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jenny_islanderI am reading the main text and the study guide in parallel.
The introduction to the main text was added for the twentieth anniversary edition. It is the author's spiritual autobiography. A spiritual autobiography is a way of laying out the events of one's own life in order to discern the working of God in it. Foster relates his initial foray into pastoral care, his realization that he was failing his flock in a fundamental way, and the urgency imposed by an influx of seekers who he describes with a quote from a Simon & Garfunkel song: "the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on." (Foster never quotes idly, so I urge you to look up the song, "Blessed.") In search of help, he reread the texts, spanning a thousand years or more, that he had been assigned in seminary. He found new understanding and new questions, because "daily [he] was working with heartbreaking, soul-crushing, gut-wrenching human need," and the saints who wrote those books had done--or endured--the same with confidence that Foster himself did not have. He was also blessed with the presence in his congregation of a professional philosopher, who was able to show the congregation and Foster himself how the spiritual classics connect with daily life. And other elders of the Church taught him how to pray and how to fearlessly practice what they were discovering in those old books, even if it flew in the face of modern understanding. And so Foster, with his teachers and the rest of his congregation, "hammer[ed] out on the hard anvil of daily life" the observations that became Celebration of Discipline.
Although the rest of Foster's spiritual autobiography is worth close study, I am trying to keep these posts short. I will turn instead to the introduction to the study guide, which is a good summary of what Foster's first congregation was yearning for. In classical texts it is called the Good Life. Some Christians refer to it as abundant life, paraphrasing Jesus (John 10:10).
Foster allows one page to a discussion of what the Good Life is not. The kind of Good Life that exalts "power, wealth, status, and freedom from all authority," says Foster, is diametrically opposed to the Good Life of classical Christian thought. But if we are trying to extricate ourselves from the modern notion of the Good Life, we also have to evict from our minds the notion that the Christian Good Life consists of a grim little chapel with " 'Thou Shalt Not' writ over the door." (Blake.) Both the have-it-all and the recoil-from-it-all versions of the Good Life have to do with appearances: look enviable and desirable; look pure and perfect. The Good Life Foster is talking about is something else. More on that in the next post.
The introduction to the main text was added for the twentieth anniversary edition. It is the author's spiritual autobiography. A spiritual autobiography is a way of laying out the events of one's own life in order to discern the working of God in it. Foster relates his initial foray into pastoral care, his realization that he was failing his flock in a fundamental way, and the urgency imposed by an influx of seekers who he describes with a quote from a Simon & Garfunkel song: "the sat upon, spat upon, ratted on." (Foster never quotes idly, so I urge you to look up the song, "Blessed.") In search of help, he reread the texts, spanning a thousand years or more, that he had been assigned in seminary. He found new understanding and new questions, because "daily [he] was working with heartbreaking, soul-crushing, gut-wrenching human need," and the saints who wrote those books had done--or endured--the same with confidence that Foster himself did not have. He was also blessed with the presence in his congregation of a professional philosopher, who was able to show the congregation and Foster himself how the spiritual classics connect with daily life. And other elders of the Church taught him how to pray and how to fearlessly practice what they were discovering in those old books, even if it flew in the face of modern understanding. And so Foster, with his teachers and the rest of his congregation, "hammer[ed] out on the hard anvil of daily life" the observations that became Celebration of Discipline.
Although the rest of Foster's spiritual autobiography is worth close study, I am trying to keep these posts short. I will turn instead to the introduction to the study guide, which is a good summary of what Foster's first congregation was yearning for. In classical texts it is called the Good Life. Some Christians refer to it as abundant life, paraphrasing Jesus (John 10:10).
Foster allows one page to a discussion of what the Good Life is not. The kind of Good Life that exalts "power, wealth, status, and freedom from all authority," says Foster, is diametrically opposed to the Good Life of classical Christian thought. But if we are trying to extricate ourselves from the modern notion of the Good Life, we also have to evict from our minds the notion that the Christian Good Life consists of a grim little chapel with " 'Thou Shalt Not' writ over the door." (Blake.) Both the have-it-all and the recoil-from-it-all versions of the Good Life have to do with appearances: look enviable and desirable; look pure and perfect. The Good Life Foster is talking about is something else. More on that in the next post.
