand the flexibility and toughness of what we believe in, we will find it all too difficult to go beyond the staidness of our safe but humdrum existence. But I hold that life is incredibly exciting; and Christian life is infinitely enjoyable and pleasurable. 

It is true at the same time that Christians are merely pilgrims of the way. Our home is somewhere else, someplace other than here. Exile is a metaphor and image common to both Jewish and Christian understandings. Yet I would like to be provocative and propose that we be a troupe of carnival artistes, passing through each deadened town and city with the colour, banners and skill that only a life of celebration could ever hope to understand and grasp. As travellers, we would do well to remember that the Jews in Babylonian exile were urged to sing songs by the Babylonian rivers. Where they wept and mourned for Zion, God the Pied Piper of the New Jerusalem now reminds us that we already inhabit his new kingdom; that for our tears, he has already begun to give us joy; for our brokenness, we already experience something of his health; for our suffering, some measure of his waiting glory. With the weight of such promises bearing down on us, we can only err on the side of incorrigible hopefulness and dogged optimism that even in a strange land and a far country, we can be found singing the Lord’s Song.  Gitanjali remains the gift we can give to God, composed not so much of poetic words or musical notation, but of the strings and sinews of our lives.

This was first published in a Kairos monograph entitled, Engaging Wider Society, pp. 29-30, August 2003.