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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 4 (Part 5)

Tue, 04 Nov 2025 18:43:20 GMT

Here are some of the readings Foster suggests on the topic of fasting.

Jesus' example: Luke 4:1-13
What God has to say about fasting: Isaiah 58:1-7 (if you don't read any other passage, read this one!)
Fasting in the early Church: Acts 13:1-3, 14:19-23

Order and Doctrine of a General Fast by John Knox (Scottish Reformed minister and theologian, 1514-1572) on fasting as a universal, not denominational, Christian spiritual discipline

The Holy Exercise of a True Fast by Thomas Cartwright (English Puritan preacher and theologian, 1535-1603) on the difference between fasting for spiritual reasons and for other purposes

Rational Fasting by Arnold Ehret (German-American alternative health practitioner, 1866-1922) on the physical aspects of fasting (note that he is sound on this topic but perhaps not on others)

Shaping History Through Prayer and Fasting by Derek Prince (British-American Charismatic missionary and broadcast preacher, 1915-2003) for historical examples of effective fasts

Fasting: A Neglected Discipline by David R. Smith (American, published 1969) recommended especially for its bibliography

God's Chosen Fast by Arthur Wallis (British itinerant Bible teacher in the house church movement, 1922-1988)--Foster calls this one "the best single book [on Christian fasting] on the market today"

Journal of a Fast by Fredrick W. Smith (American, published 1972) for first-hand experiences of a prolonged spiritual fast by an ordinary Joe and spiritual inquirer

Fasting: The Phenomenon of Self-Denial by Eric N. Rogers (American, published 1976) for a survey of religious, social, and medical fasting worldwide

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 4 (Part 4)

Mon, 03 Nov 2025 22:16:36 GMT

Today's post was to have been about the mechanics of fasting. However, after thinking it over, I decided that the Web is not the appropriate venue for that. Fasting in modern U.S. culture is so tangled up with attempts to stop feeling powerless, with hatred of the body, with obsessive scrupulosity, with delusions of perfection and supreme knowledge. I don't want to see my words recirculating as "one weird trick" in a TikTok. If you want to read a summary of the mechanics of fasting that is supported by many centuries of experience and shared observations, get the book and read it for yourself--the whole thing, mind.

So here's what Foster added in the study guide, which was written years later.

To begin with, here's his summary of the point of fasting as a spiritual discipline:

The central idea in fasting is the voluntary denial of an otherwise normal function for the sake of intense spiritual activity. There is nothing wrong with any normal life-functions; it is simply that there are times when we set them aside in order to concentrate.

This being so, Foster says, we can extract this "central principle" and apply it to other areas of life. Here are his suggestions for fasts that are not about eating.

Fast from social interaction with the intent to examine whether we are thinking of the good of others or only of what good we get out of being with them.

Fast from solitude with the intent to examine whether we are really that comfortable with our own company, or just disdainful or nervous of social interaction.

Fast from "the media," by which Foster means "the newspaper, the radio, the television, the magazines." He wrote this book before we all had home computers, much less smart phones. There is nothing wrong with them, he says, but "It has always amazed me that many people seem incapable (or at least unwilling) to go through an entire day without concentrating on a single thing." In order to hear what God has to say, we need to stop distracting ourselves.

Separately from the above, he suggests "times of fasting from the telephone." This in the era of landlines. "The telephone is a wonderful invention, but it must not control us." Wise words.

Living in a state in which billboards are (or were) legal, Foster suggests fasting from them too. Specifically, he dislikes "bigger-than-life pictures of foxy ladies and well-fed babies." I think he means advertising in general. It's even more difficult to escape advertising now than it was then. But if you can't permanently remove it from your life--because, say, it's a billboard you have to drive past--Foster suggests forming a habit of thinking of something else as it passes by. Pick a social justice issue to bring to mind instead.

Finally, Foster says, we should "discover times to fast from our gluttonous consumer culture that we find so comfortable." (I note throughout this reading that he assumes certain things about his audience.) He says that spending time with people who live in what Mahatma Gandhi called an "eternal compulsory fast" is important to our sanity. The lives of the ultra-comfortable certainly prove this. He doesn't specify how to do it; I suggest finding a non-profit in your community that is doing real good for people whose lives are a weary grind, and volunteering.

Next post: Further reading on fasting.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 4 (Part 3)

Tue, 28 Oct 2025 23:00:36 GMT

Today's post in this series is about the difference between a spiritual discipline and a commandment. Specifically it's about fasting.

There aren't a lot of commandments, and every Christian knows what they all boil down to: Be excellent to one another, and get over yourselves. (Simplified paraphrase of Matthew 22:37-39 et al.) But the working out of those two commandments can take an entire lifetime and then some. As Jesus observed: "All the Law and the Prophets [that is, most of the books of Holy Scripture] hang on these two commandments." (Matthew 22:40)

Modern American Christians can start from that point and get ourselves all tangled up in one question: Is [insert topic of debate here] Biblical? We can endlessly dice and remix various verses of Scripture, attempting to find "Biblical support" for whatever it is we are arguing about. But the danger of this kind of thinking is that we can want so much to be right that we commit offenses against reason. All sorts of things aren't Biblical unless you turn your head and squint and stretch analogies until they sag into nonsense. I am looking out of my window at any number of things that aren't Biblical, starting with the enormous expanse of water-clear glass that I am looking through.

It's much more difficult to begin instead with the Two Greatest Commandments and ask, "Does this fulfill or deny either or both of them?" Sometimes the answer is, "It depends." Sometimes it's "You should go and pray about that." Sometimes it's simply, "Do what you think best, and meet the consequences as they may occur."

Foster examines this question from the perspective of a theologian, so he begins instead with a brief survey of classic works on the subject of fasting as a commandment. His argument is too pithy to summarize, so instead of doing so I will repeat his observation that Jesus did not command anyone to fast but assumed that people would in fact do so. Remember that Christian spiritual disciplines are not unique to Christianity nor to Abrahamic religions. People have always longed to "go deeper," as Foster puts it.

Foster also observes that (at the time of his writing) it's easier to get people to give money than it is to get them to fast. "Perhaps in our affluent society," he says, "fasting involves a far larger sacrifice than the giving of money." Maybe that's it. Maybe it's the American Protestant ingrained distaste for anything that seems too Catholic. It's a question too large for me to resolve in the time I have.

Anyway, fasting may be a worldwide discipline, but fasting as Christians practice it must be done for the right purpose. (Many pixels have been sent forth on the topic of Christians obsessing over thoughtcrime. I concede that there is something to that assertion--but it is also true that your focus determines your reality.)

One wrong reason is the focus of Jesus' earliest recorded teaching on fasting. "When you fast, don't put on a gloomy expression and make yourself look a mess so that other people will notice. People who do that get what they want--they get noticed by other people. But if you groom yourself properly and don't let anybody know that you are fasting, God will notice. And that is a better reward." (Matthew 6:16-18, paraphrased by me from the Mounce Reverse Interlinear translation.)

Neither should we fast because it's socially expected, much less because it's easier than getting off our butts and helping people who need help. Consider the words of Zechariah. The descendants of those who had been taken away by a conquering empire had been allowed to return to Israel. During the generations of exile, they had developed a custom of annual fasting to mourn the destruction of the Temple. Now that they were home, should they keep the custom? Representatives went to ask the clergy in Jerusalem and those who were known to be prophets. And the Lord said through Zechariah that the annual fast had not been an act of worship, but a personal matter. So they were asking the wrong question. The Lord went on to say, "Dispense true justice and practice kindness and compassion to each other; and do not oppress or exploit the widow or the fatherless, the stranger or the poor; and do not devise or even imagine evil in your hearts against one another." (Zechariah 7:9, Amplified Bible.)

So what is fasting for? Foster notes the frequency with which fasting is mentioned in the same Scripture passage as prayer or worship. Fasting is, as I posted previously, a way to withdraw our focus from one part of the entire real world so that we can pay more attention to another part.

Fasting, Foster says, can also reveal us to ourselves. It's true that anybody can become negative and dwell on disgraceful thoughts when they are hungry. But if the same emotions and thoughts occur to you whenever you are hungry, it may be a sign of something you should not be ignoring--something that's easier to ignore when you are comfortable. And with God's help you can tackle it.

The focus of fasting, however, should always be outward. Once Jesus was resting from a long walk and teaching by a well. His disciples showed up and said, "You should eat something." But Jesus replied, "I already have food," and explained that at that time the nourishment of doing God's will was enough. (John 4) And so it is if you are fasting in the right way.

The nuts and bolts of fasting as a spiritual discipline are the subject of the next post.

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You Know You're at an SCA Event When...

Thu, 16 Oct 2025 03:03:18 GMT

...a completely new song is presented and by the third refrain multiple members of the audience have improvised harmony. Even though few if any of them have formal musical training.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 4 (Part 2)

Tue, 14 Oct 2025 22:03:00 GMT

In this section, Foster summarizes fasting as it is described in the Bible and by early Christian writers.

The basics of fasting are not laid out in the Bible. Everybody knew how to fast. They also knew why: as Foster says, "abstaining from food for spiritual purposes," in other words, disengaging from part of the real world in order to pay closer attention to another part. This could be done at any time for personal reasons; it was "a private matter betweem the individual and God." However, there were and are public (i.e. communal) fasts. Some were (and are) scheduled in order to provide regular attention to a perennial spiritual issue affecting the community; others were announced during "times of group or national emergency."

Public fasts to address an urgent problem did not fall out of practice as early as you might think, by the way. Foster quotes John Wesley about a public fast in England in 1756 in order to pray against a threatened invasion. "The fast day was a glorious day...Every church in the city [London] was more than full, and a solemn seriousness sat on every face. Surely God heareth prayer, and there will yet be a lengthening of our tranquillity." He later added to this diary entry: "Humility was turned into national rejoicing, for the threatened invasion...was averted."

Scheduled fasts multiplied as the centuries went on, and all sorts of reasons were produced for why people should observe them. Lest we fall into musings over the bright and superior past, Foster points out that there is actually no commandment in support of (for example) weekly fasting. Some people find that it is very good for them. That is not a reason for everyone to have to do it. We are not supposed to get so distracted by propriety and outward forms that we forget what is more important. On the other hand, fasting in order to look past physical matters toward the entire real world is still a good idea--as long as it is physically safe.

In rough outline, what does that look like?

The answer is complicated. Here are a few examples, all of which have very old precedents.

A basic fast is to eat nothing, and drink only water, until sunset. A partial fast might be to eat a plain nourishing diet, and skip using nice extras that you don't actually need in other parts of your daily life, then total up the money you save and give that to people who are (as we say now) experiencing food insecurity. A more extreme fast might be to eat nothing and drink only water for days on end; Foster asserts that with proper preparation, this could be undertaken for weeks by someone who is in good health to begin with. The most extreme fast is to eat and drink absolutely nothing. This must not be done for longer than three days.

Beware, Foster says, of dwelling on the mental clarity and feeling of physical lightness that may accompany a fast. These are nice benefits, but they are not the point. Likewise, weight loss is not the point. And fasting in order to attract public attention to a cause or spotlight wrongdoing is not fasting: it's a hunger strike.

Beware also of using self-inflicted discomfort as an attempt to earn merit or as a distraction from things you don't want to think about. And beware of combing through the Bible in search of novelty. Foster cites a fad that was just getting started at the time of writing Celebration of Discipline. It's called "watchings," and it consists of going without sleep in order to pray. This is based on a single translation of Paul's second letter to the Church of Corinth, in which he describes himself enduring sleepless nights, among many other hardships, in the service of the Kingdom. (Citations: 2 Corinthians 6:5, 11:27) In the King James Version, this is termed "watchings." And on this, certain enthusiasts have built a system of self-induced sleeplessness. This kind of behavior, says Foster, is part of what the letter to the Colossians (2:23) calls "The appearance of wisdom with their self-imposed religious piety, false humility, and harsh control of the body, but they are of no value against the gratification/satisfaction/filling-up of human nature/mere humanity/human fashion/perennial human passion and frailty." (Mounce Reverse Interlinear New Testament, with amplification by me.) In other words, mere material systems--ever-increasing fasts and watchings and whatnot--are not the cure for our refusal to look past everything described by the Greek word sarx, often translated "the flesh." What is? Go ask God. And God will tell you if it's a good idea for you, specifically, at a given time, to fast or "watch" or anything else.

Next post: But is fasting really not a commandment?

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 4 (Part 1)

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 23:24:55 GMT

Today's post is about fasting.

Foster begins this chapter with this observation by John Wesley: "Some have exalted religious fasting beyond all Scripture and reason; and others have utterly disregarded it."

Wesley was writing in the 18th century, but the problem he identified was already very old. Arguing about when to fast, and from what and for what purpose, goes all the way back to the earliest writings we have from the fathers and mothers of the Church. But, says Foster, there is a peculiar gap in the literature in our times. "I could not find a single book published on the subject of Christian fasting from 1861 to 1954, a period of nearly one hundred years."

Why?

Foster identifies two reasons. The first, he says, is a prolonged reaction to the exaggerated asceticism of medieval Christianity. (Note that he is talking specifically about the Western branch of the faith.) And he blames that asceticism on "the decline of the inward reality of the Christian faith." I don't agree. In medieval Christianity, ascetic movements--for example, the Poor of Lyon, which became the Waldensian Church--were actively persecuted as disruptive influences. He goes on to talk about fasting together with mortification and flagellation and how the last two tended to over-color the first one in retrospect and produce repugnance. But the Catholic Church condemned the extravagant displays of self-flagellation seen e.g. in reactions to the depredations of plague in Europe in the 14th century. I think that what he sees as "the decline of the inward reality of the Christian faith" is much more the swamping of the outward reality of the Christian faith by lurid mass-market historical fiction, which influenced even people who didn't read the stuff. I am reminded of how when I was a teenager, my Lutheran congregation had to have a special talk about Rapture timelines and international peace being an Antichrist conspiracy and whatnot because we simply had no tradition of any of that--but now, after decades of American Exceptionalist Protestant preachers going on and on about it on TV, the same congregation takes those notions for granted. And so, I think, as mass media became ever cheaper and ever louder, the most exciting stories about fasting--hollow-eyed mad hermits and whatnot--got into the minds of people who should have known better, and taught better.

But onward.

The second reason for the loss of literature on fasting, says Foster, is that we are continually encouraged to eat-eat-eat. I am reminded that Foster is a man and that he was writing originally in 1978. Diet culture appears to have passed him by. But he does have a point when he quotes the concerns he has heard about the immediate injurious effects of fasting. The average reader of Foster's works may never even have been so hungry that the next meal is unusually tasty. Food is everywhere, and for many years it was so cheap that thinness--the ability to spend time obsessively exercising and seeking out the very skinniest foods--was a sign of disposable income, not of poverty. Plus, the conventional wisdom that we can attain and retain supreme good health and longevity by consuming the correct foods is rarely questioned. So the knowledge that moderate hunger at moderate intervals won't harm you (if you are in good health) is relatively rare. And our only modern examples of the further reaches of fasting are of people who really are hurting themselves--anorexics, or people who are always high on drugs that suppress the appetite, or people who have a very powerful irrational belief about health that leads them to proclaim how healthy they are not long before they die prematurely. We don't generally understand that fasting, done well, can go on for a long time before starvation begins.

All of this is modern talk, however. Fasting in the Christian tradition has roots that go much, much further back. And like many of the Christian disciplines, fasting is not even exclusive to faiths that acknowledge Abraham. Foster cites examples of fasting in Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, Hinduism, and classical Hellenic religion.

But what does it look like when Christians fast? This is a question with a long and complicated answer. Foster summarizes part of that answer in the next section of this chapter.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 3 (Part Oops)

Tue, 23 Sep 2025 01:09:51 GMT

This post is not actually about fasting, because I forgot to include Foster's recommended reading about prayer. Here are the Bible passages:

The pattern of prayer: Matthew 6:5-15
The prayer of worship: Psalm 103
The prayer of repentance: Psalm 51
The prayer of thanksgiving: Psalm 150
The prayer of guidance: Matthew 26:36-46
The prayer of faith: James 5:13-18
The prayer of command: Mark 9:14-29

And here is the reading list, in biographical order:

The Interior Castle by St. Teresa of Ávila (French Catholic Carmelite mystic and religious reformer, 1515-1582) (he suggests the Kavanaugh & Rodriguez translation of 1979 from Paulist Press)
How to Pray by Jean Nicolas Grou (French Jesuit priest and mystic, 1731-1803) (the Dalby translation of 1973 from The Upper Room)
With Christ in the School of Prayer by Andrew Murray (South African Dutch Reformed pastor and missionary, 1828-1917)
Power Through Prayer by E.M. Bounds (American Methodist attorney and pastor, 1835-1913)
Prayer by Ole Hallesby (Norwegian Lutheran theologian and concentration camp survivor, 1879-1961)
Prayer, the Mightiest Force in the World by Frank C. Laubach (American Congregational missionary and mystic, 1884-1970)
Prayer Power Unlimited by J. Oswald Sanders (New Zealander Evangelical Christian author and speaker, 1902-1992)
The Prayer Ministry of the Church by Watchman Nee (Chinese Nonconformist religious leader and prisoner of faith, 1903-1972)
Steps to Prayer Power by Jo Kimmel (American Anabaptist freelance writer and speaker, 1931- )
True Prayer by Kenneth Leech (English Anglican priest and Christian socialist, 1939-2015)

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 3 (Part 5)

Tue, 16 Sep 2025 04:52:49 GMT

This section is titled "The Foothills of Prayer." It begins: "We should never make prayer too complicated."

Foster points out that the Lord's Prayer is addressed to God as from a child to a parent. "Have you ever noticed that children ask for lunch in utter confidence that it will be provided? They have no need to stash away today's sandwiches for fear none will be available tomorrow. As far as they are concerned, there is an endless supply of sandwiches. Children do not find it difficult or complicated to talk to their parents, nor do they feel embarrassed to bring the simplest need to their attention."

This is one of those places in Celebration of Discipline where Foster makes a common error: He generalizes too far from his own experience.

Onward. "Children also teach us the value of the imagination. As with meditation, the imagination is a powerful tool in the work of prayer." He cites St. Teresa of Avila, who found herself unable to pray in the usual way and chose instead to concentrate on mental imagery. "I believe my soul gained very much in this way," she writes, "because I began to practice prayer without knowing what it was." Foster adds that "imagination often opens the door to faith" and asserts that this, too, is something children understand very well. He tells a story about being asked to pray for a seriously ill infant in her home. He taught her four-year-old brother how to imagine Jesus healing his little sister and prayed a prayer of thanks with him. "Now, I do not know exactly what happened, nor how it was accomplished, but I do know that the next morning Julie was perfectly well."

He also relates how a teacher in a special needs classroom solved the issue of a child who would crawl under his (the teacher's) desk and curl up there. The man would picture himself holding the upset student in his arms and pray silently for healing for the boy's pain and turmoil. At the same time he would find reasons to get up and walk around the classroom, doing his job, "so as not to embarrass him." He also encouraged the student, on calmer days, to talk about positive moments in his life and imagine them happening again, but with his friends there to rejoice with him--teaching him how to pray without words. He did this with every student in his classroom, and by the end of the year all but two of them were mainstreamed.

Foster describes other imaginative prayers for different people and situations. He warns, "We are not trying to conjure up something in our imagination that is not so. Nor are we trying to manipulate God and tell him what to do. Quite the opposite. We are asking God to tell us what to do...Our prayer is to be like a reflex action to God's prior initiative upon the heart." But he reveals his own limited imagination. For example, it isn't enough for him that a straying husband is breaking his oath, lying, putting his wife in danger of disease, and diverting earnings that are meant for his family. He has to add, "God desires that marriages be healthy, whole, and permanent." Certainly. But Jesus observed that sometimes marriages break (Matthew 19:9). There are other examples of adherence to a checklist in this chapter. Checklists are too limited for human experience--or for Scripture--but there's a strain of American Protestantism that doesn't seem to realize that.

To his credit, however, Foster also notes that the above example of praying secretly for one's students is a form of prayer in schools "against which there can be no law," but hardly talked about by those who are fervent proponents of prayer in schools. Remember that for all his immersion in modern American Protestantism, Foster is a member of the Society of Friends, which began as a counterculture--a counterculture persecuted as a threat to the Christians in power.

Back to prayer. Not having our prayers observed by anyone but God frees us to pray for anyone at any time. Foster relates suggestions from Frank Laubach, a writer on prayer, regarding praying continually (1 Thessalonians 5:16). One is to pray a brief silent prayer for everyone one passes on the street. Foster has tried it and notes that some people will "turn and smile as if addressed." The aisle of a plane or bus is another avenue for these quick prayers--for "the joy of the Lord and a deeper awareness of his presence" or similar words. If many people did this, Laubach contends, it would be a kind of solidarity of prayer, a protection against the Enemy. Only first try "swishing prayers" at everyone you pass on the street, and note the results. Like any skill, practice, assess, adjust, and try again.

But, says Foster, "we must never wait until we feel like praying before we pray for others." It is a task that needs doing, so begin it. Like other tasks worth doing, we may find that we settle into the flow of it and become absorbed by it--and then we "feel like praying."

This is not a matter of carving out time from our lives that may be needed for other things. Here he quotes Thomas Kelly, a mystic and fellow member of the Society of Friends. "It takes no time, but it occupies all our time...There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profounder level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship, and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings." This is what I mean when I say that my goal, in revisiting this book, is to become more awake to the entire real world.

I repeat Foster's warning against treating any of the Christian disciplines as a pinnacle, attainable or otherwise. They are processes. "We have so much to learn, so far to go."

Next post in this series: Fasting.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 3 (Part 4)

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 06:04:55 GMT

The heading of this section is "Learning to Pray."

Foster begins Celebration of Discipline with meditation, or learning to perceive and inhabit the entire real world. In this chapter he outlines the process of prayer as a sort of reversal-and-fulfillment of meditation: instead of learning to look beyond the immediate world of matter and time to the rest of Creation, we look the other way, from where we stand with God. "Live within me," says the Lord, "and I will live within you" (John 15:4). And so, when we speak, God speaks. And when God speaks, the world is made.

This is a matter for careful thought and practice. It is easy to soar to the heights and bob around up there like a shiny and useless mylar balloon. Foster's advice is, as ever, grounded.

He noticed that the disciples, who had been raised in a praying tradition, nevertheless asked Jesus, "Lord, teach us to pray" (Luke 11:1). Jesus responded with what we call the Lord's Prayer. But that was not the only time Jesus prayed or talked about prayer.

So Foster decided, in those long-ago analog days, to cut up a Bible. (If you were raised in certain Christian traditions, this may horrify you. That is a fundamental error. The book is not what is important. The words within it are important. If you make something sacred, then you stop touching it, which defeats the point of having a book at all!)

Pasting every Gospel passage about prayer onto sheets of paper, Foster read them straight through. "I was shocked," he says. "Either the excuses and rationalizations for unanswered [intercessory] prayer I had been taught were wrong, or Jesus' words were wrong." So he read classic works on intercessory prayer and asked people who were good at it for advice. Here is a summary of what he learned about learning to pray.

First, intercessory prayer doesn't include the words "if it be Thy will" or anything like them. In fact, Foster identifies certain commands of the disciples ("In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk!") as prayers. Uncertainty, he says, is for another time. Prayers for guidance include it. So do prayers of surrender to the will of God. But intercessory prayer begins when we already know God's will. Be cautious about this! If you were raised in certain Christian traditions, you may assume that if you feel very strong emotions about something, then you know God's will about it. That is another fundamental error. We may perceive God's guidance as powerful emotions, but that does not mean that powerful emotions are God's guidance. Foster does not tell his readers to work themselves up into a fervor of emotion. His instructions for effective intercessory prayer are precise, practical, and methodical.

Second, learn by doing. "I am so grateful I did not wait until I was perfect or had everything straight before praying for others," he says, "otherwise I would never have begun."

Third, try praying for small things first. "Colds or earaches," for example. "Success in the small corners of life gives us authority in the larger matters."

Fourth, if your prayer does not work, analyze your actions--not with the intent to assign blame or shame, but to see how better to attune your will to God's will. "Listening to God is the necessary prelude to intercession." This is why Foster puts meditation before intercessory prayer in his book. Christian meditation can be a prelude, or a tune-up, for prayers for guidance, including guidance in our intercessory prayers. We can meditate on our prayers and how to make them better, or simply sit quietly with God and listen. "In times of meditation there may come a rise in the heart, a compulsion to intercede, an assurance of rightness, a flow of the Spirit." This "divine authorization...to pray for the person or situation" may also be words spoken, or an unanticipated contact from that person, or a vision. On the other hand, a negative indication--which, again, may be a feeling or words or an event or vision--means that "probably you should set it aside. God will lead someone else to pray for the matter."

Fifth, don't build up faith into an unattainable mountain in your mind. Usually, Foster says, when people talk about lack of faith, they mean lack of courage, but deciding to pray at all takes courage--and there's your faith the size of a mustard seed. But compassion, which moved Jesus and the disciples to prayer with miraculous results, is the more common failure. "It seems," he observes, "that genuine empathy between the pray-er and the pray-ee often makes the difference...[I]f we genuinely love people, we desire for them far more than it is within my power to give, and that will cause us to pray. The inner sense of compassion is one of the clearest indications from the Lord that this is a prayer project for you."

Compassion, empathy, and the willingness to let go of what we think God should want for us in order to listen for what God does want...these are seeds that grow. Practicing them makes them stronger, brings our will more closely in tune with the will of God, and makes our prayers more effective.

Next post: What intercessory prayer looks like.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 3 (Part 3)

Tue, 22 Jul 2025 23:02:27 GMT

Today's section is about obstacles to prayer. Note: Foster acknowledges that prayer is an enormous and multi-faceted jewel, so he restricts his discussion in this book to intercessory prayer, that is, prayer on behalf of others.

Foster had more time to think about obstacles to intercessory prayer between writing the original book and his study guide. From the study guide, here is a list of problems we may encounter when we try to pray or even try to want to pray.

The first obstacle is the assumption that "prayer mainly involves asking things from God." Foster describes answers to prayer as "a happy by-product" of its most important function, which is "To sink down into the light of Christ and become comfortable in that posture...to discover God in all the moments of our days, and to be pleased rather than perturbed at the discovery," in short, "a growing, perpetual communion." Heady stuff! But attainable. Now and then you meet someone who has that light. In general, they aren't conspicuously separated from everyday life. They move through it and partake in it, but they are secure in the knowledge that the greater world is always there.

The second is the assumption that prayer must be difficult--that it must carry with it awe and terror of the Almighty, or be a struggle to define sacred space amidst the distractions of the mundane. Foster does not downplay either of these issues, but from his perspective, "the most frequent experience during prayer is one of lightness, joy, comfort, serenity. Even laughter...There is a feeling of companionship...of a different quality from the ordinary human variety. Perhaps it is that we are becoming friends with God." That sounds like something from a bland modern praise song until you think about the implications. Again I recall the Gregory Paul print of the running tyrannosaurs that I kept near my desk for years. What is man, that Thou art mindful of him? What does it mean to be a temporal--a temporary--creature, a mere spark in the long burn of Creation, and yet have the Creator personally interested in your ordinary life and in what you have to say? Maybe the way over this obstacle is to remember that we are made in God's image, and that includes inclinations toward mercy and hospitality.

The third is one that I have bumped into in my personal life. People who are quite close to me, who were raised just as Lutheran as I was, have preached to me of the absolute control of God over every moment of our lives in a way that leaves absolutely no room for our mercy or compassion or creativity or consciousness. Put another way, if there is only ever one possible outcome for every event, why not just sit down like a bump on a log and let whatever happens happen? Foster has encountered the same notion; he calls it Stoic. He points out that we are in truth made in God's image, which also means that we too are creators. (I note that J.R.R. Tolkien described his intricately imagined Middle-Earth as sub-creation, that is, as an expression of his own nature as a reflection of the Creator God.) "If the Apostle Paul is right that 'we are fellow workers with God' (1 Corinthians 3:9), then ours is indeed an open universe." But be careful not to get a big head about it. The same passage begins by pointing out that although the crop grows because it is planted and watered, humankind is not the force that causes planting and watering to have results. And it ends like this (Young's Literal Translation): "God's tillage, God's building ye are."

The fourth is the fear of loss of faith "if our prayers are not answered the first time every time." So we don't ask for what we want; we take refuge in vague petιtions and wishes. But this, Foster says, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of prayer. If we flip a light switch but it doesn't work, we don't decide that electricty is a fraud. Something in the network between the light switch and the power plant needs attention. Or it's possible that we were trying to light up the wrong room or flipping the wrong switch. This only appears facile if you don't consider what it might mean to co-ordinate our attempts at sub-creating with the immense complexity and limitless motion of the greater real world.

The fifth and final item on Foster's list is a teaching that Foster calls common, although I am glad not to have encountered it. "Pray once! Any more than that shows a lack of faith." Foster observes that Jesus' own parables directly contradict it. See "The Friend at Midnight" in Luke 11 and "The Persistent Widow" in Luke 18 for details. Foster goes on to say, "We are to keep at this work, mainly, I think, because we aer the channel through which God's life and light flows into individuals or situations."

Turning back to the main text, Foster remarks of his list of giants of prayer life, "For those explorers in the frontiers of faith, prayer was no little habit tacked onto the periphery of their lives; it was their lives. It was the most serious work of their most productive years."

How to go about this is the subject of the next post.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 3 (Part 2)

Tue, 15 Jul 2025 20:42:07 GMT

In my previous post in this series, I dissected two paragraphs. This one will analyze four. Everything Foster says demands unpacking and careful thought.

He begins with a quote from the Bible: James 4:3. In the translation he is using, this reads, "You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions." Now, one problem with reading the Bible in any language but the original is that a word that has only one meaning in this language can have several in that one and several others in another. So I checked this verse against the Expanded Bible and the Mounce Reverse Interlinear New Testament. Both of these translations present as many different ways to read a phrase as exist in the source language. I also read the surrounding context, keeping in mind that Foster never quotes lightly. So here's the context, in paraphrase, beginning with James 3:13 and ending with 4:8.

If you are wise and you can perceive what is right, then live rightly and do right, with gentleness--get over yourself! But if you are jealous and envious, if you want nice things and good outcomes only for yourself and you want to be big, don't try to front your way through life by covering up your inadequancy with bragging, blustering, and ‮tihsllub‬‎. They don't ‮tihsllub‬‎ in Heaven; that's a symptom of Earthly life, which is infected by evil. When people start by being jealous and envious and thinking only about getting ahead, their actions result in chaos and every kind of evil. Valuing people who talk big and stomp over others to get what they want is not wise. Put another way, it's worldly-wise, which is to say, demonic.

Heaven's wisdom--the wisdom of spiritual, natural, soul-ish life--is like this: it's blameless and modest; it wages peace; it's patient and considerate; it's easy to please, willing to yield, open to reason. This wisdom is always ready to help those who are troubled and to do good for others. It plays no favorites, practices no hypocrisy. It is honest and sincere. When people live with this kind of integrity, the world becomes a better place.

Do you, believers throughout the world, know why you can't live in peace within your congregations or within yourselves? It's because of jealousy, envy, and selfish desires. You fight each other, you fight your own consciences. You are ready to ‮llik‬‎ but you still can't get what you want. Or you remember to pray, but you still don't get what you want--because you want God to give you things so that you can enjoy the pleasure of satisfying your envy, jealousy, and self-absorbed ambition.

You want to solve the conflict within you by surrendering to the enemy and making God pay for it. You're treating God like the boring spouse who "just" trusts you and gives you everything in life so you can sneak off and have an exciting affair whenever you feel like it. Do you really think God doesn't notice when proud people march around puffing out their chests, or when envious people creep on others' lives, or when jealous people act like offended dragons at the idea of giving up a tiny bit of what they consider to be theirs? If you keep on like this, then sooner or later you will find yourselves with nothing to stand on and nowhere to hide.

But turn back to God, tell God that you have this nasty sin-habit that you can't shake, and God will help you. And you shall be transformed: washed clean of willful blindness, self-deception, and hypocrisy.

It is on this ground that Foster lays his next assertion:

In prayer, real prayer, we begin to think God's thoughts after him: to desire the things he desires, to love the things he loves, to will the things he wills. Progressively, we are taught to see things from his point of view. All who have walked with God have viewed prayer as the main business of their lives.

Foster then takes a page to describe the habits of some spiritual athletes, such as Adoniram Judson, a ceaselessly busy missionary, husband, theological debater, language and cultural student, and promoter of education who nevertheless found time to observe the monastic hours of private prayer--that is, seven times a day around the clock! "For these, and all those who have braved the depths of the interior life, to breathe was to pray."

But, Foster assures us, we need not feel intimidated by these examples. Everybody starts somewhere.

Occasional joggers do not suddenly enter an Olympic marathon. They prepare and train themselves over a period of time, and so should we. When such a progression is followed, we can expect to pray a year from now with greater authority and spiritual success than at present.

The next post deals with roadblocks we may encounter at the beginning of this journey.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 3 (Part 1)

Wed, 02 Jul 2025 03:31:40 GMT

Today I am beginning a read-through of the chapter on prayer as a spiritual discipline.

Foster begins this chapter by quoting Julian of Norwich.

For some twenty-five or thirty years, Julian (or Juliana--sources differ) lived in a single room attached to a church in Norwich, England. She never left it. This was a personal choice that she attained only after applying for the position and proving her intent. Her only contacts with the world were through windows. Her room probably had one low down that served as a service hatch so that her maid could help her keep her room clean; one to the street, covered with a thin curtain, for light; and one into the church, so that she could join in worship services and also talk to anyone who came to her for advice. There she remained until the day she died, probably in the first quarter of the 15th century, at the age of seventy or eighty.

Supported by donations and the devoted service of a maid, she was subject only to the local bishop, this in a time when the Church wielded considerable power and was all about hierarchy. She was free to read--she was literate, although she may not have had any Latin--and to write. Her great work was a theological exploration of a series of visions that she had had while on the edge of death about twenty years before entering seclusion.

Julian had lived through riots, mass arrests, and the Black Plague. People came to her for spiritual advice during the decades of her life in that single room. But they didn't come to her because she had seen so much in the outside world. They didn't come to talk about her visions, as best we can tell. They came to her because she was like a living saint, and she was regarded as such because her life was absolutely dedicated to prayer. Surviving copies of handbooks written for people in her position describe hours spent in prayer every day.

How can a person pray for hours a day, every day, for years? And to what end?

Here is the quotation that Foster chose:

I am the ground of thy beseeching; first, it is my will thou shalt have it; after, I make thee to will it; and after I make thee to beseech it and thou beseechest it. How should it then be that thou shouldst not have thy beseeching?

I am irresistibly reminded of a scene from Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach, in which a wise mystic tries to pass on the full insight of a life lived in the pursuit of enlightenment. His students, absolute beginners, are baffled. They can't figure out how his words have anything to do with what they came to him to learn. The mystic sighs and starts over. "We begin," he says, "with level flight." (All of the characters in the book are birds.)

Foster also recognizes this. His next words are, "Prayer catapults us onto the frontier of spiritual life." "Frontier" here has an American meaning, as a place beyond what you know but not inaccessible. You go there expecting to find things that you have never seen before, possibly never imagined--a place without detailed maps, a place that changes you. Julian of Norwich didn't know the word frontier, but she knew that feeling.

Onward:

Of all the Spiritual Disciplines prayer is the most central because it ushers us into perpetual communion with the Father. Meditation introduces us to the inner life, fasting is an accompanying means, study transforms our minds, but it is the Discipline of prayer that brings us into the deepest and highest work of the human spirit. Real prayer is life creating and life changing.

Abstraction upon abstraction. What does prayer, concretely, do?

"To pray is to change." Ah. "Prayer is the central avenue God uses to transform us. If we are unwilling to change, we will abandon prayer as a noticeable characteristic of our lives." Ouch.

I haven't even finished the first page of this chapter, but it's time to end this post. More later.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 2 (Part 7 and last)

Tue, 24 Jun 2025 20:43:22 GMT

As usual, I will skip the study questions. I do encourage anyone interested to get their own copies of both the main text and the study guide and work through the study questions for themselves.

The suggested Scripture readings for this chapter are very short. They are:

Sunday: The glory of meditation--Exodus 24:15-18
Monday: The friendship of meditation--Ex. 33:11
Tuesday: The terror of meditation--Ex. 20:18-19
Wednesday: The object of meditation--Psalm 1:1-3
Thursday: The comfort of meditation--1 Kings 19:9-18
Friday: The insights of meditation--Acts 10:9-20
Saturday: The ecstasy of meditation--2 Corinthians 12:1-4

Foster's suggested books for further study in the art of meditation are still available and many are still in print.

Downing, Jim. Meditation: The Bible Tells You How. By a member of The Navigators, an international parachurch organization that coordinates discipleships.

Edwards, Gene, ed. Practicing His Presence. Combines a paraphrase of the 17th century classic The Practice of the Presence of God by Brother Lawrence with Letters by a Modern Mystic and The Game of Minutes by Congregational missionary and literacy pioneer Frank Laubach.

Kelsey, Morton T. The Other Side of Silence. Foster calls this "the most important single book on the theology and psychology behind the experience of Christian meditation." By an Episcopal priest who was a student of Max Zeller, a Jungian analyst and concentration camp survivor.

Merton, Thomas. Contemplative Prayer. "A must book."

ibid. Spiritual Direction and Meditation.

Moffatt, Doris. Christian Meditation: The Better Way. Foster recommends this one for beginners. By a Presbyterian freelance writer and Bible teacher.

O'Connor, Elizabeth. Search for Silence. By a member of the Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC, a congregation Foster cites often as a model. Uses a similar pattern to Celebration of Discipline, but with a focus on "the art of quietness and contemplation."

Russell, Marjorie. A Handbook of Christian Meditation. I was not able to find out anything about this author. Foster recommends this book as a practical guide to the acts of meditation.

Tilmann, Klemens. The Practice of Meditation. Draws together both Eastern and Western techniques. By a German Catholic theologian and teacher. The translation Foster recommends is from Paulist Press, 1977.

My next post in this series will begin a study of Chapter 3, "Prayer."

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 2 (Part 6)

Mon, 23 Jun 2025 20:46:37 GMT

In this post I am relying on both the main text and the study guide.

Right away in the study guide I run across this:

Meditation is a more passive Discipline. It is characterized more by reflecting than by studying, more by listening than by thinking, more by releasing than by grabbing. In the Discipline of meditation we are not so much acting as we are opening ourselves to be acted upon.

Hence my fright, after the experience I described in my previous post, and my flight. It was not humanly possible for me to have known about that lost item on my own. If that was the fruit of one afternoon's meditation, then what else might God have me do? Rereading Foster and following up on the saints whom he quotes, I could see the deeps ahead, so I turned and swam like Hell for the shore--like a seal pup convinced that its natural home is the beach!

Of course, we do return to the shore, and swim out again, because the shore and the sea are both part of the entire real world in which we live. Foster does not draw firm boundaries, by the way, between Christian experiences of the entire real world and others. He takes for granted that "astro-travel and... other rather exotic forms of meditation" exist. He does not decry them as evil--this is important! Always Foster is more interested in practicality and spiritual renewal than in performative purity. But he finds them irrelevant to Christian life, while admitting that "perhaps that reflects my own prejudices."

But this post is supposed to be about the process of actually meditating. So here we go.

"For all the devotional masters, the meditatio Scripturarum, the meditation upon Scripture, is the central reference point by which all other forms of meditation are kept in proper perspective." It is important, he says, not to confuse meditation with analysis. He quotes Dietrich Bonhoeffer: "...just as you do not analyze the words of someone you love, but accept them as they are said to you, accept the Word of Scripture and ponder it in your heart, as Mary did. That is all. That is meditation." Bonhoeffer scheduled a daily half hour for the practice.

But isn't it silly to accept so uncritically? Isn't that how people get used? Aren't we supposed to first prove, then believe? To this I answer what I have learned in my own life: Human reason has limits. I could fill this post with examples, but Michael Goldenberg sums it up beautifully in Contact, in which a believer asks a strict materialist if she loved her late father. "Yes," the materialist asserts. "Very much." We know that she is truthful because we saw her past, but the believer just met her. And he gently responds, "Prove it."

So you either believe that Scripture reflects the entire real world, as encountered by millions of people over thousands of years, or you don't.

Here's a sketch of the way to meditate on Scripture. First, keep your selection short. Foster suggests "a single event, or a parable, or a few verses, or even a single word." Second, allow yourself to become immersed in the imagined context of that selection. Third, recognize that God is present, and allow yourself to feel whatever you feel. Finally, ask what direction God may have for you. It may be simply "Let's sit together for a while." It may be religious ecstasy. It may be "Go down that street and look in that spot," as it was for me. Or it may be plain directions about some ordinary matter of your life. Remember, God is deeply interested in our lives, which are made of moments.

A second method of Christian meditation was called "re-collection" in the European Middle Ages; Foster's upbringing in the Society of Friends presented it to him as "centering down." You silently bring to mind whatever troubles you, and you release that trouble into God's care. Allow some time to pass as you contemplate this surrender. Then ask the Lord for whatever you need in connection to your troubles. Then sit in silence. "Allow the Lord to communicate with you, to love you. If impressions or directions come, fine; if not, fine." Foster suggests turning the palms of your hands down while you meditate, as if allowing your troubles to fall away, then up, as if to receive.

A third method is "meditation upon the creation." This means to look, with the receptive attention of a child. First you must believe that everything in the unmanufactured world points in some way to its ultimate Creator. Then choose a flower, a grove of trees, some busy insects, or whatever else you can find to contemplate. Clouds are also suitable. "Sometimes God reaches us profoundly in these simple ways if we will quiet ourselves to listen."

The fourth method Foster mentions is "to meditate upon the events of our time and to seek to perceive their significance." The danger here is to be caught up in helpless anger, apocalyptic fervor, or conspiratorial embroidery. Always our focus is to be on what is set before us. So find the best source of news that you can; read it; meditate on it; and ask God what the future outcome of these events is to be and what you should do with what you have where you are.

Remember as you practice meditation that you are practicing. Even seals must learn how to swim. Or think of sea otters, who cannot dive when they are very young, although the sea is their home. Instead, they bob helplessly on the surface. As they practice being sea creatures, they slowly learn how to turn to the depths, and dive. So give yourself time and grace. Meditation will become first a skill, then a habit, then part of your being.

This post is already long, so I will leave Foster's suggested readings on meditation for the next one.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 2 (Part 5)

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 19:26:50 GMT

The heading for this section is "Preparing to Meditate." Isn't that what the preceding section is about--getting yourself in the right mindset to meditate? Yes and no. "It is impossible to learn how to meditate from a book," Foster says bluntly. "We learn to meditate by meditating." He says over and over in this book that learning about a spiritual discipline is only the doorstep: you have to take the brake off your wheels and do it, and possibly fail, and learn thereby, and do it again.

But we don't have to begin by rediscovering first principles on our own. "Simple suggestions at the right time, however, can make an immense difference." He emphasizes that these are only suggestions derived from the experience of the believers who have gone before us. "They are not laws nor are they intended to confine you."

The first suggestion is to schedule your meditation. "When a certain proficiency has been attained in the inner life, it is possible to practice meditation at any time and under almost every circumstance," but we paddle before we can dive. Foster immediately cautions us not to stop there, however. The goal is for meditation, or "contemplative prayer," to become "a twenty-four-hour-a-day job." This does not require a tremendous feat of asceticism! Simply, as you get better at meditation, it's easier not to stop meditating as you go about your day. And this is part of living fully in the entire real world. The real world should not be diced into pieces. Life isn't "this part of the day for spirituality, that part for cooking." It's all one thing.

Foster's next word of advice collides, as we have seen before in this book, with the steadily worsening plight of the average American reader since first publication. He speaks of "holy leisure," an ancient practice of deliberately ordering of one's life in order to prevent "constantly being swept off our feet with frantic activity" and thus enable meditation and other spiritual disciplines. But we cannot stop being "harassed and fragmented by external affairs" if we have no power to demand to be left in peace. We are even induced to inflict this harassment on ourselves: our minds are infected with "[the] tendency to define people in terms of what they produce." Imagine practicing democracy in the pursuit of holy leisure for yourself and others. What might that look like for you? As food for thought, here is Foster's full definition of holy leisure: "a sense of balance in the life, an ability to be at peace through the activities of the day, an ability to rest and take time to enjoy beauty, an ability to pace ourselves." I will say no more on this topic except to urge you to be local, practical, physical, incremental, and persistent--like the mothers and fathers of the Church from whom Foster takes inspiration.

Beside a time for meditation, we need a place. Of course an experienced practicioner can meditate anywhere. Foster advises beginners to settle on a particular spot. It should be "quiet and free from interruptions" from both near and far, so silence your phone, and if at all possible be alone in the place. I know people who choose to stay up late in order to get some solitude. A possible alternative, if you can get no privacy but you have comfortable headphones and an ad blocker, is to use one of the many multi-hour repetιtive music tracks available for free online. These are often captioned with extravagant promises about wealth or chakras or what have you, but what counts is their ability to hang a curtain between you and the rest of the room. "If it is possible to find some place that looks out onto a lovely landscape, so much the better." If you can't, I suggest setting your monitor or phone screen to a photo or painting of a landscape or garden. Or use a poster. Avoid abstraction and symbolism: immediate perception is better for this than puzzling out layers of meaning.

An aside: If you find yourself terrified of solitude and silence because of things your mind does to you when you are not distracted, there is hope. I spent several years unable to bear waking life without the radio on. If you can't afford therapy, look for online communities of people who support one another after diagnoses with anxiety, intrusive thoughts, PTSD, and so forth. Take a couple of weeks to lurk (read without commenting) and study their archives as well. If the community topic does not seem to fit your situation, ask community members for advice on where to go next. Sooner or later you will find a community that "clicks" and you will be able to lean on the gathered wisdom of people who have been there also. I am free of the fear of silence now. You can be too.

We meditate with our minds, but of course our minds are seated in bodies. So what about posture? It seems irrelevant, but Foster reminds us that "the body, the mind, and the spirit are inseparable" whether we notice this connection or not. "I actually have witnessed people go through an entire worship service vigorously chewing gum without the slightest awareness of their deep inner tension." Adjusting the body promotes awareness in the mind and frees the spirit. So is there an ideal posture? The ideal for you is one that is comfortable for you to stay in for some time. You might find that with a landscape at hand you want to close your eyes after all. That's fine.

Foster does not mention this and may not have been aware of it when he wrote this book, but moving meditation may be easier than still meditation if you have chronic pain. You don't have to study an entire system of moving meditation, such as yoga or tai chi, although that might be helpful. Use the exercises that help your pain, sticking to those that you have memorized without the need to consult a diagram. Switch from one to another as your body indicates, leaving your mind and spirit free to meditate.

The next post will at last show us the details of a meditation session.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 2 (Part 4)

Mon, 09 Jun 2025 22:44:50 GMT

After examining what Christian meditation is and is not, Foster goes on to describe how to begin meditating. The first heading in this section is "Desiring the Living Voice of God." That is a lot to unpack. Understand that Foster is not using a metaphor: meditation arises from a desire for the living voice of God. However, there are barriers. Here is the first:

There are times when everything within us says yes...But those who meditate know that the more frequent reaction is spiritual inertia.

Books have been written about this inertia--about "coldness and lack of desire." Often accusations are flung about it. But the answer is simpler than we tend to make it: ask God for help. So why don't we do that more often?

Human beings seem to have a perpetual tendency to have somebody else talk to God for them. We are content to have the message secondhand...The history of religion is the story of an almost desperate scramble to have a king, a mediator, a priest, a pastor, a go-between. In this way we do not need to go to God ourselves. Such an approach saves us from the need to change, for to be in the presence of God is to change. We do not need to observe Western culture very closely to realize that it is captivated by the religion of the mediator.

This inverts the conventional wisdom that flim-flam men co-opted or invented religion in order to hoodwink other people. But doesn't it ring true? Is our history not filled with accounts of people obsessively worshiping some creep who they had hardly heard of a year ago--someone who told them exactly what they wanted to hear? The mortal object of worship does not manufacture this need to feel oneself to be in communion with great power. They capitalize on it, accumulating followers who want the comfort of communion without self-examination or examination by a truly greater power. If you believe yourself too enlightened ever to be swayed from your rational independence into such worship, or too thoroughly saved ever to be tempted, you are another pigeon for the con.

But it's possible to be unable to begin meditation without being so far into the thickets of self-important borrowed glory. The second barrier is the difficulty in believing that the One who made the Sun and other stars simply wants to listen to and talk to you, and that what God may have to say to you may be very ordinary. In my own meditative life, I have been instructed to go down a particular sidewalk I had no reason to walk down and look in a particular direction. There was something there that a stranger had lost. I was able to reunite them with it. The lives God gave us are made of such daily moments and decisions, and God is very interested in them. And if it's hard to believe that--once again, ask God for help.

So as we begin meditation, we yearn to yearn for God; we listen for God's help in listening to God's living voice. Okay, now what? How do we "descend with the mind into the heart"? Foster quotes three people in one page to answer this question, and they all say the same thing: Use your imagination.

This is a stumbling block to many. "Imaginary" is a pejorative adjective. But Foster observes:

Perhaps some rare individuals experience God through abstract contemplation alone, but most of us need to be more deeply rooted in the senses. We must not despise this simpler, more humble route into God's presence. Jesus himself taught in this manner, making constant appeal to the imagination.

He goes on to quote St. Francis de Sales (1567-1622): "[B]y means of the imagination we confine our mind within the mystery on which we meditate, that it may not ramble to and fro[.]"

Certain denominations and non-denominational congregations teach that the imagination is wholly and irrevocably evil. Certainly every part of our nature has been marred; equally certainly, every part of our nature has been redeemed. If you are worried that your imagination is running away with you--then, again, ask God for help. (Aside: If you are bedeviled with intrusive thoughts, I have found that identifying them as products of the marring of creation can help to cut them down to size, if you are not too tired or disoriented at the moment to do more than suffer. Imagine them as persistent, horrid little beasts that can be briskly escorted out of your home at the end of a broom. "Oh, you again. I do not have time for your mess. Out!")

Back to Foster, on the imagination:

In fact, the common experience of those who walk with God is one of being given [emphasis his] images of what can be. Often in praying for people I am given a picture of their condition, and when I share that picture with them, there will be a deep inner sigh, or they will begin weeping. Later they will ask, "How did you know?" Well, I didn't know, I just saw it.

To believe that God can sanctify and utilize the imagination is simply to take seriously the Christian idea of incarnation. God so accommodates, so enfleshes himself into our world that he uses the images we know and understand to teach us about the unseen world of which we know so little and which we find so difficult to understand.

Next post: Now that beginnings have been laid out for us, how do we go on with meditation?

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 2 (Part 3)

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 23:35:14 GMT

Meditation, like communism or chili, is a word of many meanings. In today's reading, Foster digs deeper into what meditation is for a Christian.

In meditation we are growing into what Thomas à Kempis calls "a familiar friendship with Jesus." We are sinking down into the light and life of Christ and becoming comfortable in that posture. The perpetual presence of the Lord (omnipresence, as we say) moves from a theological dogma into a radiant reality. "He walks with me and he talks with me" ceases to be pious jargon and instead becomes a straightforward description of daily life.

Please understand me: I am not speaking of some mushy, giddy, buddy-buddy relationship...No, I am speaking of a reality more akin to what the disciples felt in the upper room when they experienced both intense intimacy and awful reverence.

I note that the first thing the disciples heard in that upper room was a wind so strong it felt violent; the first thing they saw was fire coming for each one of them--and how were they to know, as it touched them, that it would not burn? (Acts 2)

But the answer to my question in the previous post is, "Yes, the One who set the cosmos into motion, to whom deep time is as an ornamental pond, nevertheless takes a strong personal interest in me and every one of us, and values us as individuals, and wants to converse with us like people meeting in a garden on a fine evening."

Christian meditation is best understood as a way to build something like that garden and open its door. Foster observes that Revelation 3:20 is directed to believers: "Pay attention! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and take supper with that person, and they with me." Again, this is about much more than the pictures of nice Jesus knocking on the door. It's much more than the boilerplate phrase "inviting Jesus into your heart." People who spend time with Jesus in this way are changed. Back to quoting:

We who have turned our lives over to Christ need to know how very much he longs to eat with us, to commune with us. He desires a perpetual Eucharistic feast, in the inner sanctuary of the heart. [I note here that the word translated "take supper with" in the above verse refers to a meal for which people are welcomed into one's home in order to have fellowship, discuss things, leave the business of the day, and stay a while. Reference: Strong's Concordance.] Meditation opens the door...[i]t is a portable sanctuary that is brought into all we are and do.

Inward fellowship of this kind transforms the inner personality. We cannot burn the eternal flame of the inner sanctuary and remain the same, for the Divine Fire will consume everything that is impure...Everything that is foreign to [Christ's] way we will have to let go. No, not "have to" but "want to," for our desires and aspirations will be more and more conformed to his way. Increasingly, everything within us will swing like a needle to the polestar of the Spirit.

Aside: I earnestly beg readers of this post not to fall into the trap of assuming that when Foster talks about impure desires and aspirations he means unapproved fucking.

Anyway, on to "Understandable Misconceptions." Foster sharply distinguishes between Christian meditation and "the concept of meditation centered in Eastern religions." This definition is certainly too broad, but he does have a point that emptying the mind, detaching from the world, and/or surrendering personal identity are not goals for Christians. Of course, to hear the voice of God we first hush the myriad voices of our chattering thoughts, to live in the world we need to sometimes lean back and rest from it, and to become ourselves we have to hand ourselves over to the One who knows us best. But that is not where it ends. There is no end. We are to fill our minds, as a dry land to which the rains have come. We are to live fully in the real world, which surrounds, overshadows, and includes the material, temporal world. And the end of our striving, though we may lose everything we are, is to find ourselves again.

Foster also denies that meditation is complicated. It may be difficult when pain is shouting at you all day or people always need you. But it is not innately complicated. The only apparatus you need is your body, your mind, and grace.

He further warns against assuming that meditation makes a person "so heavenly minded that they are of no earthly good" (Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.). Foster is a member of the Society of Friends, in which ordinary churchgoers practice meditation as a matter of course. The word so heard may be directions on a thoroughly mundane question of interest to only a few. God is keenly interested in our small doings and understands that they are in fact very important--as any parent should. Or there may be a time of mystic ecstasy. You never know until you ask.

Finally, he cautions against deciding that because meditation has measurable physical benefits, such as reduced blood pressure, it must therefore be only "a religious form of psychological manipulation." "Often I have discovered," he says, "that those who so freely debunk the spiritual world have never taken ten minutes to investigate whether or not such a world really exists."

My next post will begin an exploration of the nuts and bolts of meditation.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by RIchard J. Foster: Chapter 2 (Part 2)

Tue, 03 Jun 2025 04:51:23 GMT

Today's reading begins with the heading "Biblical Witness," so I had better explain something before going on.

I was raised in one old Protestant denomination, before Left Behind and its ilk brought obscure American notions into mainstream media and therefore into conventional wisdom. As an adult I became a member of another, which has so far successfully resisted ditto. In both, when we say "Biblical," we mean "there is a passage in Scripture about this" or "the places and events described in the Bible took place in this context." Deacons are Biblical; the Internet is not. "Biblical" is not a value judgment, just an adjective. It can also be used as an adverb: Biblically, deacons walked around in the neighborhoods where they lived; modernly, they can use the Internet to talk to people in need and send them help.

However, the usage is not the same in every denomination. The word "Biblical" is used in other denominations, which are often perceived by Americans to be the Christian majority, to mean "good." In other words, if it is not mentioned in the Bible in an approving way, it's bad. This can lead to preposterous verbal contortions in an attempt to prove that things we like are "Biblical." Or it can be used as a thought-stopper: if something is "un-Biblical," it must be dropped from the conversation. Or the charge of being "un-Biblical" can be used as a reason to harass and torment other people. I think this is another reason why young Americans are driven away from Christianity. They can see that these attempts to make the Bible into a universal encyclopedia are absurd. That is not what it is for. The questions you are supposed to be asking are, "Does this interfere with love of God or love of neighbor? Does this interfere with justice or mercy? Does this encourage me to be up my own ass?" The answer may be no for you, or it may be yes. Discernment is what is needed--not a checklist.

Anyway. When Foster talks about Biblical witness to the discipline of meditation, he means that he is surveying what we can read about it in Scripture. He does not feel the need to use Scripture to prove that it is OK.

Like other disciplines described in this book, meditation is older than Christianity. In the Hebrew Bible, he says, the theme of meditation is "changed behavior as a result of our encounter with the living God." He cites more instances than I have room to summarize here, and that is only a sample of the mentions of meditation in Scripture. How did people meditate? By "listening to God's word, reflecting on God's works, rehearsing God's deeds, ruminating on God's law, and more." You don't need to be a yogi to do it. "God spoke to them not because they had special abilities, but because they were willing to listen." And, Foster points out, Jesus frequently went off alone to listen to His Father.

Foster continually emphasizes that spiritual disciplines, existing as they do in the context of daily life, are simpler than one might think. And so with meditation. "I wish I could make it more complicated for those who like things difficult," he says. "It involves no hidden mysteries, no secret mantras, no mental gymnastics, no esoteric flights into the cosmic consciousness. The truth of the matter is that the great God of the universe, the Creator of all things, desires our fellowship."

But simple does not necessarily mean easy. In the beginning, it was as ordinary to converse with God as meeting a friend for an evening stroll in a lovely garden. The Fall tore away that easy closeness. Although people have attained to it--Moses for one--there are still moments of sheer terror. Why fear?

Here again modern mass-media American Christianity obscures the topic. It tends to talk about punishment--about rightful retribution from an angry God who sees what we did. Granted, that is an old theological concept about our relationship with God and the need for Jesus' sacrifice. But it is not the oldest nor the only.

I used to own a print of a painting by noted paleoartist Gregory S. Paul. It depicts two tyrannosaurs, boldly marked in yellow and black, on a summer day in South Dakota 70 million years ago. They are running across a mudflat toward a distant green shoreline, with massive white clouds building up in the shining blue sky overhead. The viewpoint in the painting is very low, as if crouching to avoid notice. Nevertheless, one tyrannosaur has glanced back, directly at the viewer, and opened its massive jaws to call out to the other... And the One who made that--and the layers of stone that lie over its bones, and the Black Hills brought to life from that stone, and the wild Missouri that runs through it all--wants to pay close personal attention to me? "What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the son of man, that thou visitest him?" (Psalm 8)

But we are not plunging into the unknown. "How sad," says Foster, "that contemporary Christians are so ignorant of the vast sea of literature on Christian meditation by faithful believers throughout the centuries!" In a single paragraph he quotes four: Theophan the Recluse, Jeremy Taylor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Madame Guyon. Further down the page he mentions Thomas à Kempis. All of them refer to meditation as a source of deep peace, strength, guidance, and joy.

More on that in the next post.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 2 (Part 1)

Tue, 27 May 2025 05:58:19 GMT

My previous post in this series gave Foster's booklist for Chapter 1, a mini-library of core texts about spiritual disciplines.

I am beginning the first chapter that explores one discipline in depth: "The Discipline of Meditation." And here I begin to understand how this book, which distills the dozen-and-a-half books in that list and more besides, is so short.

I struggle to paraphrase this chapter. I can hardly abridge it. I very strongly urge you to find a copy and read it for yourself.

Here is how the chapter begins:

True contemplation is not a psychological trick but a theological grace--Thomas Merton

Again, Foster never quotes lightly.

Thomas Merton, who died in 1968, was a postsecondary English teacher on his way to a Ph.D. when his life took a turn. He became a well respected author and speaker. He said that the race riots in the U.S. (in which white mobs attacked African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Native Americans, and anybody else in their path for not being invisible and submissive) were wrong. He also said that the Vietnam War was wrong and spoke out against nuclear proliferation. He was a firm advocate of nonviolence and described himself as an anarchist. A Christian, he conversed often with people of other religions in an attempt to understand the full breadth of human experience. One of his colleagues said that he talked like a Marxist, which is a long-standing way of calling someone a danger to the American way of life. He was found dead in a room in Thailand, where he had been invited to a professional conference, with a short-circuited electric fan lying across his body and a very bloody wound in the back of his head. The cause of death was officially given as heart failure.

At the same time, starting from the same place, Thomas Merton was Brother Mary Louis of the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance, at the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani in Kentucky. Cistercians of the Strict Observance follow the old Western monastic rulebook very closely. They live simply, stay at home unless their abbot gives them permission to travel, own nothing, eat no red meat, raise as much of their own food as possible, pray, worship, look after guests, and work to support their community--Gethsemani produces ‮egduf‬‎ and a very popular ‮yzoob‬‎ fruitcake. Quiet time for meditation and study is very important; to avoid idle chitchat, they communicate only by a limited sign language for part of each day. It was within this framework built around spiritual disciplines that M. Louis began to write for publication. He also became a priest.

So this is the company we find ourselves in, at the beginning of Foster's list of spiritual disciplines. I think Foster quotes this author, out of all those he might have chosen, in support of his assertion that spiritual disciplines are for everyone in all walks of life. M. Louis lived to the end of his days as a monk bound to simplicity, prayer, obedience, study, fasting, service, worship, and contemplation (AKA meditation). Thomas Merton was a public figure. His busy life was sometimes a strain, but there was no contradiction.

That said, Foster goes on to say that--

In contemporary society our Adversary majors in three things: noise, hurry and crowds. If he can keep us engaged in "muchness" and "manyness," he will rest satisfied. Psychiatrist Carl Jung once remarked, "Hurry is not of the Devil; it is the Devil."

Again I say that Foster wrote this when the lot of the average American was not as terrible. So to noise, hurry and crowds I add distraction, dread and despair. Despair, in particular, is the weapon of the Enemy. Despair whispers that nothing can be done, that you are all alone in the dark, that there is nothing left to do but await the final destruction. Despair can almost be comforting: you don't have to exert yourself, and possibly fail, if nothing can be done...

Foster begins with meditation as a way past "the superficialities of our culture, including our religious culture." I say that it is also a way out of the trap of distraction, dread and despair. "[G]o down into the recreating silences, into the inner world of contemplation...we should without shame enroll as apprentices in the school of contemplative prayer."

My next post will deal with Foster's explanation of where Christians learned to meditate and what meditation is for.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J Foster: Chapter 1 (Part 5 and last)

Sun, 25 May 2025 05:57:35 GMT

Here is the booklist for Chapter 1 of the study guide. Foster offers these as "an excellent background and framework out of which to study the Christian Disciplines." He does not mean that you have to read them all right away or at all. If you wish, choose one to read through slowly.

As I have said before, do not expect checklists for perfection. The authors were products of their times. This does not mean that they were stupid or ignorant, but they swam in the currents of their lives, and a fish may not know that it is wet. You are doing the same thing right now. Have grace for them and for yourself, and learn from them.

The Imitation of Christ (orig. De Imitatione Christi) by Thomas à Kempis (Thomas van Kempen) (1380-1471) "Undisputed leader of the classics of Christian devotion."

Introduction to the Devout Life (orig. Introduction à la vie dévote) by Francis (François) de Sales (1567-1622) "For those seeking to deepen their devotional life."

The Practice of the Presence of God (orig. Maximes spirituelles fort utiles aux âmes pieuses, pour acquérir la présence de Dieu) by Brother Lawrence (Laurent de la Résurrection) (1614-1691) "These simple letters and conversations...have inspired three centuries of Christians to life in more intimate communion with Christ."

The Sacrament of the Present Moment (orig. L'Abandon à la divine providence) by Jean Pierre de Caussade (1675-1751) "Sheer delight to read."

A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life by William Law (1686-1761) "An influential work on the Christian life."

Christian Perfection (orig. Instructions et Avis sur Divers Points de la Morale et de la Perfection Chrétienne) by François Fénelon (1695-1715) "Letters of spiritual counsel and direction on a multιtude of practical matters."

Discipline and Discovery by Albert Edward Day (1884-1973) "Practical wisdom for us all."

A Testament of Devotion by Thomas Raymond Kelly (1893-1941) "I can count on one hand the twentieth-century classics of devotion--this is one of them."

The Pursuit of God by A.W. Tozier (1897-1963) "A tender sensitive book filled with insight and a catholicity of outlook that is refreshing."

The Healing Light by Agnes Sanford (1897-1982) "A book which has influenced my own pilgrimage immensely."

The Normal Christian Life (正常的基督徒生活) by Watchman Nee (Ni Tuosheng) (1903-1972) "An important statement on the Christian life which stands in counter-distinction to so much of 'normal Christianity.'"

The Cost of Discipleship (orig. Nachfolge) by Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1906-1945) "The book that gave us the term 'cheap grace' and so forcefully called us to a more costly form of discipleship."

The Disciplined Life by Richard Shelley Taylor (1912-2006) "A sharp, staccato plea for disciplined living in an age of self indulgence."

Journey Inward, Journey Outward by Elizabeth O'Connor (active mid-20th ct.) "Sets forth in life situations the twin disciplines of the inward journey of devotion and the outward journey of service."

Christian Disciplines: Meditations for Prayer Classes by Harold Wiley Freer (active mid-20th ct.) "Short meditations that evince an unusual awareness of the Devotional Classics."

Freedom from Sinful Thoughts: Christ Alone Breaks the Curse (orig. Freiheit von Gedankensünden: Nur Christus bricht den Fluch) by Heini Arnold (1913-1982) "An insightful little book on inner thought-life."

Making All Things New by Henri Nouwen (1932-1996) "A small but powerful invitation to the spiritual life."

A Long Obedience in the Same Direction by Eugene H. Peterson (1932-2018) "Helps Christians wrestle with many of the classical Spiritual Disciplines."

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 1 (Part 4)

Tue, 20 May 2025 19:41:06 GMT

I return to Foster's non-exhaustive list of pitfalls in the practice of spiritual disciplines.

The fourth pitfall in his list of seven is the temptation to concentrate on spiritual disciplines and forget that the point of them is to open the door for Christ. If you are going along doing your spiritual practices, and you hear God telling you to drop the usual routine and go do something else, and you resist because you want to continue with your spiritual practice, you have forgotten the point of spiritual discipline.

The fifth is becoming fascinated with a single discipline to the neglect of others. Spiritual disciplines are "an organic unity, a single path." Put another way, describing the Good Life as abundant life means that you have been handed a whole lot of good things all at once. Allow each of them a place in your life. Trying to nourish your soul on one of them exclusively is poor spiritual hygiene.

The sixth pitfall is regarding any teaching on spiritual discipline as complete. "I have no exhaustive list of the Christian Disciplines," says Foster, "and as far as I know, none exists. For who can confine the Spirit of God?" The twelve spiritual disciplines in these books have been topics of broad discussion for a long time, which is why Foster picked them for Celebration of Discipline and its study guide. But they are not the whole picture. We were made in God's image, but being finite creatures, we are not a complete image, nor can we comprehend the entirety of God's grace. So there may be some other spiritual discipline that appears to you at the right time.

The seventh pitfall is stopping at discussion and study. You have to get off your cushion and actually do the thing. It's like reading about physical therapy versus actually doing it.

And that is where I stopped when I first picked up these books twenty years ago. "To step out into experience threatens us at the core of our being. And yet there is no other way. Prayerfully, slowly, perhaps with many fears and questions, we need to move into this adventurous life of the Spirit." I was too afraid.

This is not the place for my spiritual autobiography. I will say only that I was once instructed to make a detailed list of events in my early life for the benefit of someone else's therapist. I did so, concentrating on what I perceived as the root causes of my bad habits in my relationship with that person. The therapist spent some time reading over this list in complete silence (we were alone in her office), then looked up at me and said gently, "You weren't ever treated as a person, were you? Just a thing." And that's how I started crying in the office of a therapist who wasn't even mine. Because I had known this all my life, but no one had ever acknowledged it to my face.

I worked very hard to become a person, in spite of people who wanted to use, discard, or consume me. It has taken me a long time to arrive at a point in my spiritual journey where I can face the fear of being changed--of losing what stability I worked for, even though what replaces it will be better. But I want to live more fully in the entire real world, not only the small corner of the world that I carved out for myself. So I have returned to Foster's writings.

Anyway, Foster recommends the following Scripture readings on the topic of spiritual disciplines as the door to liberation. This is nowhere near the massive reading list of the introduction! Read in the suggested order and take your time.

The longing to go deeper: Psalm 42
The slavery of ingrained habits: Psalm 51, Romans 7:13-25
The bankruptcy of outward righteousness: Philippians 3:1-16
The pervasiveness of sin: Proverbs 6:16-19, Romans 6:5-14
The victory of Spiritual Discipline: Ephesians 6:10-20

Beginning with this chapter, Foster provides study questions for the reader. I won't list them here because they refer to the entire text, not my summary and paraphrase. But each could form the basis of its own post.

Foster quotes extensively from the saints in every chapter. In my next post I will provide the booklist he presents at the end of Chapter 1 of the study guide.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 1 (Part 3)

Tue, 20 May 2025 02:12:33 GMT

I am skipping between the main text and the study guide today.

Foster portrays the spiritual life, also known as the Good Life or as abundant life, as a narrow way, but not, as is often imagined, a gate. Instead it is a path. On one side is any attempt to get everything perfectly right through human will. On the other is the assumption that we need do nothing and God will sort it all out. Both of these go nowhere. Foster calls them sheer dropoffs; I prefer to think of them as thorns and heavy brush, because it is possible to get out of them and back to the path--not without looking silly or feeling pain, but possible. The path takes us from birth through death; it is a matter of both spiritual practice, and asking for God's guidance and transformational power. As we travel, we are changed. Ever beginners in spiritual discipline, we nevertheless find ourselves growing closer to "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ," as the King James Version poetically puts it. (Ephesians 4:13)

But oh, does the temptation to find a shortcut wind its way into every waking moment.

The section for Chapter 1 in the study guide goes into more detail about this temptation. Foster lists seven pitfalls along the way--"though, surely," he says, "there are more."

Legalism is often held up by American Protestants (and possibly others) as the pitfall we must watch for. It is certainly a pitfall. You don't have to do scary things, like trusting that God knows more than you do about a situation, or meeting everyone as an equal image of God, if you stick to a firm checklist of Do This = Good, Do That = Bad. Real virtues can be silenced and thrown out by properly written laws. You don't have to wake up and say, "Today I will do evil." Just pick a tiny snippet of Scripture to found an enormous system of laws upon. Ignore any way in which your laws increase human misery or your checklists exasperate and divide. After all, what you are doing is Scriptural! Then compound the evil by teaching it to your children and telling them they will go to Hell if they point out the inconsistencies in your laws and the inanities in your checklists. This, I firmly believe, is how you make angry ex-Christians out of your kids.

But that's just the most commonly discussed pitfall in the way.

Second, Foster points out that although spiritual disciplines are often an inward matter, if you practice them, the world is going to notice, and that notice must sooner or later be negative. He doesn't mean the artificial martyrdom of making an ‮ssa‬‎ of yourself to people who did not invite you in. Spiritual disciplines prompt us toward doing more justice, loving mercy more, walking more humbly in the presence of God, valuing our neighbors as equal images of God with us, and valuing the will of God above all things. When you do this where the powerful can see you, the powerful get angry. When you remind ordinary people by your actions that they can do the same, they get uncomfortable. Sometimes anger and discomfort lead to self-examination and change. Sometimes, however, they lead to trouble. But leaving the way because people are shoving you off it is a mistake. Do not assume that the way is always going to be easy.

The third pitfall is upholding spiritual disciplines as virtues. Virtue needs some explanation first. Popular culture tends to regard virtue either as not having unapproved sex, or as sitting around telling other people where they have gone wrong. Virtues are more complicated than that. (Nearly everything popular culture says about the Good Life is more complicated than that.) A virtue is something you do if you are the best person you can be.

The number and nature of virtues has been the subject of debate since humankind first learned to argue. Here are two lists that Foster certainly has in mind, because the authors he cites certainly did. The first list, often called the Seven Heavenly Virtues, consists of prudence, or thinking about the consequences of your action and inaction; justice, or the honoring of the rights of all; temperance, or practicing moderation in all things; fortιtude, or being afraid but doing it anyway; faith, or being willing to believe in what cannot be proven; hope, or acting in the assumption that what is wrong can be set right; and charity, or love without favoritism. NOTE that these are very rough paraphrases. The second list is called the Seven Lively Virtues (lively here meaning life-giving) or Seven Capital Virtues (capital meaning that they are very important). It includes chastιty, or not being led around by your sexual desires; temperance; charity; diligence, or being careful and attentive as you work; kindness, or doing good for other people without expectation of reward; patience, or not allowing the big and little troubles of life to lead you off the way; and humility, which means both owning your ‮tihs‬‎ and getting over yourself. Again, these are very rough paraphrases.

You can see that spiritual disciplines are not virtues. You can be an ‮elohssa‬‎ and practice every single one of the disciplines in these books without any improvement in your character, because you have decided that they are desirable to you personally. Or you can be an amazing person, an example to all--as long as things are going right. In other words, you can go through your whole life tidying up your living room without noticing that your house is rotting. The Lord walks in through an opened door and starts patching up your foundation and shoring up your roofbeams: and that's when you find yourself living a more virtuous life.

I will return to Foster's list of pitfalls in spiritual practice in my next post.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 1 (Part 2)

Wed, 14 May 2025 05:06:22 GMT

I 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.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Chapter 1 (Part 1)

Mon, 12 May 2025 20:40:29 GMT

I am reading the main text today.

Foster tιtles this chapter "The Spiritual Disciplines: Door to Liberation." He begins with a quote from Donald Coggan, who was a preacher, teacher, evangelist, and renewer in England:

I go through life as a transient on his way to eternity, made in the image of God but with that image debased, needing to be taught how to meditate, to worship, to think.

Coggan was Anglican. There are absolutists in every corner of Christianity, of course, human nature being what it is. However, Anglicans generally preach that there is no absolute "this, only this, and always this" answer to most questions. In other words, there is a very short list of things that all Christians must believe. This list is summarized in a form called a creed. Different groups of Christians at different times in the history of the Church have worked out various creeds; the longest one in an Anglican prayer book is about two and a half pages of large type, as best I can recall. Only choices that contradict this list are wrong. For all other questions of the form "Is A right, or is B right?" the Anglican answer is "Yes; now consider whether either is right for you personally."

I repeat that Foster does not quote idly.

Returning to the actual quote: Coggan summarizes the historic Christian attιtude toward the world and our place in it. The world of time and mortality is not our permanent home. Our lives here are a journey toward our true home. Although the mortal world was created as good, it now has a flawed and unsteady foundation; so also for us.

Anybody who lives in the United States will probably recognize the above whether they are Christian or not: it's entwined in our consciousness; it underlies assumptions made even by people who were never in a church--indeed, by people who used to believe, but claim to have freed themselves from Christianity.

But the second part may be foreign to someone raised in an American-grown denomination. They might expect Coggan to go on to talk about redemption and forgiveness--about getting right with God. What is this business about meditation, worship, and thinking?

It's the fruit of the many, many lifetimes of Christians seeking after God that took place before America was even thought of.

The first baptisms were on the bank of a river. People listened to a preacher who told them that they were being hypocrites and ‮selohssa‬‎. He told them that if they wanted to do better, they should be ritually washed in the river as a sign that they wanted to clean up their lives. And then he expected them to leave, and do what they said they were going to do.

Talking about redemption and forgiveness exclusively is like hovering on the bank of that river. It's like trying to coast on the spiritual high of a religious experience. But the mortal world is just as real as the spiritual. While we are mortal, we live in both.

As Foster reminds us continually, there need be no contradiction between living in the mortal world and seeking the spiritual world. It is possible to order our mortal lives in a way that helps us to be more aware of the entire real world and thus more able to hear and accept the guidance of God as we journey through the world God made. This journey is a series of everyday moments: Foster cites "hav[ing] jobs...car[ing] for children...wash[ing] dishes and mow[ing] lawns." It is not a solitary journey for most, but takes place "in the midst of our relationships with our husband or wife, our brothers and sisters, our friends and neighbors."

The point is not to do it right. Spiritual disciplines are not a test to ‮deew‬‎ out the unworthy. They are not a duty or a burden you must take up. They are a means to "liberation from the stifling slavery to self-interest and fear," as Foster puts it.

They are not intended only for spiritual athletes or people who have a lot of religious education. Absolute beginners in Christian life can follow spiritual disciplines as well as anyone else. "The primary requirement," says Foster, "is a longing after God." He quotes Psalm 42 to close this section. This psalm opens with a cry: "As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for You." It goes on to describe the outpouring of God's power: "Deep calls to deep at the thunder of Your torrents; all Your waves and Your billows have gone over me." If this psalm resonates with you, I suggest getting your own copy of Celebration of Discipline.

More later.

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Reading Celebration of Discipline by Richard J. Foster: Introduction (Part 6)

Sun, 04 May 2025 18:31:40 GMT

I end my read-through of Foster's introduction to the study guide with a look at his recommended reading about the Good Life. Each chapter of the study guide includes a week's worth of Bible readings and a list of suggested books for further study; most also include a list of questions to think on.

Although Foster humbly gives thanks for the hard work of others that allowed him to do nothing but write in order to complete his book, he sometimes appears to forget that not everyone can do this. The week's Scripture readings on the topic of the Good Life begin with reading through all four gospels on a Sunday. The shortest assigned reading for the rest of the week is five chapters on Tuesday; some assignments are much longer.

The first time I got to this page, I said aloud, "Well, bless his heart." This is supposed to be a guide for a lone student outside an academic setting. Not even in my Education for Ministry class did we read this much in a day.

Nevertheless, if you want to follow Foster's plan, these readings, in this order, are a good start. But take as long as you need to finish them. They are:

1. All four gospels, beginning with Mark (the example of Jesus)
2. Genesis 12-25 (the example of Abraham)
3. 1 Kings 17-19, 2 Kings 1-2 (the example of Elijah)
4. 1 Samuel 16-27; 2 Samuel 1-12, 22-23:7 (the example of David)
5. Daniel 1-12 (the example of Daniel)
6. Reread the gospels, then Acts 1-5, 10-11, then (optionally) his letters (the example of Peter)
7. Acts 9, 11-28, then (optionally) his letters (the example of Paul)

If you are the sort of reader who can have a couple of books in progress at the same time, you could also start a book by or about someone from the following list. "There is nothing that gives content to the Good Life and fleshes out the meaning of our own spirituality," says Foster, "quite like reading the saints throughout the ages. They lift our spirits, free us from the cult of the contemporary, and give us models to imitate." Read a bit at a time, and choose a full book, not an article (although the citations in a Wikipedia article may be a good jumping-off point). Foster recommends the following saints as examples of the Good Life: St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Francis of Assisi, Dame Julian of Norwich, George Fox, Madame Guyon, Blaise Pascal, John Wesley, John Woolman, David Brainerd, William Carey, David Livingstone, Adoniram Judson, Georg Müller, Dwight L. Moody, J. Hudson Taylor, Rees Howells, Sadhu Sundar Singh, Jim Elliott, M. Louis (Thomas Merton), Fulton J. Sheen.

IMPORTANT NOTE: People make selfish decisions in these accounts. They ‮wercs‬‎ up, hold grudges, and yell. They fail to notice the harm they do or the need they are failing to address. They are blind to their own false assumptions about people over whom they have power. If you are looking for perfection, even in the Scripture passages, put that wish aside. The saints live in the mortal world alongside us. Even Jesus Himself got tired and ‮dessip‬‎ off sometimes.

Next, I will spend a long time in Chapter 1 of both the main book and the study guide. They are called "The Spiritual Disciplines: Door to Liberation."

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