Theology Isn’t Enough, We Need Spiritual Formation

It was the spirituality of the Church that attracted me first to Orthodoxy.

By spirituality, I mean the whole package of the Orthodox Christian life: not only Liturgy and theology, but fasting, icons, art, architecture and music. Truth be told, even though I became Orthodox later in life, I also find the various and sundry ethnic customs (at least in small doses) to be life-giving.

From a more systematic point of view, what I was attracted to was the anthropological vision of Eastern Christianity. Above all, it was the idea that salvation as theosis, that is deification or participation in Divine Life and the spiritual life as therapeutic, that really captured my heart.

Begging your indulgence, I’ll skip the examples, and simply say in recent years I’ve come to the rather uncomfortable conclusion that the things which most attracted me to the Eastern Church are honored more in the gap then in practice by most Orthodox Christians.

As I have thought and prayed about this state of affairs, I have found my own priesthood more and more concerned with the spiritual formation of the laity. Especially in the parish, it is spiritual formation, which is most neglected in the life of the Church or so, I would say based on my own pastoral experience and my conversations with both clergy and laity.

What, you might ask, do I mean by spiritual formation? Simply, spiritual formation is the art and science of helping people shape their lives according to the Tradition of the Church in light of their own vocation and the concrete circumstances in which they live. Or, to put it more simply, spiritual formation is about the application of faith to daily life.

This then becomes the central question of my own ministry as a priest and scholar: Together with the whole Church, how do I help the people Christ has entrusted to my care apply the faith and spirituality of the Church to their daily lives?

Answering this question in practice is significantly more involved than simply celebrating the various liturgical services of the Church and teaching people the catechism. Yes, the services and the catechism are important—but their importance is structural. They provide us with the grammar and vocabulary of the Christian life to be sure and so are essential. But as anyone who has tried to learn a foreign language (and I have failed to learn, in order, Spanish, German, Latin, Hebrew and Greek), competency, much less fluency, requires much more than simply knowing grammar and vocabulary. As for eloquence—while this requires that we not simply think in German, for example, but do so “thoughtlessly”—that is, without effort, naturally and fearlessly.

And this brings me back to the formation of the laity (and we ought not to forget, since we draw our clergy from the laity—a deficit in lay formation means a later deficiency in the spiritual formation and leadership provided by the clergy for the laity). While the tradition of the Orthodox Church is almost unimaginably rich, it seems to me that we seriously neglect the formation of our laity (and so necessarily of our clergy, but that is for another day). While some would object to this, I would simply point to the findings of the recent Pew Charitable Trust study of religion in America. Almost a third of those baptized as infants leave the Church as adults. Only about a third of all Orthodox Christians attend Liturgy on a weekly basis. And how can we think we are succeeding in the formation of the laity when over half those who joined the Orthodox Church as adults will eventually leave?

Whatever may be the tradition moral teaching of the Church, the findings of the Pew Survey reports that we are, in the main, a pro-choice and pro-gay rights community (these later two, I should add, have not gone unnoticed by those outside the Church. See for example the posts found in the Catholic blog The Black Cordelias, here and here.) Combined all this with the relatively low rates of participation in Holy Communion and even fewer who come to Holy Confession and a picture of a spiritual weak laity comes quickly into focus.

Somehow, for all that we talk about the Fathers, about being the Church that never changes, about being the True Church and holding to the Historic Christian faith where are found the fullness of the means of salvation, for all that we easily, even glibly, point out the failures of Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Mainline Protestants, Evangelicals Christians, in practice Orthodox Christians are often no better and in some case worse.

As I said in an earlier post on preaching, spiritual formation needs to be Christ-centered and systematic. It must also take into account the unique vocation and life circumstances of the person and/or community. Too much of what we do, I fear, is not done systematically and done with only a vague understanding of the life circumstances of the laity. As I pointed out in an earlier post on the response of the Orthodox Church to same-sex marriage, to simply assert that an issue is not compatible with the tradition of the Church, or, as the Orthodox Peace Fellowship did in response to the US invasion of Iraq did with the just war doctrine, assert that a given moral issue is not addressed in the tradition, is insufficient. As with Bishop Hilarion argument about theology so to the pastoral life with the Church: “It must be patristic, faithful to the spirit and vision of the Fathers, ad mentem Patrum. Yet it also must be neo-patristic, since it is to be addressed to the new age, with its own problems and queries.”

Orthodox spiritual formation is, or rather should be, both patristic and neo-patristic. Especially as it pertains to historical, dogmatic, and liturgical matters we excel as a community on the patristic side of the question. But we have very far to go in fulfilling the “neo-patristic” dimension of our tradition, especially as it pertains to parish ministry.

In the next few post, I hope to address this lacuna in Orthodox practice by looking at (1) the contribution of the social and human sciences to spirituality,(2) the practical elements of spiritual formation in groups, and (3) some ecumenical possibilities that I think are worth exploring.

As always, your comments, questions and criticism are not only welcome, but encouraged.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

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Unless noted otherwise, everything posted here is © 2009 Gregory R Jensen.

In Our Beginning We Find Our End

Summer, 2008 will end for me in much the same way it began—with my serving the funeral of a friend.

In May, I served the funeral of Khouriya Joanne Abdallah, the wife of Fr John Abdallah. The service itself was large, 8 bishops, 20 (or more) priests, several deacons, and over 200 people in the congregation.

Tomorrow I will serve the funeral for another friend, Charlene Cannon. Like Joanne, Charlene lived with cancer for many years—for almost the whole of the 15 years I’ve known her in fact. And like Joanne, Charlene was usually cheerful and optimistic in the face of her illness.

Unlike Joanne’s funeral, tomorrow’s for Charlene will not be as grand. There will only be two priests serving Divine Liturgy for her funeral, her pastor Fr Jonathan Tobias and me. And yet, for all the service will be smaller, it will be no less significant for that fact. In the Gospel Jesus challenges us: “Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?” He then asks us more directly: “Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?” (Mt 6.26-27)

The great paradox of the Gospel is that our trust in God arises not out of intellectual reflection or study, but from the living sense of our own powerlessness:

“So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? “Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For after all these things the Gentiles seek. For your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you. (vv. 28-33)

St Irenaeus, in his reading of the fall of humanity recorded in Genesis, makes much of the fact that God closes our first parents in “garments of skins.” As did some of the Fathers who would follow him, Irenaeus saw God clothing us with these garments as an act of divine compassion. God eases the burden of my shame. But He does so in a way that will remind me of my powerlessness, my absolute dependence on Him and my relative dependence upon others.

The “garments of skin” are all of those experiences of my own contingency that I would turn away from; primarily sickness and mortality, but also failure and my seeming insignificance in the eyes of the world.

Both Khouriya Joanne and Charlene lived for many years with a more intense experience of the “garments of skins.” Bearing up under their own illnesses as they both did with grace and good humor, allowed God to use their illnesses to transform them those around them.

Thinking about both women, I realize that they were both open-hearted and hospitable. Certainly they were hospitable in the sense of welcoming others into their homes. There was also in a more fundamental hospitality that both embodied however.

This more basic hospitality is one that welcomed people into their hearts and allows their presence there to shape their lives. Hospitality of home allows the host to do for the visitor; hospitality of the heart allows the visitor, to transform the host; to allow visitors in their need and with their own gifts to become someone through whom Christ can redeem their host.

These two hospitalities are not opposed to each other; far from it. But of the two, it is the hospitable heart that is the more demanding ascetically. Why? Unlike a hospitable home, which in Charlene’s case was always welcoming, but cluttered, a hospitable heart must always remain empty of the passions and any hint that I would impose my own will and desires on you. This certainly was the case with both Charlene and Joanne’s hearts—their hearts were always empty in order to make room for others.

Years ago I heard a tape of a lecture given by Fr Henri Nouwen on the spirituality of marriage. Reflecting on the Ark of the Covenant, he pointed out that the cherubim that God ordered to be placed on the Ark faced each other. And it was there, in the empty space between them, where the Glory of God dwelt. Charlene and Khouriya Joanne each in her own way and in a manner compatible with the circumstance of her own life, where able to create in their own hearts that empty space in which God’s glory was able to dwell among us.

These women whose death serve as bookends for the Summer of 2008 embody for me the great mystery of the Christian life—it is only by self-emptying that I am able to fulfill my own unique vocation. How could it be otherwise? What else does the example of Christ tell us but that the Glory of God dwells among us only in human poverty? For me at least, it is easy to lose sight of this. To forget that the failures, the disappointments, the miss opportunities, are all part and parcel of how God makes room in my heart and life for His Glory.

Thinking of how Summer 2008 began and now ends, I am put in mind of the hymns sung at Matins for women martyrs:

Made radiant with the beauty of the noblest contest, you were revealed as shining lamps, Maidens of Christ, with shining rays making resplendent those who cry: Glory to your power, O Lord! You were made beautiful, O Virgins, and radiantly glorified, having loved without limit the glorified Word, wounded by whose love you most valiantly endured the assaults of sufferings. By your intercession with Christ drive away the attack of the varied temptations and dangers of me, who fervently celebrate with you all-festive memorial, O worthy of praise. (Ode 4, Matins for Women Martyrs)

Except for those who knew them, and unlike to the women martyrs of old, Joanne and Charlene, wives and mothers both, lived and died in relative obscurity. And granted as well, the “lawless tyrant” that caused their deaths was illness and not Caesar. But for all these and other differences of time and place between those ancient women martyrs and them, I think Joanne and Charlene both stand now before Christ wearing a martyr’s crown. Not because they suffered Caesar’s lash, but because they suffered with nobility and charity under their long illnesses and in so doing bore witness to

“the beauty of the Bridegroom, with an unswerving intent towards him God-bearing Maidens, you contemplated immortality while in mortal bodies, therefore you are fittingly called blessed. You appeared as spotless lambs in the midst of tyrants like ferocious wolves, overthrowing their savagery, and being brought to Christ as acceptable sacrifices. Together you wove a garland that does not grow old, O Virgin. You attained divine glory and were found worthy, as Martyrs, to obtain a truly unshakeable kingdom with the Martyrs. As you have freedom of access to the Master, holy Virgins, intercede that those who celebrate your memory with love may attain the glory of which you were found worthy and the choir which you attained. .” (Ode 9, Matins for Women Martyrs)

As we sing in the Funeral Service:

May he who has authority over the living and the dead, as immortal King, and who rose from the dead, Christ, our true God, through the intercessions of his most pure and holy Mother, of the holy, glorious and all-praised Apostles, of our venerable and God-bearing fathers, of the holy and glorious forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, of the holy and righteous Lazarus, dead for four days, the friend of Christ, and of all the Saints, establish in the tents of the righteous the soul of his servants Khouriya Joanne and Charlene who have gone from us, give them bith rest in the bosom of Abraham, and number them with the righteous; and have mercy on us and save us, for he is a good God and loves mankind.

Eternal your memory, our sisters, worthy of blessedness and ever-remembered.

In Christ,

+Fr Gregory

Unless noted otherwise, everything posted here is © 2009 Gregory R Jensen.