Wednesday Wonder
There is a false dichotomy, a false portrayal of a polarization, that has been bantering itself about religious periodicals of late. What is this misleading either-or, this presentation of supposed opposites?
Perhaps twenty years ago a movement rose up from the sea and it reclaimed a simple but profound aspect of the Christian faith: spiritual practices shape the individual’s faith and life of the church in profound ways. Who can argue with that? Models like The Eight Keys of Discipleship find their origin in this one insight. But why did such a movement rise up?
It rose up because of a vacuum and that vacuum came from an exclusive emphasis on the act of believing, analyzing, and knowing. If I study until the metaphorical cows come home, discuss the intricacies of scripture and theology, and pursue the truth that glues the universe together, and have not practice of what I preach, I am a clanging cymbal. It was a counterweight needed to balance the religious scales.
Some communities have always leaned more toward practices of the faith, even centering their church’s source of unity around it. For instance, what holds Anglicans together is not so much orthodoxy – uniformity in thoughts, beliefs and doctrines, but orthopraxy – commonly accepted and shared practices of the faith: The liturgy, the unified prayer book, the regularized ministry of the bishops – all these regularized practices contribute to a unified common life.
The re-emergence of spiritual practices balanced the too thought/belief oriented reality of many churches. And this great compensation reached into worship, prayer life, spiritual disciplines, social action, service and generally the way one viewed keeping a faithful life. There are certain things we do that shape who we become. Without them we become something else.
A recent push back has surfaced a corrective to the corrective: If we focus exclusively on practices then we are vulnerable to becoming “works” oriented; believing that our activity can save us, that if we do enough we might justify ourselves before God. I think there is some truth to that. The down side of a practices-only preoccupation is too much focus on me and my response, and not enough on the One to whom the practices are meant to take me. If I’m so focused on the way I pray that I forget why I’m praying in the first place, then I’ve missed it.
All of this represents an attempt to find the balance when the pendulum happens to sway too far to one side or the other. We all know that it’s both, that what we believe matters and that the path to God is littered with good practices. It is both of these things. And to posit one side or the other is indeed a false dichotomy.
I like the thoughts of the Sufi master, Rabia, when she said,
When God said, “My hands are yours,”
I saw that I could heal any creature in this world;
I saw that the divine beauty in each heart
is the root
of all time and space.
Until we know that God lives in us
and we can see Him there
a great poverty
we suffer.
(Love Poems from God, Penguin, 2002, p. 19)
At our best, in the spiritual life, there is a union, a harmony, between our awareness of God and the way it gets embodied in us. When our selves are divided what we know is somehow separated from our hands, our bodies, what we do, as though they live in two separate rooms of the same house. The truth is that there is one room and when we are in it what we believe and know is reflected in the spiritual practices we hold, and the spiritual practices we hold will reflect the truth that we know. They are one, not two.
When we are at our best, that is.
