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jenny_islanderI am reading the main text today.
The loudest voices in modern media-oriented Christianity in the U.S. claim persecution so often that they have become the boy who cried wolf. Barriers to Christian practice do exist, but they are much more pervasive, and more dangerous, than being greeted over the coffee counter with "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." In this chapter, Foster describes three of them.
After the opening quote by Donald Coggan, Foster says, "Superficiality is the curse of our age." Foster identifies superficiality with "the doctrine of instant satisfaction." So I would say rather that impatience is the curse of our age. We're always after results, the sooner and more obvious the better! The possibility that some things simply take time and effort to do properly has become so foreign that it's easy to bamboozle people into anything that looks at first glance like an instant solution to their problem. This is not purely a modern issue, but the ever-accelerating commercial cycle--invent a need, fill it, then invent another need, and so on--has worsened this tendency. So has the unending slithering of work into every waking hour of our lives. (Note that Foster wrote this book in the late 1970s. Consider the ways in which daily life has changed since then!) Impatience is paired with reluctance to accept that change can be inward and subtle. We have all seen the exaltation of weight loss for women--an immediately visible change--over better endurance, better flexibility, better sleep, more strength, reduced chronic pain, and other actual benefits of exercise. Consider also the plethora of ads for products that promise to help women lose that weight fast.
Impatience (or, as Foster puts it, superficiality) has infected American Christianity as well. But spiritual disciplines can't be packaged and sold like this. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you a bill of goods--even, perhaps especially, if it has a Jesus-fish logo. They are a matter of daily practice over a lifetime, each day anew. Foster calls himself a beginner years after his congregation began practicing spiritual disciplines together. The resulting transformation can be profound, but is generally incremental. Some of us have moments of sudden enlightenment; most of us need years to realize that looking back over our lives has become looking down.
When Foster wrote Celebration of Discipline, popular culture was still strongly materialistic in its views on the cosmos, although it had become safer for scientists to say publicly that "we cannot be confined to a space-time box," as he puts it. So Foster identifies this pop-sci materialistic attιtude as another barrier to Christian practice. I think that popular culture has changed since then. Instead of truth being seen as a matter of material existence only, truth has become a matter of emotional weight. If you feel very strongly about something, it's true. If you have to put your feelings aside and carefully study something, it isn't true and is probably an attempt to get at you somehow. If it doesn't make you feel at all, it is bmud and made up by a bmud person. Only fakes and patsies say, "Hey, wait a minute, let's slow down and think about this." We can see the results in the regime we are enduring today.
This too has infected American Christianity. Too many preachers train their followers to continually look for "the Devil, prowling around like a lion, searching for someone to devour" (1 Peter 5:8), not in order to resist evil in community with "fellow believers throughout the world" (verse 9), not in order to look forward to Christ's restoring, settling, strengthening, and grounding presence that is promised after troubles (verse 10), but in order to take part in exciting spiritual combat and claim victory--through Christ, of course. Christianity becomes a matter of looking for enemies in order to get that high of victory again. If there are no enemies at hand, it's easy to make some up. Meanwhile, real evil, which must be studied soberly and resisted daily and in community with patience, often goes ignored. Or glorified--if the evildoer promises enemies to gloriously defeat.
Even Christians who are not preoccupied by these snipe hunts mistake strong emotion for truth. As best I can tell--I was not raised in a denomination that talked like this--to be convicted of something by the Holy Spirit means to have a very strong feeling about it. As if God's voice only counted when God shouted!
Spiritual disciplines demand that you live in the world around you, even if it is not as highly colored as the world of strong emotions. This applies even if you are using emotional experiences to escape a world that is increasingly filled with dread. The people who first developed spiritual disciplines also lived through times of dread. Looking at the moment you are in now and the world within your reach, and quietly listening for what God wants you to do about it, is counter to everything the instillers of dread want you to do. Practicing it is good for you and for the world around you. And it ultimately helps you to satisfy the thirst for the presence of Christ.
The third difficulty Foster identifies is simply practical. He observes that the Bible has nothing to say about the basics of the spiritual disciplines, only the details. This was because everybody knew what the disciplines were. Most of us modern American Christians don't. When we hear the word meditation we think yoga. Fasting? Weight loss. Simplicity? Minimalist aesthetics. Silence? Monks. But for most of the life of the Church, they have been an ordinary part of that life. Foster wants to make them ordinary again. He has read a library of Christian classics and summarized them in Celebration of Discipline for us. Think of this book as the wiki for twelve spiritual disciplines: it is a jumping-off point for deeper knowledge.
The loudest voices in modern media-oriented Christianity in the U.S. claim persecution so often that they have become the boy who cried wolf. Barriers to Christian practice do exist, but they are much more pervasive, and more dangerous, than being greeted over the coffee counter with "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas." In this chapter, Foster describes three of them.
After the opening quote by Donald Coggan, Foster says, "Superficiality is the curse of our age." Foster identifies superficiality with "the doctrine of instant satisfaction." So I would say rather that impatience is the curse of our age. We're always after results, the sooner and more obvious the better! The possibility that some things simply take time and effort to do properly has become so foreign that it's easy to bamboozle people into anything that looks at first glance like an instant solution to their problem. This is not purely a modern issue, but the ever-accelerating commercial cycle--invent a need, fill it, then invent another need, and so on--has worsened this tendency. So has the unending slithering of work into every waking hour of our lives. (Note that Foster wrote this book in the late 1970s. Consider the ways in which daily life has changed since then!) Impatience is paired with reluctance to accept that change can be inward and subtle. We have all seen the exaltation of weight loss for women--an immediately visible change--over better endurance, better flexibility, better sleep, more strength, reduced chronic pain, and other actual benefits of exercise. Consider also the plethora of ads for products that promise to help women lose that weight fast.
Impatience (or, as Foster puts it, superficiality) has infected American Christianity as well. But spiritual disciplines can't be packaged and sold like this. Anybody who tells you otherwise is selling you a bill of goods--even, perhaps especially, if it has a Jesus-fish logo. They are a matter of daily practice over a lifetime, each day anew. Foster calls himself a beginner years after his congregation began practicing spiritual disciplines together. The resulting transformation can be profound, but is generally incremental. Some of us have moments of sudden enlightenment; most of us need years to realize that looking back over our lives has become looking down.
When Foster wrote Celebration of Discipline, popular culture was still strongly materialistic in its views on the cosmos, although it had become safer for scientists to say publicly that "we cannot be confined to a space-time box," as he puts it. So Foster identifies this pop-sci materialistic attιtude as another barrier to Christian practice. I think that popular culture has changed since then. Instead of truth being seen as a matter of material existence only, truth has become a matter of emotional weight. If you feel very strongly about something, it's true. If you have to put your feelings aside and carefully study something, it isn't true and is probably an attempt to get at you somehow. If it doesn't make you feel at all, it is bmud and made up by a bmud person. Only fakes and patsies say, "Hey, wait a minute, let's slow down and think about this." We can see the results in the regime we are enduring today.
This too has infected American Christianity. Too many preachers train their followers to continually look for "the Devil, prowling around like a lion, searching for someone to devour" (1 Peter 5:8), not in order to resist evil in community with "fellow believers throughout the world" (verse 9), not in order to look forward to Christ's restoring, settling, strengthening, and grounding presence that is promised after troubles (verse 10), but in order to take part in exciting spiritual combat and claim victory--through Christ, of course. Christianity becomes a matter of looking for enemies in order to get that high of victory again. If there are no enemies at hand, it's easy to make some up. Meanwhile, real evil, which must be studied soberly and resisted daily and in community with patience, often goes ignored. Or glorified--if the evildoer promises enemies to gloriously defeat.
Even Christians who are not preoccupied by these snipe hunts mistake strong emotion for truth. As best I can tell--I was not raised in a denomination that talked like this--to be convicted of something by the Holy Spirit means to have a very strong feeling about it. As if God's voice only counted when God shouted!
Spiritual disciplines demand that you live in the world around you, even if it is not as highly colored as the world of strong emotions. This applies even if you are using emotional experiences to escape a world that is increasingly filled with dread. The people who first developed spiritual disciplines also lived through times of dread. Looking at the moment you are in now and the world within your reach, and quietly listening for what God wants you to do about it, is counter to everything the instillers of dread want you to do. Practicing it is good for you and for the world around you. And it ultimately helps you to satisfy the thirst for the presence of Christ.
The third difficulty Foster identifies is simply practical. He observes that the Bible has nothing to say about the basics of the spiritual disciplines, only the details. This was because everybody knew what the disciplines were. Most of us modern American Christians don't. When we hear the word meditation we think yoga. Fasting? Weight loss. Simplicity? Minimalist aesthetics. Silence? Monks. But for most of the life of the Church, they have been an ordinary part of that life. Foster wants to make them ordinary again. He has read a library of Christian classics and summarized them in Celebration of Discipline for us. Think of this book as the wiki for twelve spiritual disciplines: it is a jumping-off point for deeper knowledge.
