7. The Beatific Vision: Becoming What You Behold 91
8. The Road to Transformation and Union: Attention, Contemplation, and Detachment 103
9. Teresa of Ávila: Exploring the Interior Castle 121
PART 4: THE UNITED LIFE: LIVING IN COMMUNITY 133
10. Belonging Together: Longing for Community 135
11. The Web of Existence: Cosmic Connections 147
12. Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Neighbor Love and Life Together 167
Conclusion: Whole Persons and Holy Persons 179
Acknowledgments 185
Bibliography 188
Index 198
Back Cover 203
Foreword
I once knew a man who would end every conversation with the words “Be good.” At first, I found this odd. After all, “Be good” is what a mother might say to her child as she sends that child off the first day of school or to summer camp; it’s not usually what friends and coworkers say to each other at the end of a phone call or after a visit in the aisle of a grocery store. For him, though, it filled the place that “Aloha” would in Hawaii or “Come see us” would in my hometown—a kind way to signal well wishes at the end of a talk. Most of us don’t say “Be good” to acquaintances in any context, though, in some sense, that’s exactly what we expect and hope. We want the people around us to be faithful, responsible, and honest. When you think of your own flaws, you may well find a way to justify them or to contextualize them or even ignore them. But I would almost guarantee that none of you ever started down a wrong path in life by saying to yourself, “I am setting out on a journey to vice.” In some sense, we all want to pursue goodness, but often we have no idea how to do so. And sometimes, we are confused about what “good” even means.
That’s not just a problem for us with our behavior. For those of us who are Christians, it’s also often an internal skirmish when it comes to what some people call the “spiritual disciplines.” For lots of us, prayer and contemplation and Bible reading are hard. We find our attention distracted or the clocks whirling by with activities, and we wonder, “How do other people do this with such ease? What’s wrong with me?” We add to that our lives together in churches. Some people wonder, “Am I really a good church member since I just don’t know how to get to know people, much less what gifts I would have with which to serve?”
This book by Alex Sosler is not a guilt-inducing to-do list from a guru or a “life coach.” Instead, this book helps us to think through just what’s in the way of our pursuit of virtue—or, better, of Christlikeness. The book doesn’t hit us with abstractions but with specific, concrete counsel on how to recognize and to pursue truth, goodness, beauty, and community. You will not leave this short book burdened down with a sense of all the things you can’t ever seem to do. You’ll instead start to see the possibility of how you, in your own life, can seek holiness and formation. The book neither leaves us with an exhausting and counter-gospel legalism nor with an exhausting and counter-gospel sloth. The author knows that we don’t ascend the ladder to God by performing better with our prayers or our works. God has come to us, and the Ladder has a name, Jesus of Nazareth. The sort of obedience we seek starts with freedom, not with indebtedness.
Be good.
Russell Moore
Introduction
I search for rest in all the wrong places.
I’ve sought rest in ambitious success, in getting things done. I’ve thought that after the next accomplishment, things will slow down, and then I’ll be happy. I’ve sought rest in family harmony. After this move, after a child gets to such and such age, then I’ll be satisfied. After this experience, I can settle down. Peace is always around the corner. I’ve sought satiation in financial stability. Once I get so much money, then I will rest. Like the child in the book The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein, who uses all of a tree’s resources—apples, limbs, and trunk—until it’s a mere stump, I use all of life, abusing good gifts, all in search of happiness.
As I look out into the world, I see the same restlessness at work. Wars are fought with the drive for more: more land, more oil, more resources, more people. Conflict comes with unhinged desires: I want what I want when I want it, and this person is keeping me from my desire. I see people with passionate resolve that leads to pain in themselves and in others. I see young people longing for affirmation, for someone to notice them, for someone to like them.
I’m surrounded by restless craving. We all have hidden hungers.
What about you? What do you want? What are you seeking? How’s that going?
Perhaps you thought a relationship with the opposite sex would bring you happiness. But you end up stuck or broken if that relationship fails. So, you try more relationships, thinking that may do the trick. But after each new fling, you feel more destitute than before.
Or maybe you have sought satisfaction in earning the best grades and being the smartest in the room. And all that learning made you feel more insecure, like you would never be smart enough, never good enough.
Ronald Rolheiser observes, “Spirituality is what we do with our unrest.”1 Either this searching leads to greater integration with God, ourselves, our neighbor, and the world, or it leads to disintegration. Life is driven by pangs of hunger—for love, health, beauty, truth, and wholeness. The trouble we run into is our misdiagnoses of the causes of hunger and our wrong ideas of what food will truly nourish and satisfy. Even if we are well-intentioned, we can look for rest in the wrong places.
This idea of hunger and fulfillment is so common in Christian circles that it almost becomes a cliché. And as with all clichés, so trite and commonplace at first glance, there is a deep mystery to satiation.
Saint Augustine points to this hunger as he begins his Confessions: “You have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.”2 He goes on to describe our desires as being as many as the hairs on our heads rather than a single desire that unites us. Our desires go from pleasure to pleasure, disintegrating us, leading us away from ourselves and the God who made us for himself, leaving us in a perpetual state of restlessness.
Blaise Pascal describes our unrest as the God-shaped vacuum in the human heart that only Jesus can fill.3 We can try to stuff it with things or pleasures or encounters or travel or experience, but none of these created things do the trick. Try as we might, we can’t fill a Creator-sized vacuum with created things.
C. S. Lewis believes that in our search for rest our desire is not strong enough. He claims, “We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”4 God offers a luxurious vacation at an all-inclusive resort. But on the way, we get distracted with some mud that we imagine is more satisfying. God is cool, but a Tesla would be nice too.
These are the typical “worldly” pleasures that you may hear about in a sermon. But have you ever sought rest or fulfillment in the right places—or at least what others told you were right places—and found that they left you wanting? Have you read massive systematic theologies or spiritual formation books that had all the answers but discovered that they didn’t cause the God-contentedness you sought? Have you practiced your daily personal devotions but found you did not seem to be growing closer to God? Have you tried being good, genuinely good, but ended up floundering and feeling like more of a failure? I’ve sought those kinds of rest too. These experiences may make us ask, Am I the problem?
THE GENESIS
This book began when a student critiqued a college class I teach on spiritual formation. Many people who have attended a college or university are familiar with the end-of-semester form: evaluate this class and this teacher. Typically, teachers can do two things with such feedback: ignore it or let it eat them alive. Praise can lead to pride, and the slightest criticism to despair. Naturally, I avoid them.
But sometimes I can’t help myself. In one instance I looked and saw that a student complained about my class. Though the evaluation was anonymous, I had a pretty good idea who it was. The negative comments irked me, as they usually do. I had spent time with this particular student and knew the semester had been difficult, as they were struggling with personal issues. And after the time and effort I gave to this student, I was hurt to read their critique of a class that I had hoped would be an anchor in otherwise turbulent waters.
I desired the class to be experiential. What good is a class on spiritual formation if students aren’t spiritually formed? And how does one nurture spiritual formation without doing something? So the class was oriented toward practice. We did in-class activities. I assigned devotional readings. We broke into accountability groups. We underwent self-evaluation.
But the student did not like the class—at all. Among other things, they found this particular class a waste of time and didn’t learn anything. In fact, they wanted more lectures and less practice. To be clear, my goal in the classroom is for people to learn things and feel that their time and effort are well spent, so this critique stung a bit. And the feedback was surprising; since when did college students want more lectures?
But after some reflection, I decided this student was right. I did need to spend some time reflecting on the traditions behind the practices of formation. Doing the practices without understanding where they come from or how they fit together can still be formative. Taking inventory of our souls in the presence of another certainly won’t hurt, even if we don’t know the origin of the exercise. Likewise, meditation and prayer and Bible study will cultivate a deeper spirituality even in those who do not know the history of those practices. But knowing where they find their roots can deepen our appreciation for the whole of Christianity. This rootedness can provide stability when spirituality seems more like unrest than rest.
A RETRIEVAL PROJECT
My teaching brings me into contact with students who are at times in despair over the state of evangelical Christianity. Their frustrations are something I can relate to. I came to faith in a religious atmosphere that emphasized the new and the novel and rejected tradition. Traditional church structures were stale and dead. I felt like authorities or mentors were there to take advantage of me or manipulate me rather than to be stabilizing forces or to care for me. I had to make something of myself without trusting anyone or anything that came before me, and I had an obligation to define my own conception of happiness without reference to any other tradition or authority. This mentality left me with few resources to guide my life. I had shallow puddles but no deep wells. The shallowness of these resources was a problem, since defining happiness is a hard task. Depending on myself alone, I didn’t have the resources to make wise decisions. I needed authority, tradition, and rules that would help me make sense of my place and myself. I was not as independent as I liked to imagine.
