Good morning everyone!
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Spiritual formation is inescapable.
Regardless of your religious background, we are all being formed holistically by our experiences and interactions. Just as our physical and mental diets correlate to the health of our body and mind, our spiritual life is governed similarly.
In short: we become like what we worship.
Money, politics, status, attention, sex, power, drugs, alcohol, food, and our individualized definition of success are common idols.
Simply pursuing any of these things does not constitute worship. Worship is when our idols become central to our being. What delineates our desires, passions, and purpose from worship is that worship always costs.
Prioritizing my career aspirations over my friends, marriage, and children is an act of worship.
Spending a Saturday morning doomscrolling on my phone for three hours instead of engaging and having breakfast with my children is an act of worship.
Building a mental library of emotional bookends to infinitely justify having a drink is an act of worship.
What hunger is to the body, and boredom is to the mind, the need to worship is to the spirit. Each, given time will eventually precipitate action in all of us.
The question then is whether or not we choose to take an active or passive role in the process.
Are we simply a passenger, or are we a participant?
Furthermore, if we choose to be a participant, what does that entail?
The participant is curious.
This two minute clip from an interview between Skye Jethani and historian Dr. Mark Noll centers on the choice Christians are faced with when thinking about and engaging with the world.
I was brought up in a Christian environment where because God had to be given preeminence, nothing else was allowed to be important. Iāve broken through to the position that because God exists, everything has significance.
That quote, which leads off the clip, is from Dr. Nollās The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, a book that is āboth a scholarly analysis of evangelical anti-intellectualism and "an epistle from a wounded lover" by an intellectual who feels betrayed by evangelical Christianity's neglect of "sober analysis of nature, human society, and the arts."
Christians should be the most intellectually curious people on the planet. They should be at the vanguard of history, art, science, and academia. When we take the full breadth of history into account, there is precedent for this.
Copernicus, Galileo, Carroll, Bach, Newton, Augustine, Pasteur, Mozart, Beethoven, Michelangelo, the artist and Michelangelo, the turtle.
Ok, the last one is debatable, but you get the point. Christianity has a heritage of pushing the boundaries forward in all disciplines. While there are remnants of this today, over the last fifty years the evangelical movement in America has considerably dulled this tradition of curiosity.
Before it feels like I am only speaking to Christians, I wrote about our living in a perpetual Easter in the second edition of this newsletter. The critical point is that all are āinvited to be complicit in the minute-by-minute renewal of our world.ā
All.
Christians and Non-Christians. Participating in our spiritual formation requires sober consideration of where we have been romanced by the hubris of arrival, and therefore allowed our curiosity to atrophy.
The participant removes and resists dogma.
If curiosity is the starting point, what is our greatest obstacle?
Dogma.
We live through a time when unfettered access to information has never been greater than it is today. Moreover, as the volume of data expands, our intake has become increasingly non-discriminatory. We are drinking from the fire hose of both signal and noise.
We are more connected as a species than in history through the same technological advancements. We can choose to communicate with extensive and diverse communities or constrict our interactions to insular, echo-chamber tribalism. On all sides, the perpetuation and expansion of social media increasingly drives our collective psychology.
A virtually limitless supply of information + societal pressure to engage, comment, and have a take = a kill shot to nuanced thinking and the rise of the dogmatic era.
Self-evaluate for a moment; what are your positions on the following topics?
Politics
Religion
Abortion
Policing in America
LGBTQIA+
Racism
Are they nuanced? Or are they binary? Do you see these as complex issues worthy of discussion and study, or are they simply black and white?
Author Kaitlyn Schiess coined a phrase that I love when she adroitly pointed out that all of our debates and discussions now have an existential edge. Each side of every significant issue sees the other sideās way as being apocalyptic.
There is no nuance.
There are no compromises.
We have built a societal machine that only rewards the loudest and most extreme positions. And while the majority of people do not think in loud and extreme terms, as thE machine increases in speed and scale, it becomes self-fulfilling.
This is how we immolate our ability to participate in our formation and resign ourselves to the role of passenger. Or, we can choose the better path.
Living a life of intentional curiosity, relishing that there is always more to learn, more to do, and more to understand.
In Bob Mullhollandās Invitation to a Journey, he describes our resistance to actively participating in our spiritual formation:
āBeing formedā goes totally, radically against the ingrained objectification perspective of our culture. Graspers powerfully resist being grasped by God. Manipulators strongly reject being shaped by God. Controllers are inherently incapable of yielding control to God. Spiritual formation is the great reversal: from habitual expectation of closure to patient, open-ended yieldedness.
Thank you for reading, have a joyful week, and I will see you next Sunday! Please feel free to share it with someone else if you enjoyed this newsletter!
Iād love to connect more! So follow me @beingdustin, and letās chat!