Juggling With Evolution

The Power of Liturgical Spirituality (Part 6)

Photo by Rock Staar on Unsplash

TAMING COMPLEXITY

I came to faith in Christ at a time when songs like Jesus Is The Answer were popular. I read biographies of prominent people, including some members of the Manson family, who came to faith, and others about people of faith smuggling Bibles into the USSR and freeing drug addicts (all with God’s miraculous help, of course). The faith I was taught was, in one sense, a purely cognitive experience. Believing in Jesus was about accepting certain ideas, concepts, and doctrines as literally and universally true. The relationship between accepting these beliefs and living them out was unclear. I was instructed not to put too much emphasis on ”works”, because that would deny that salvation was by grace alone. But, in another sense, it was important that Christianity was seen to “work” in the lives of believers. Faith in Jesus was often presented as the solution to all of life’s problems, the answer to every question, and the explanation for every mystery. Unsurprisingly, I experienced a massive crisis of faith and identity when the weight of my questions became more than my intellectual faith could support and the whole edifice came crashing down.

As John Briggs and David Peat observe, Western industrial society has sought to remove life’s uncertainty and insecurity by seeking to dominate and direct the natural world—to such an extent that our need for control is obsessive and addictive.^¹ And, while ancient and indigenous cultures used “dialogues of ritual” to navigate the complexities of nature’s forces, religion in the West has framed itself as another way to avoid the chaos and messiness of life. But as our world and its challenges become increasingly complex, an answers-based faith is being exposed as inadequate and irrelevant. We don’t need a religion that shows us how to escape reality—there is, after all, nowhere to hide. What we do need is a spirituality that empowers us to engage more deeply with chaos and to face unpredictability with confidence and courage.

As much as we may long to be more mindful and deliberate in our lives and relationships, it’s not as easy as we may think. Connecting deeply with others and discerning the wisest choices for our lives do not come naturally to us. The complexities of our world and humanity cannot be tamed and there is no religion or philosophy or ideology that can remove uncertainty and insecurity from our unpredictable existence. To live well, to find meaning and purpose in our short time on Earth, we need help.

PARADOXICAL SPIRITUALITY

Authentic spirituality shows us the way to the good life we long for. Through its liturgies—its stories, vocabularies, symbols, and rituals—intentional spiritual practice can train us in the values, attitudes, and habits that make life more whole and fulfilling. But paradoxically, making spiritual mastery another goal to reach or another mission to accomplish, robs it of its value. It doesn’t take great insight to recognise how often Very Spiritual People (as Julia Cameron calls them²) appear to have missed the point. In our purpose-driven, goal-oriented culture, it can be tough to accept that any spirituality worth the name has a calm restfulness and a natural playfulness to it, even as it rolls up its sleeves and creates beauty out of the mess.

In a recent post on her Substack, author Nadia Bolz-Weber offered this liberating reflection:

You think cattle care what they look like or what others think of them or if they are righteous? Hell no. You think rain is self-conscious or cedar trees try and whip themselves into what feels like a state of worship. Of course not. Their being is in itself praise of the one who created them.

I think the difference is that the cattle don’t get their identity or sense of worth outside of God. Sea creatures aren’t looking to the Dow Jones or their Body Mass Index to know their value. Their value, as ours, rests in their createdness by God.

To praise God then is to live fully into the dignity of being God’s children. Perhaps to praise God is to simply look to nothing and no one else to know who we are.

Because your being is - in itself - in praise of the one who created you.

So let’s all just try less hard.

It may seem strange to speak of trying less hard in one breath and then to suggest that an intentional, liturgical spiritual practice is important in the next. But this is the paradox of living deeply. Jesus invited his followers to “Come to me, all you who are struggling hard and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28 CEB) But he also taught that, “All who want to come after me must say no to themselves, take up their cross, and follow me.” (Matthew 16:24 CEB).

Perhaps the point is that life-giving spirituality is not about doing something new or different. It is not about learning specific religious skills, or developing superhuman strength in faith. It is about waking up to what we already know, what are already doing, and who we already are, and then being intentional about how we use our knowledge, where we aim our actions, and how we embody our most authentic selves. Or, to use the framework for liturgical spirituality that I have been exploring in the last few weeks, it is to be conscious of the stories we allow to capture our hearts, the words we speak that shape our thinking, the symbols we embrace that direct our imagining, and the rituals we observe that develop our habits.

Contrary to what I was taught, and how Nadia Bolz-Weber’s call to “try less hard” could be misinterpreted, spirituality is not only about ideas and doctrines. It is not only about reflection, meditation, and prayer. It is about both action and contemplation. As Richard Rohr writes:

We need both action and contemplation to have a whole spiritual journey. It doesn’t matter which comes first; action may lead you to contemplation and contemplation may lead you to action. But finally, they need and feed each other.³

And this is where we come face to face with complexity once again.

JUGGLING OUR SELVES

One of the liberating gifts of intentional spiritual practice is that it teaches us to know ourselves more honestly, objectively, and compassionately. And it empowers us to be intentional about our own evolution. Rather than live at the mercy of the societal forces that seek to mould us to their expectations, or be little more than victims of our circumstances, the practice of conscious evolution enables us to choose who we become and how we will show up in our lives and relationships. But it doesn’t take long, once we’ve started this journey, to realise that we are not just a single, simple self, but a complex community of multiple selves.⁴ It’s not just that we have different roles within our families, workplaces, and societies, but that as we grow, we all develop a “jostling crowd of inner selves” that each express who we are. Some of these selves may live, unacknowledged, in what Carl Jung called our shadow, while others may be our primary way of engaging with our world. But we all know what it feels like when different selves—or different parts of ourselves, if you prefer—are out of sync and pulling against each other.

One of the reasons I love the personality profiling system known as the Enneagram is that it doesn’t just label each person in terms of a single number or personality type. Rather, using the familiar star-shaped diagram, it reveals that we each contain multiple personality “ingredients” that combine to create the particular “recipe” of who we are.⁵ It also offers signs that reveal how psychologically and spiritually healthy we are, and practical guidelines for nurturing a healthy personality. In addition to our personalities, families, cultural backgrounds, and experiences, we are also formed by the various social contexts we inhabit and by our different aptitudes and preferences. And each of these different selves may be living into a different story, speaking a different language, embracing different symbols, and practicing different rituals. In my own life, I can identify one liturgy related to my life as a musician, another connected with my writing, yet another that relates to my role in a church, and still others connected with my marriage, family, friendships, play, and solitude.

This means that, in terms of our spiritual practice, we do not need (with apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien) “one liturgy to rule them all”. Rather we will need, and have to juggle, multiple liturgies. If we lack self-awareness, most of these liturgies will operate automatically and we will be influenced by them without our knowledge. But as we become more self-aware, through intentional spiritual practice, we will learn to identify, not just our multiple selves, but the variety of liturgies related to them. Over time, and with practice, we can begin to integrate these liturgies into a cohesive ‘inner liturgical library’ that helps to bring our different selves into alignment with each other, and that can lead us to greater wholeness and integrity.

JUGGLING WITH OTHERS

In our hyper-individualised world, it is tempting to view spirituality as a private and personal endeavour. But the truth is that authentic spirituality is always both personal and communal. When Jesus taught his followers about prayer, in the Sermon on the Mount, he offered these instructions:

When you pray, don’t be like hypocrites. They love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners so that people will see them. I assure you, that’s the only reward they’ll get. But when you pray, go to your room, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is present in that secret place. Your Father who sees what you do in secret will reward you…

Pray like this:
Our Father who is in heaven…
(Matthew 6:5-6, 9a)

Notice, in Jesus’ teaching, that even in the ‘secret place’ where we are alone and no one but God can see us, we are to pray “Our Father…” not “My Father…” This indicates that, for Jesus at least, spirituality—as personal as it may be—always has social and relational implications.⁶ This means that, once again, our spirituality must enable us to face and navigate complexity—in this case the complexity of relationships.

One of the biggest areas of challenge when it comes to living intentionally is learning to balance our personal intentions with our social and relational intentions. Most of us live in a constant juggling act between loving ourselves and loving our significant others. It would be wonderful if the needs and desires of our loved ones fitted seamlessly into our own, but that only happens if someone in the relationship is denying important parts of themselves. When we’re honest with ourselves and the people with whom we’re in relationship, we will always have to negotiate the relationship between living on purpose and loving on purpose.

Human beings are wired to connect with one another, and that means that we influence each other mentally, emotionally, and even biologically in significant ways, as Daniel Goldman notes:

The social responsiveness of the brain demands that we be wise, that we realize how not just our own moods but our very biology is being driven and molded by the other people in our lives—and in turn, it demands that we take stock of how we affect other people’s emotions and biology. Indeed, we can take the measure of a relationship in terms of a person’s impact on us, and ours on them.⁷

This means that we are constantly juggling competing liturgies, not just relative to our culture or society, but in our relationships. It is naïve to expect that our significant others will love the same stories that have captured our hearts, use the same vocabulary and think the same way that we do, have their imaginations inspired by the same symbols, and develop their habits using the same rituals. There may naturally be some overlap, but unless we are intentional about the liturgies we share, we will inevitably experience times when the liturgies we practice clash with those of others. The task, then, of intentional spirituality, is not just to help us be conscious about our own evolution, but also to help us be conscious—and welcoming—of the evolution of our loved ones. It is to enable us to juggle the ever-present tension between our needs and aspirations and those of others in our lives and worlds.

A few years ago I was given a series of coaching sessions with a business consultant who works with some of the biggest global corporations. Early in our journey, he got me to do a personality profiling test. When he saw my results, he expressed great surprise at one facet in particular. It seemed that in the areas of my life where I’m alone and independent, I am highly decisive and proactive. But when I find myself in groups, I tend to become highly compliant. These two traits—decisiveness and compliance—seldom co-exist at high levels in one individual. Rather, most people tend to be strong in one and much weaker in the other. My coach explained that the presence of both qualities signalled a contradiction within me. He was concerned that I was submitting myself and my strength to the groups in which I participated. And he encouraged me to seek ways to embrace my decisiveness more when working with others.

That conversation was significantly transforming for me. And it revealed the extent to which, at that point, I was failing at my ‘Intentional Juggle’. I wasn’t really negotiating the relationship between my intentions and those of the group. I was simply prioritising the group over my own needs and desires. And, as you might have guessed, it eventually became completely unhealthy and unsustainable.