Some have blamed this push toward individualism and away from tradition as a by-product of the Reformation. One of the principles of the Reformation was semper reformanda: always be reforming. When I was first taught this phrase, it was explained as referring to each generation of the church needing a reformation because the church is prone to error. But the subtext I read into the phrase made me, the individual, the arbiter of correctness. For Protestants, it’s easy to be a nontraditioned people. We’re individuals, after all. The evangelical Christianity I knew seemed obsessed with the trendy at the expense of the traditional. The music was new and used hip styles. New pastors with fashionable clothing were in, while gray heads and suits were out. And priestly vestments weren’t even considered. We’re not Catholic!
But in myself and in the young people I teach, I have found a desire for roots and tradition. I remember trying to figure out something simple on my own: dating. Typically, this is an individual effort, a “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” sort of thing. Yet I remember being exasperated at the end of my dating trials and errors; most trials were indeed errors. I needed someone to tell me what to do, to give me some guidance. By the end, I knew enough not to trust myself.
The same was true in the church. I had seen people trying to reinvent Christianity, to make it more palatable and accessible. There were shallow reasons given for the practices in the church. I’d ask, “Why do we do it this way?” The response was, “Because it’s the way we’ve done it”—for the past fifteen years, which was how long the church had been around. There was no biblical intentionality or historical precedence. There were no theological reasons. This was just the way the pastor did it. And I thought that there must be more to Christianity than this.
In the search for stability, I needed the “democracy of the dead,” to use a phrase from the theologian G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton claims, “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.”5 As I’ve begun my teaching career, I’ve seen what a ballast tradition can provide. If we look only to those walking about, we will be limited in our vision and action. I’ve found a great freedom in not having to reinvent the Christian faith.
Tradition, as it turns out, creates social continuity and personal density. Social continuity comes through the establishment of a language that is common to the past and the present day. This language connects past moments to the present moment in a way that makes actions and thoughts intelligible. Tradition gives us a language to speak and practices to inherit. Respecting those who have come before us is a way to respect those who come after us. It gives us guardrails so we don’t swerve off the road.
Along with social continuity, tradition also provides personal density. “Personal density” refers to our ability to remain steadfast. Our culture is prone to live in the moment (#YOLO). Access to information is overwhelming, and trends change as quickly as the nightly news. Considering this reality, Alan Jacobs proposes that the greater one’s understanding of the past is, the greater the personal density one has. He writes, “Personal density is directly proportional to ‘temporal bandwidth,’” which Jacobs defines as “the width of your present, your now. . . . The more you dwell in the past and in the future, the thicker your bandwidth.”6 Personal density allows us not to be “tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes” (Eph. 4:17), or by whatever the latest outrage on social media is. Tradition—knowledge of the past—brings a kind of stability and maturity in a shifting and changing world.
The Christianity in which I was formed seemed fifteen years old. But what about the two-thousand-year history of the church? Do we reject the first fifteen hundred years because “that’s Catholic”? As a Protestant, do I have a tradition that is only five hundred years old? That’s better, I guess, than fifteen years. But are there more ancient resources we can retrieve that deepen and enliven our lived Christianity?
This book answers that last question in the affirmative. Our resources are deeper and richer than fifty years or five hundred years. We have two thousand years of church history that provide a social culture and density from which we can draw. This is the work of retrieval. Though I write as a Protestant, I explore different traditions and include exemplars beyond Protestant Christianity. I don’t think Christianity began with the Reformation. I am gladly Protestant, but I also recognize that Catholic and Orthodox people and practices have something to teach us. They are our brothers and sisters, our fathers and mothers in the faith.
When I was growing up, a “quiet time” or devotional time in the morning was the most suggested practice for spiritual growth. That’s about all I knew to do. A vibrant Christian has a quiet time. Quiet times can often seem like the silver bullet for all ailments. In sin? “Quiet time.” Feeling anxious? “More personal devotions.” Angry? “Get alone with God.” To be sure, I am all for quiet time. I highly recommend it. But I also want to suggest other ways of formation beyond the standard solution. I want to introduce you to the rich history of Christian practices to give you more tools for your spiritual formation tool belt.
Students do not have to run to Buddhism to find resources for deep meditation and contemplative practices; Christianity has them. They don’t need to run to communism to care about the poor; Christianity has the theological resources to love the lowly and the exemplars who have been faithful to that task. People don’t need to join a bohemian commune to love the earth; there are deep ecological and environmental wells to draw from in Christianity. Those disenfranchised by the new and novel can go back to the ancient to find depth and breadth of Christian expression. Before we run to something else, we need to explore our own traditions.
INTRODUCING THE TRANSCENDENTALS
In classical philosophy, for anything to be real it must share some aspect of truth, goodness, and beauty. If something were completely evil, false, and ugly, it would not exist; it would be robbed of its substance, its realness. The term “transcendentals” points to the Transcendent One in which all things are made. For Plato, the Transcendent was the world of perfect Forms. For the Christian, God is the perfect Form to which all things conform—the All-True, All-Good, and All-Beautiful, holding all three qualities in fullness and perfect unity. Part of what it means to be made in the image of God is to share these divine attributes of truth, goodness, beauty, and unity. Created beings have more or less of these aspects, but to exist at all is to share in the Transcendent. As such, no person is pure evil or pure ugliness. All things—from trees to birds to human beings—have semblances of truth, goodness, and beauty. And as the crown of creation, humanity images the Transcendent most closely and clearly.
The human powers to understand truth, goodness, and beauty correspond to our human nature: the mind, the will, and the heart. The mind knows the truth. The will chooses the good. The heart loves the beautiful. Traditionally, these qualities have been the core tenets of a liberal-arts curriculum: strengthening our human capacities to know, choose, and love by drawing on the best of human history. Part of being authentically human is growing in our capacities for truth, goodness, and beauty. We all hunger for these fundamental aspects of our being. To be real persons, substantive persons, it’s necessary for us to develop our capacities in the transcendentals: to be more authentically true, more genuinely good, more compellingly beautiful, and more integrated people. A Short Guide to Spiritual Formation is a book about being. As such, my modest definition of spiritual formation is this: the process whereby the soul becomes more conformed to the image of God. The transcendentals are like food for our souls. Our modern world wants to fragment and segment us into bits and pieces that can be analyzed and mastered. I’m suggesting a way of formation that seeks to put us together and make us whole. Each transcendental is its own note, but together they form a single, unified major chord. Rather than being in competition, each transcendental plays in harmony with the others. If we recover truth, goodness, and beauty—along with community—our souls can be shaped into fuller being.
THE ROAD AHEAD
A Short Guide to Spiritual Formation is divided into four parts: truth, goodness, beauty, and community. Truth, goodness, and beauty broaden the soul’s capacity for divine participation, and community deepens and integrates each in turn. Each transcendental provides a different stream or tradition of formation to channel our unrest. The transcendental streams aren’t in competition but rather are more akin to tools in a tool belt. I want to provide a framework you can use in exploring richer and deeper traditions in case you ever become stagnant or think, Is this all there is?
Each part of the book will share certain commonalities. In structure, they each have three chapters. The first chapter will focus on the biblical precedents for the transcendental. The story of the Bible can be told in a way that highlights a certain transcendental, and the Lord’s Supper showcases a distinctive of that transcendental. The second chapter is the historical, philosophical, and practical outworking of that stream of formation. My desire is for you to see that each transcendental not only has roots in Scripture but also has tradition that grounds it. The final chapter of each part features one exemplar from that stream. To riff on Saint Ambrose, God saves not by argument and reason but by lives.7 We need to see what a life of faith looks like, so this last chapter presents a saint who enriches and enlivens the tradition discussed in that part of the book. We learn the Christian life through imitation and under the direction of a master. As Stanley Hauerwas posits, “The problem lies not in knowing what we must do, but how we are to do it. And the how is learned only by watching and following.”8 These exemplars show what a life of faithfulness looks like in different times and places—in persecution, in wealth and comfort, in slavery, in power, in poverty, in the marginalized status of a minority. The communion of saints helps us see ourselves as part of God’s story as we watch and follow.
In his famous book The Seven Storey Mountain, Thomas Merton debates with himself about what he should be. A friend suggests that he should want to be a saint.9 I think that’s good advice. Saints take different forms. There’s no single prescription for how sainthood happens or what it will look like. Defining goals too narrowly can be restrictive to a life of sainthood. The traditions of truth, goodness, beauty, and community lay out a broad life of holiness where we can find where we fit in.
Part 1 of this book highlights truth. The church is to “contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). Faith is something heard and understood. Theology, thinking God’s thoughts after him (in the words of Johannes Kepler), is an intellectual affair. From this theological foundation and a gospel centrality, good works flow. But if we get the gospel wrong, as Saint Paul shows in Galatians, then our whole foundation is flawed. Theology helps us stay grounded in the gospel. Saint Augustine, a fourth-century North African bishop, is the exemplar of truth, as he has a famous conversion story, and this conversion drove him to defend a pure faith with theological rigor.
Part 2 explores goodness. The Protestant temptation is to think that the pursuit of goodness leads to a works righteousness. However, living a life of virtue requires habits and rituals. God is concerned not just with our minds but also with our bodies and our lives. Part of being a Christian is growing in Christlikeness by bearing the fruits of the Spirit: putting off sin and putting on virtue. The exemplar is Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement of the twentieth century, whose work included caring for the homeless and destitute.
Part 3 focuses on beauty. While the goal of part 1 is to know God and the goal of part 2 is to be like Christ, the goal of the beauty tradition is to see God. In essence, we become what we behold, so we ought to seek the face of Jesus, in whose image we are being formed. Being detached from things that draw us away from God, we can attend to and contemplate his compelling beauty. Part 3 closes with a brief introduction to the life and work of the mystic Saint Teresa of Ávila, a sixteenth-century Spanish monastic.
Lest one think that spiritual formation is an individual affair, part 4 deepens the broad formation of the earlier parts by attending to community. I take the liberty of terming the transcendental of unity as “community,” since Jesus prays for unity for the community that he establishes in his church (John 17). Whereas the previous three traditions emphasize the broadening of an individual person, community roots the individual in a place and among a people. This final part emphasizes the necessity of commitment to a local church and to stability in place. Because we are embodied individuals enmeshed in a web of relational and cosmic connections, part of the call of formation is nourishing the people and places that have nourished us. The German martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer is utilized as the exemplar of communal commitment.
CONCLUSION
Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd. He proclaims that “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” (John 10:10). The witness of the church is the witness to this life, this real, joyful, full life, a life most alive to life. We need the truth if we are to know God rightly and develop true affection for him. We need goodness if we are to develop a practical faith and intentional spirituality. We need beauty if we are to experience God on an intimate and deep level. We need relational bonds if we are to be known and loved. This book serves as an introduction to broadening and deepening our common faith.
We live in a world that is restless and discontented. We’re not at home here, which is another way to say the same thing. Part of this restlessness is the human condition. We are always pilgrims, homeless and in search of a homeland. The spiritual writer Henri Nouwen points out that the search for rest presumes we have found or have access to truth, goodness, and beauty already. He asks, “How can I search for beauty or truth unless that beauty and truth are already known to me in the depth of my heart?”10 Likewise, the band U2 sings a song called “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” I think many who listen to it relate to this longing. We know we’re looking for something but are still searching and still have unrest about the fullness of this elusive thing.
The goodness of spirituality is that we do not have to find the transcendentals. The Transcendent has already found us.
At the end of The Giving Tree, the children’s book I mentioned earlier, the child comes back to that used-up tree. All the good gifts that the child abused are gone: no apples, no limbs, no trunk. The boy has sold the apples, built a house with the limbs, and used the trunk to build a boat to sail away in. All that remains is a stump. The last thing the tree has left to offer is a place to sit and rest.
As our hearts experience restlessness, God invites us to rest in him. We can use God’s good gifts, but they are vanity unless we learn to rest. In this life, satiation will always be temporary. I wrote this book to help Christians find little stumps along the way of life. I pray A Short Guide to Spiritual Formation brings you a rest and stability that you’ve been yearning for.
1. Rolheiser, Holy Longing, 5.
2. Augustine, Confessions 1.1.1 (Chadwick, 3).
3. Pascal, Pensées, 425.
4. Lewis, Made for Heaven, 26.
5. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, 45.
6. Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead, 19.
7. “But it was not by dialectic that it pleased God to save His people; ‘for the kingdom of God consisteth in simplicity of faith, not in wordy contention’” (Ambrose, On the Christian Faith 1.5.42, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 10:207).
8. Hauerwas, Community of Character, 131.
9. Merton, Seven Storey Mountain, 260.
10. Nouwen, Life of the Beloved, 44.
Part 1
Truth
