“Stay together, friends, don’t scatter and sleep. Our friendship is made of being awake.” Rumi

In her book Cloister Walk, Kathleen Norris comments that in a monastery, Holy Week is “a total surrender to worship.” This surrender allows for a greater focus on the events leading up to and moving us through Resurrection Sunday—Jesus’ gathering with his friends the night before his death to share a last meal, his teaching and ministry to his disciples on that night, his arrest, trial, execution and finally his Resurrection. Such a surrender to worship allows those who participate an opportunity to walk with Christ through the culminating events of his life here on earth and to be alert and awake to what he has to teach them along the way.

Just a Closer Walk with Thee

Walking with Christ is a central metaphor for the spiritual life; there are things that we learn by staying alert and walking with Jesus during Holy Week that we cannot learn in any other way. Some of the harder lessons and mysteries of our faith are lived out right in front of our eyes during these days, and the lessons to be learned are best taught in the intimacy of our relationship with Christ as we walk the path together.

To stay awake to his passion during Holy Week is a challenging invitation, to be sure. It is one thing to learn how to be like Christ during the triumphs of the Palm Sunday experience when everything is as we hoped it would be. It is easy to follow Christ then— to enjoy the pomp and circumstance, the good will and limelight. It is quite another to learn how to be like Christ in the midst of betrayal, violence, pain, struggle, and death. As Barbara Brown Taylor commented, “I want to stop about a day short of following Jesus all the way!”

Isn’t it Ironic?

Jesus’ dark night began, ironically, with the kiss of a friend. The irony had to do with the fact that Jesus had given such priority to cultivating relationships with his disciples during his brief time on earth and now he was experiencing the betrayal of his deep longing within that most intimate circle. Just when he needed them most, his closest friends kept leaving in one way or another—either by falling asleep, misunderstanding the situation, betraying him, or denying him.

Some of Jesus’ most human moments had to do with his poignant expressions of longing for companionship.  From the very first moment of his life in ministry he invited “those whom he wanted…to be with him,” the Scriptures say in Mark 3. He accepted his ultimate aloneness as we all must, but his longing for intimacy and friendship with those he loved expressed itself consistently and in different ways throughout his life. When his teaching became too challenging and many chose to leave, Jesus turned to his disciples and said, “Will you leave me also?”

As their relationships deepened, Jesus said, “I no longer call you servants, I call you friends.” And one of the crowning achievements of his life was that he loved his own until the end. (John 13:1)

The Gift of Being There

Perhaps the most compelling expression of Christ’s longing for companionship was his request for his disciples to accompany him to the Garden of Gethsemane and to pray with him through the dark night of his betrayal and death. (Matthew 26: 36-37) There was something about knowing that his friends were nearby that provided strength and comfort.

Jesus invited Peter, James and John, whom he had come to trust the most, to come farther than the others. And as he began to grieve more openly and to struggle with what was before him, he asked them specifically to stay awake with him. He seemed to have an awareness of how hard it is to stay awake and present to someone else’s pain but he asked them anyway. He knew the human tendency to “check out” when the human struggle becomes too much to bear. Only those who are closest stay through the end.

As we walk along this way, perhaps Jesus has something to say to us regarding those moments when we, too, feel ourselves abandoned by those who were closest to us. Is there a comfort in being with Jesus in this moment?

Keeping Vigil as an Act of Friendship

Every year at this time, we have the opportunity to “go all the way” in reliving the events of Jesus’ last days here on this earth. Like the first disciples we have the opportunity to choose, as best we can, to deepen our friendship with Christ by communing with him and learning from him as we walk each step of the way. At the beginning of this week we might ask, How will I be intentional about staying awake with Christ through all the events of this week? In the midst of leading others through Holy Week, where is that very private place where I can be present to Christ’s suffering, learning the very personal lessons he has for me?

As we are intentional about seeking ways to walk with Christ through the events of this week, we are responding to his deep and consistent desire to be with those he loved—particularly during the time of his agony. Keeping vigil is an act of love and friendship with Christ. It is the gift of being present during the hardest and most unnerving part of his journey; we do it because he asks those he loves to remain near him and to stay with him, awake and alert. This is the gift of ourselves, which is the truest gift we have to give.

Praying Our Way Through Holy Week

Lord Jesus Christ, prepare our hearts to walk with you the rest of the way. Help us to find ourselves in this part of your story and not run from the pain and the unanswerable questions contained within it.

Draw us to sit with you at the Last Supper where you shared your heart so tenderly with your friends and faced your betrayer honestly and without malice.

Help us to stay awake in the Garden of that Dark Night, as you wrestle with the death and dying that must take place in order for God’s will to come forth.

Give us the wisdom to know, as you did, when it is time to lay down our life so that some day we can take it up again.

Give us the grace to endure the pain of witnessing your humiliation and rejection so that we can more gracefully endure our own.

Help us to be as gut-wrenchingly honest as you were when you cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

Grant us the courage to let go when it is time.

And give us the patience to wait with you in the silence of death until you call forth resurrection.

Amen.

©Ruth Haley Barton, 2025. This article is not to be reproduced without written permission from the author or The Transforming Center.

Read more: Staying Awake During Holy Week

“Lent is a time of returning to God. It is a time to confess how we keep looking for joy, peace, and satisfaction in the many people and things surrounding us without really finding what we desire. Only God can give us what we want. So we must be reconciled with God… The season of Lent helps us in a special way to cry out for God’s mercy.” –Henri Nouwen

There comes a time in the spiritual life when one of the major things God is up to is to lovingly help us see ourselves more clearly. This is a time when we are called to wake up to the darkness within and invite the light of God’s presence to shine there. Just as winter and spring—light and darkness—seem to be fighting for dominance during this season of the earth, Lent is a spiritual season for seeing, naming and confessing our own darkness until eventually it gives way to God’s marvelous light.

A Leader’s Prayer During Lent

It is not easy to consider “dying so that we might live,” but there are times when this is what God calls us to. When we embrace the rhythms of the Church year as seasons of transformation, hiddenness, self-examination, and fasting is what we are called to during Lent. Let’s pray for ourselves and one another that we will hear God’s call to us during this Lenten season. Perhaps this prayer from Henri Nouwen’s work, A Cry for Mercy, will help us.

“Yes, Lord, I have to die—with you, through you, and in you—and thus become ready to recognize you when you appear to me in your resurrection.  There is so much in me that needs to die: false attachments, greed and anger, impatience and stinginess.  

O Lord, I am self-centered, concerned about myself, my career, my future, my name and fame.  Often I even feel that I use you to my own advantage…

Yes, Lord, I know it is true.  I know that often I have spoken about you, written about you, and acted in your name for my own glory and success.  Your name has not led me to persecution, oppression, or rejection.  Your name has brought me rewards!  I see clearly how little I have died with you, really gone your way and been faithful to it.  

O Lord, make this Lenten season different from the other ones.  Let me find you again.  Amen.

© Ruth Haley Barton, 2025. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Read more: A Leader’s Prayer During Lent

There is no doubt that Lent requires something of us. But there can be no feasting without fasting. Entering into the Lenten discipline of giving up something in order to create more space for prayer is the fast that prepares us to fully enjoy the Feast of the Resurrection.  My prayer is that part of your preparation would be to consider your own Lenten disciplines and bravely ask God, “How can I return to God with all my heart? Where have I gotten distracted or become distant from God as my first love? Have can I return to wholeness, to the version of myself that is most authentic, true and holy?”

Let us approach Lent, then, as an opportunity, not a requirement. Let us approach it as a joyful season.  “After all, it is meant to lead us into the church’s Springtime, a time when out of the darkness of sin’s winter, a repentant empowered people emerges.” (Bread and Wine: Readings for Lent and Easter)

Journey with us through Lent

Lent is just around the corner, and we are invited to enter this season as an opportunity to face more bravely the complexity of the human struggle for authentic transformation through greater surrender to God. If you missed our Lent Online Oasis, you can purchase the recording to receive guidance from Ruth on bringing more intention into your Lenten journey.

Purchase the recording and receive weekly reflections written by Ruth Haley Barton.

This digital resource, Lent: A Season of Returning, by Ruth Haley Barton includes weekly reflections. Each week focuses on the disciplines associated with Lent including:

• Solitude/Retreat
• Self–Denial
• Repentance
• Confession
• Walking with Christ in his suffering

Purchase recording and weekly guidance

New podcast season

To further support your journey, we are launching a new season of the Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership podcast entitled, “Tarry with Me Awhile: Learnings from the Black Church.” We will use Dr. Selina Stone’s book, Tarry Awhile: Wisdom from Black Spirituality for People of Faith, as a guide.

Black spirituality has much to offer us in understanding the practice of tarrying as a Lenten practice. Together we will seek a deeper understanding of waiting on God in the liminal space—where the resurrection feels far off, and our deaths and suffering are present.

The first episode drops on March 5. Listen to weekly episodes for wherever you listen to podcasts.

Podcast Patrons receive bonus episodes highlighting the spiritual disciplines associated with Lent.

Support the podcast and receive bonus episodes

Read more: Lent Resources for Spiritual Leaders

“Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” – Mary Oliver

For many families it is rather customary to use the time off around Christmas and New Year’s to see at least one movie that is new for the holidays.  It’s always interesting to note which ones people choose to see and which ones become blockbusters.  Several years ago, even though there was a new James Bond movie released for the holidays, it was The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey that was the highest grossing film of the season.

In this prequel to J.R.R. Tolkien’s acclaimed trilogy The Lord of the Rings, we are introduced to endearing creatures called Hobbits, a fictional race of people who stand about half the average human height.  Though some live in houses, most dwell in simple underground homes built into the sides of hills with windows looking to the outside world. They live barefooted with no need for shoes because they have hairy feet with naturally tough leathery soles.

Hobbits by their very nature, do not like adventures—which is why the journey captured in this story is so unexpected. Hobbits like predictability, they love good food and ale, and they prefer to stay in the comfort of their own neat and well-kept houses.  They don’t much care for strangers, and they feel no need to venture out beyond the safety of the shire. When Gandalf, the wizard, approaches a hobbit named Bilbo Baggins about going on an adventure with a bunch of dwarves, Bilbo is highly resistant at first and tries to refuse the invitation. Gandalf responds with a challenge and bit of cynicism, “When did you get so attached to your mother’s doilies and china teacups?”

Gandalf’s communication strategy works, motivating Bilbo Baggins to embark upon the journey of a lifetime—the journey there and back again!

Averse to Adventure

Sometimes we Christians are more like hobbits than we would like to admit—having fallen into a pattern of assuming that the Christian life is all about maintaining our own personal comfort and preserving our well-ordered existence.  We, too, are rather attached to our creature comforts and would rather not give them up.  We are adept at avoiding strangers by surrounding ourselves with people who are just like us, so we never get very far outside our own echo chambers. We, too, feel no need to venture beyond the shire—that is, the safety of the life experiences and belief systems that have shaped us and give us the illusion of security.  If an adventure is offered, we are likely to decline as we would prefer a faith journey that doesn’t require much…well… faith.

Epiphany challenges this propensity towards staying safe.  It all begins by highlighting the unexpected journey of the Magi—three spiritual seekers willing to leave the safe and the familiar in order to find what their souls have been seeking.  These pagan astrologers had a longing for Something More and they had been seeking some sense of direction for a very long time. Day after day they looked up into the night sky, plotting the course of the stars, waiting for a revelation…and when that revelation came through a special sign in the heavens, they had a choice.  Would they embark upon a new adventure of seeking and finding, even though they had no idea where following this star would take them, or would they choose to stay safe, continuing to star-gaze, trying to gain more information?    

Our Gospel reading for today tells us that they chose this unexpected journey, and that choice made all the difference.

A Season of Spiritual Seeking

It may not surprise you to learn that Epiphany is my favorite season of the Church year because it centers the spiritual journey—the choice to strike out on a new (and potentially risky) journey of actively seeking rather than being complacent, cynical, or passive.  Whereas Advent emphasizes waiting (active waiting though it may be), Epiphany emphasizes active seeking, which has always been my bent. What does Epiphany have to teach us about our own adventures in faith?

For one thing, the story of these spiritual seekers ascribes worth to the practice of staying alert, attentive to signs that God may be up to something—even if it’s a practice as simple as looking up at the stars every night. This attentiveness is coupled with an attitude of radical readiness to take action based on what is revealed in and through those signs.

The journey of the Magi to find the Christ child imbues value and worth to both the seeker and the search, no matter how imperfectly that journey is carried out. It communicates that there is something inherently valuable in the journey itself and our willingness to risk everything to take it.  It affirms that being on the journey is what matters most because that is where God meets us. As St. Francis is credited with saying, “The journey is the destination.”

A Spirituality of Imperfection

One of the most striking elements of the Christmas story culminating in Epiphany is the imperfection of it all. None of the circumstances surrounding Jesus’ birth were ideal.  Jesus was conceived out of wedlock.  When the time came for him to be born, Mary and Joseph were on the road due to political forces beyond their control.  Because so many were traveling during this time and there was a shortage of adequate accommodations, Jesus’ parents had to settle for a much less than ideal situation for the blessed event of Jesus’ birth.

Beyond these intimate imperfections, the outer landscape was very bleak.  Jesus’ birth took place during a time of religious and political upheaval with a despotic king on the throne.  King Herod was a violent and insecure man who used power to shore up his own sense of self rather than harnessing power for the good of others.  Not knowing this, the magi made a grave mistake in alerting Herod to the birth of Jesus, a future king whom Herod immediately viewed as a competitor and a usurper.  This so infuriated Herod that he ordered what is now known as “the slaughter of the innocents”—the murder of all children who were two years old and under. The journey of the Magi becomes haunted by the sounds of mothers weeping for their children, refusing to be comforted.

Beyond Safety

So, what are we to make of all this? For one thing, there is never a perfect time to strike out on a new spiritual journey.  Jesus’ birth and all the events surrounding it took place during a season of real threat, times that were more conducive to staying in one’s own house with the curtains drawn rather than being out and about. 

All the major players in the Christmas story were in danger and had very little control over their circumstances. This was not a good time for spiritual seeking, for responding to signs in the heavens or worshipping a baby king in a manger.  But Jesus was born anyway.  The star appeared anyway.  And the Magi left their secure and protected environment to seek the One whose arrival signaled hope for them.  The One whose presence was bringing light to a very dark time.

Even though these “wise” ones created danger for themselves and others by what they shared with King Herod, God alerted them through a dream that their situation was not what it seemed and gave instructions for how they could return home safely. What this tells me is that we don’t have to be perfect in how we do our seeking.  In fact, I would say, forget about perfection!  We just need to stay alert to how God is leading along the way and be utterly responsive to it —whether that guidance comes through a dream or signs in the night sky.

The story of the Magi tells us that we don’t have to be afraid on our journeys even when there is danger all around.  God’s got us on our journeys, just like he had the Magi on theirs. God honors every attempt we make at seeking and finding by never leaving us or forsaking us. It is important that we know this for when we make our own mistakes or face our own dangers.

The Vulnerability of God

Then somewhere along the way on this journey of faithful seeking, God does the revealing. And this is the heart of Epiphany—we seek, and God reveals.  Epiphany marks the mysterious process whereby things that were hidden are now being made manifest. Paul, brilliant intellect that he was, tries to explain this in Ephesians 3:1-12 using the words like mystery, revelation, and bringing to light. What a humbling admission for a person like Paul to acknowledge that he could not think his way into the knowledge that he now possessed, but that he had needed to wait for the great mystery of our faith to be revealed in God’s way and in God’s time. Can we do this?  Can we let go of intellectual striving and wait for the mystery to be revealed in God’s time and in God’s way?

It seems to me that there is always some kind of letting go that must take place in order to be ready to receive God’s revelations.  We may have to let go of reliance on our own intellect.  We may have to let go of a belief system that we are now finding to be quite limiting.  We may have to let go of a community that doesn’t understand the seeker’s journey and what it requires. The Magi had to leave the king’s palace, letting go of the trappings of royalty and wealth, fancy titles and job security.  There was no fanfare, nor were there any special effects.  Just desire, resolve, and great risk leading to an ordinary barn in the hill country of Judea. And in the simplest of settings with the simplest and most unassuming of people, the mystery of God-in-Christ was finally being revealed.

The first thing that gets revealed is the vulnerability of God. To paraphrase Luke’s Gospel, “And this will be a sign for you: you will find God in the form of complete vulnerability, having given up all the trappings of royalty and any semblance of power and strength. You will find God completely open and available to the world, undefended and without resources except for what those who come to visit might bring. When you see this, you will begin to comprehend the mystery of God-in-Christ.” (Luke 2:12, author’s paraphrase)

Epiphany emphasizes the revealing of God’s self to ordinary people in ordinary places. But God’s vulnerability is only the beginning.  Epiphany draws us into a season of progressive revelation of God’s self in Christ.

A Season of Progressive Revelation

The coming of the Magi to the manger signals an important transition: What has been largely hidden or shared with only a few is now becoming more widely known.  There is a certain poignancy to this, and I remember this feeling from when I had my babies.  There was a blessed time (very short) when no one except my husband was permitted to be in the room with me and the new baby; and even as I savored the intimacy of this time, there was a sense that it was passing, that it was going to come to an end very soon. 

The funny thing was how mixed my feelings were during that time. With each birth I couldn’t wait to share my beautiful baby with others who would ooh and ahh and love the baby, too, but at the same time I sensed the preciousness of this intimate time before the big reveal.  I knew that once it was over, it would be over for good, and a new season would begin: a season of revelation in which life with this child would be a progression of sharing her with the world.  I knew that eventually we would leave the cloister of the hospital, and I would begin the journey of sharing this child with many others.

Epiphany represents this same kind of progression, moving from the small circle of those who were intimately involved in the Christmas story, to a wider circle of those who would come to know Jesus as well.  In the first Sunday after Epiphany, we skip to that very public moment when John prophesies about Jesus being the Messiah following Jesus’ baptism and the Voice from heaven proclaiming his identity as the beloved Son of God.  From there we witness the wedding of Cana where Jesus turns water into wine, the first revelation of his miraculous powers.

As the season moves along, we witness the power of Jesus’ preaching as he proclaims the true nature of the Gospel, which (interestingly enough) has nothing to do with going to heaven when we die and everything to do with provision for the poor and freedom for the oppressed. And in the fourth Sunday after Epiphany, we see that Jesus angers people with his preaching—so much so that they wanted to kill him—but he passes through the middle of the crowd and goes on his way. We learn that others who had been waiting for a sign (Simeon and Anna) recognized him for who he was even as an infant, and the favor of the Lord was upon him, even as a child. And the revelations continue with miracles and powerful preaching moments, all the way to that definitive moment when Jesus is transfigured before them and communes with Moses and Elijah on the mountain top.

A Season for Ordinary Mystics

Perhaps the most important thing we can say about Epiphany is that it is the season for ordinary mystics.  Do not be scared off by that term.  To be a mystic is to be one who is in touch with the  mysteries of our faith as Paul talks about in Ephesians 3.  To be a mystic is to be open to actually experiencing the things we say we believe—like the possibility of real encounters with the Divine in the midst of our everyday lives.

Mirabai Starr says that “To be a mystic is to have a direct experience with the sacred…mysticism is not about concepts; it is about communion with ultimate reality.” By this definition, everyone in the Christmas story and in the unfolding of Epiphany were mystics—ordinary mystics—who cultivated the capacity to recognize and respond to the signs of God’s presence coming to them in the most ordinary moments of their lives

My prayer is that each of us will accept the invitation contained within the season of Epiphany—the invitation to be mystics, too.  My prayer is that we will choose to pay attention…to be astonished… and to tell about it.

A Blessing for You

May the blessings of Epiphany be yours:
The blessing of moving beyond safety into unknown territories.
The blessing of trusting God amid imperfection, and maybe even a little danger.
The blessing of stumbling across a God who chooses to be revealed in vulnerability.
The blessing of ongoing revelation rather than a static faith.
The blessing of being an ordinary mystic,
open to the mystery of God-in-Christ revealed in your ordinary life.

© Ruth Haley Barton, 2025. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Read more: Epiphany – There and Back Again: An Unexpected Journey

Perhaps it goes without saying but it needs to be said anyway: the future of Christian spirituality will, of necessity, be Christocentric but with some sorely needed fresh insight into what that actually means. One of those fresh applications has to do with focusing on the deeper unity we all share rather than focusing on the differences that divide us. This unity can only be found in and through the Spirit of Christ working actively among us.  

I experienced a longing for this kind of wholeness long before I would have been able to express it the way I am expressing it here, and part of my story is how I sought that out in some very intentional ways. 

Choosing Unity Within Diversity

When it came time for me to enter spiritual direction training in 1998, I chose the Shalem Institute for Spiritual Formation precisely because of the theological diversity and the diversity of faith tradition lived out within an ecumenical environment. Tilden Edwards was an Episcopal priest, Rosemary Dougherty was a vowed Catholic sister who was exploring mindfulness within a broader context, and Gerald May, MD was a contemplative who was also a psychiatrist.  

My religious upbringing had been so conservative and homogeneous that I just wanted to be in the mix of their diversity. I was hungry to experience these three teachers together in one place; I wanted to simply bask in the unity they experienced within their diversity.  I had not had an experience like that before and I knew I was impoverished because of it. I hoped that witnessing and participating in their integrated wholeness would foster integration and wholeness within me.  So I invested a lot in the five years of training I received there—and it was worth every penny, for it has shaped who I am today. 

Bad News and Good News

The truth is, there has been a painful distance and even estrangement within the family of God that has gone on for way too long.  While this family truth is hard to admit, Richard Rohr’s observation that “A good journey begins with knowing where we are and being willing to go someplace else” is strangely encouraging because we can name the distance and (in some cases) estrangement within the family of God as where we are.  That’s the bad news. But the good news is that there is someplace else for us to go. There is a hidden wholeness that is still there for us on the other side of this great divide.  As siblings in the family of God, we belong together and the truth is, we just miss each other! Some of us are getting honest enough to say so and to seek a family re-union as part of our spiritual journey. 

As I pay attention to what the Holy Spirit is up to in our world, I cannot escape a deep sense that the future of Christian spirituality will include a focus on bringing back together what has been torn asunder—especially the rupture that took place in the Protestant Reformation.   Indeed, it is happening already. 

Phyllis Tickle in her book, The Great Emergence, observes that massive transitions in the church happen about every 500 years and that we are living in just such a time right now. She compares the Great Emergence to other “Greats” in the history of Christianity, including the Great Transformation (when God walked among us), the time of Gregory the Great, the Great Schism, and the Great Reformation otherwise known as the Protestant Reformation.

She names the time we are living in right now as the Great Emergence, which means that the Christian Church has entered a post-denominational mode. In her view, this is a sociological and cultural shift involving a change in sensibilities that we will not go back from.  “Christians today are going to keep moving towards being non-hierarchal, suspicious and afraid of institutions,” she says, “and they are going to want to spread out horizontally, they want to be communal, and they are going to be actively involved in social justice.”   And I would add—they/we are going to want a more unified, integrated existence on all levels because something in us knows this is what we were made for. It’s just taking us awhile to get there!

Beyond Dualism to Fruitful Synergy

Something Catholics and Protestants share in common is that we have inherited an ambiguous legacy of dualistic thinking that separates aspects of the human experience that seem very different but actually belong together in some fundamental way.  Because we have not always known how to hold these aspects of life together in fruitful synergy, we have torn them apart, convinced they cannot possibly exist together.   Then, we’ve elevated one as being better and “more spiritual,” while subordinating or diminishing the other. This habit of creating false bifurcations functions on so many levels that it is fruitless to try and list them all, but (by way of example) here are a few: 

• the spiritual vs. the physical/material  
• life of the soul vs. life in the body
• male vs. female  
• black vs. white 
• Catholic vs. Protestant
• sexuality vs. spirituality 
• being vs. doing
• community vs. cause 

I could go on and on, but my point here is that the future of Christian spirituality will move us all towards bringing these (on the surface) dichotomous elements of human existence back together, holding them in creative tension rather than pitting them against each other.  My story is just one living, breathing example of the kind of integration that is springing up all over the place. In that sense, my story is not unique at all.  

Participating in the Unity that is Ours  

But how will this integration happen on a larger scale, given the divisiveness of these days?  It will only happen in Christ because all things have already been reconciled in Christ at the cosmic level. Left to ourselves as mere humans, we will never find what it takes to heal all that has been broken inside us and among us. But IN CHRIST this unity is ours!   We can enjoy our unique and personal relationship with Jesus and the transformation it brings while at the same time opening to the Christ in whom all things hold together.  “He is the icon of the invisible God, the first born of all creation; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created…all things have been created through him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together… for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross.” (Colossians 1:15-20)

It’s not that we don’t know this; it is that we have not fully plumbed the depths of what it means.

 Our unity in Christ doesn’t mean we have to change where we go to church or change our creeds and statements of faith—although we may be led to that eventually.  We can experience differentiation as children in the family of God and at the same time experience the love, respect and cross-pollination among siblings that does the soul good.  We don’t have to be the same in order to seek and experience the deeper unity we share in Christ. Rather than seeing ourselves as “defenders of the faith” as though everything depends on us, we can rest in the peace of what Christ has already done and is doing, thus participating in the unity of the family we are a part of. We know this is what Jesus wants for us and it is why he came.  (John 17)  

Spirituality that is Distinctly Christian 

This is not just any kind of spirituality; this is distinctly Christian spirituality.  This is our present AND our future. It is what already exists in Christ at the cosmic level, and it is where we’re going.  Our only choice is whether to participate in what the Spirit is doing or to resist it. What God has joined together, let no man or woman or child put asunder. 

© Ruth Haley Barton, 2024. Parts of this article were first presented at The Future of Christian Spirituality Conference in honor of Fr. Ron Rolheiser in 2019.

• Introduction: A Protestant’s Journey Toward a More Unified Faith
• Part 1: The Role of Desire in the Spiritual Life
• Part 2: The Charism and Practice of Spiritual Direction
• Part 3: A Spirituality that is Practice-Oriented and Practice-Based
• Part 4: A More Welcoming Stance from a Rooted Depth
• Part 5: Profoundly Justice Oriented

Read more: The Future of Christian Spirituality: Part 6 | Searching for Wholeness—in Christ

It is not a huge leap to move from welcoming the stranger to caring for the stranger—being concerned for their well-being and being willing to get involved in ensuring that they, as God’s children, have equal opportunity to flourish. And yet, I was surprised when this started happening to me. 

For a while, it seemed like I couldn’t get enough solitude, silence, and just being in God’s presence.  In fact, I started to become a little worried about myself, wondering if I would ever fully re-engage with the world of people again or would I always be wanting to wander off by myself? I feared I was becoming a narcissistic navel-gazer, disconnected from the needs of the world. Would I ever be good for anything practical again? I wondered.  Where had my activism and drivenness gone?      

But as I stayed with my desire and the practices that were fostering the deeper intimacy for which my soul had been longing, I noticed that there was an organic rhythm unfolding in my life—a rhythm of receiving from God the loving connection I needed and then allowing God’s love to flow from that fullness back out into the world.  There was less forcing, just flowing.  Without having words for it yet, I was experiencing a natural phenomenon—our spiritual transformation for the glory of God, for the abundance of our own lives AND for the sake of others—my intimate others (and believe me, they were grateful for my much-needed transformation!) but also others in the world who were not enjoying the safety and security, the justice and the equity, and other tools for flourishing that I have taken for granted all my life.  

Where the Justice Journey Begins 

As we experience ourselves to be unconditionally welcomed by God, our own hearts become more welcoming, and our capacity to care about what and who God cares about expands. As we welcome one another into our conversations and communities, our hearts and our lives, we find ourselves changing–sometimes in surprising ways. It becomes harder to sit on the sidelines when those whom we are coming to understand and care about are being treated unfairly and unjustly.  Suddenly, issues that didn’t used to matter to us much at all, matter quite a bit because they relate to real people whom we have now welcomed and whose cares and concerns have become our own.  

How, I began to wonder, had I been a Christian for so long and somehow avoided really grappling with the reality of injustice in the world, not to mention God’s passion for justice? “For I, the Lord love justice,” God declares (Isaiah 61:8) and Isaiah 30:18 proclaims, “For the Lord is a God of justice.” Clearly justice is a part of God’s essential nature. And Micah’s statement What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” is as concise a biblical definition of Christian spirituality as we might find anywhere.  How has Christianity so often been reduced to a privatized, me-and-my-best-friend-Jesus kind of thing with so little regard for the welfare of others? 

The Sin of Injustice 

Gary Haugen, founder of International Justice Mission, shares a similar experience of growing up in a good Christian family, attending church every Sunday and never once hearing a sermon on justice.  In his book, Just Courage, he shares that it wasn’t until he got to college that he first began to be challenged towards thinking about justice, which changed the trajectory of his life to one oriented around fighting for justice on behalf of those who cannot fight for themselves.  In his book he boldly states, “The sin of injustice in the Bible is defined as the abuse of power—abusing power by taking from others the good things God intended for them, namely, their life, liberty, dignity, or the fruits of their love or their labor…When more powerful persons abuse their power by stealing those good things, they commit the sin of injustice.” 

Our Black brothers and sisters are quick to point out that only in the White church would it even be possible for justice to remain unaddressed and ignored; in Black churches, justice is talked about every week.  In fact, in the Black church it is impossible to talk about love without talking about justice because they are seen as two sides of the same coin. As James Cone puts it, “Love in society is called justice.”

Not needing to talk about justice is nothing more than White privilege, plain and simple.  

Beyond a Domesticated Faith

Speaking of James Cone…recently I have been rereading his book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, engaging it again with new eyes and a deeper soul as we navigate a much-needed racial reckoning in our country. What stands out to me this time around is that Cone is writing about justice in the context of grappling with his spirituality as a Black man.  He writes, “I was black before I was a Christian. My initial challenge was to develop a liberation theology that was both black and Christian—at the same time and in one voice. That was not easy because even in the black community the meaning of Christianity was white.”  He goes on to acknowledge how his questions—”Who am I?  Why am I here? And what must we do to achieve our full humanity in a world that denies it?”—have shaped his spirituality differently than the spirituality of those who have been shaped by assumed safety, agency, and privilege.  

The reality of injustice and how it shapes and misshapes those who are on the receiving end of it is something the Holy Spirit is seeking to rectify even now, and that brings me to my next observation: The Christian spirituality of the future will be (and indeed must be) more sensitized and committed to the fight for justice or it is not Christian spirituality at all.  Rather, it will be some pale, watered down, self-serving domestication of the God who is the father and mother of us all and therefore desires for all to flourish.  Applying Paul’s profound statement about equality and justice in Galatians 3:28 is an ongoing work of the Spirit that has yet to be fully realized:  As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.  [In Christ] there is no longer Jew or Greek…there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male or female; for all of you are one in Christ. 

What Does the Lord Require of Us?

As painful as the racial reckoning we are experiencing in our country is right now, as hard as it is to face the abuse of sex and power not only in the world but in the church, as painful as the controversies are around gender equity and human sexuality, as confounding as issues of immigration and socio economic inequities can be…there is contained within it all an unprecedented opportunity for us to grapple in new ways with what it means to love justice and do justice rather than merely pontificating about it.  God is already at work in these difficult places, inviting into fresh applications of basic Christian ideals.  So, let’s lean into the future rather than resist where the Spirit is taking us. 

The future of Christian spirituality is already incorporating, and will continue to incorporate, listening to the experiences and wrestlings of those whose collective experience includes oppression, violence and abuse, discrimination and inequity—both past and present. Those who have not experienced any of these things will need to stand down and stop feeling so threatened by realities that we simply must face. We’re going to have to stop the flow of our own words and rationalizations, listen better and longer, and give others’ understanding of God within their experiences as much credence as we give our own.  We are not the measure of all things, after all!  And God is big enough to hold us all in our differing experiences and how these shapes our spirituality. 

And maybe, if we do, we will be given the grace to respond with the soul force Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. identified as “the force of God-directed action motivated by love and emerging from the soul of a person in touch with the Spirit of God.”  

Quick to Listen and Slow to Speak

One of the most fundamental aspects of partnering with God in the work for justice is being slow to speak and quick to listen. We need to ask questions characterized by deep curiosity and true care, including questions like, “Tell me more” and “What was that like for you?” We need to let those who have experienced injustice tell us what would constitute justice going forward vs. thinking we know how to fix everything. Then we need to do the next right thing based on what we’ve heard.  We need to ask, “What can I do to help make this right?”  

Listening does not mean we agree on everything…in fact, I think that’s why many of us don’t want to listen—because we’re afraid we’re going to have to agree and we’re not sure we’re ready for that! But there can be no movement towards justice without first listening and allowing ourselves to be impacted by those whose experiences are so different than our own. Bishop Michael Curry writes, “To love, my brothers and sisters, does not mean we have to agree. And maybe agreeing to love is the greatest agreement.  And the only one that ultimately matters, because it makes a future possible.”

While the fight for justice starts with listening, it cannot end there.  Then we must gather up whatever resources we have at our disposal—money, platform, position, power, influence—and use them to take steps toward liberty and justice for all, walking gratefully in the footsteps of all the justice partners who have gone before. For where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom…and the wind of the Spirit propelling us toward justice.  

© Ruth Haley Barton, 2024. Parts of this article were first presented at The Future of Christian Spirituality Conference in honor of Fr. Ron Rolheiser in 2019.

• Introduction: A Protestant’s Journey Toward a More Unified Faith
• Part 1: The Role of Desire in the Spiritual Life
• Part 2: The Charism and Practice of Spiritual Direction
• Part 3: A Spirituality that is Practice-Oriented and Practice-Based
• Part 4: A More Welcoming Stance from a Rooted Depth

Read more: The Future of Christian Spirituality: Part 5 | Profoundly Justice Oriented

As I journeyed with my desire and with a good spiritual director, something else was happening, too. Wrestling with my tradition while at the same time going deeper into that tradition and finding practices there that I had not known about opened me to the transforming work of God beyond all the human striving that had characterized my early religious life. Moving beyond mere dabbling in solitude and silence into a substantive commitment to these practices changed not only the landscape of my inner life, but the contours of my outer life as well.

Finding myself to be so deeply and unconditionally loved by God in all my unfinished-ness, my rawness, and my lack of performance and productivity began to form within me a different kind of love for others. Something significant was happening inside me that was changing me outwardly.

Slowly and imperceptibly, I was becoming a more open, a more welcoming, a more faith-filled and less judgmental person. This was rather unexpected, given that up to that point, my Christianity had functioned in large part to delineate who was “in” and who was “out,” who was right and who was wrong. I could not deny that coming closer to God at the center of my being drew me into a deeper kind of unity with others who were journeying towards that very same Center.

They Will Know We are Christians by Our…What?

There is simply no way to sugar-coat the kind of arrogant, judgmental, self-righteous attitudes certain aspects of my tradition had formed within me early on. It is hard to admit that we Protestants are not exactly known by our love; we are more known by what we protest. We are known by the fact that we think we are right and believe everyone else is going to hell—literally—unless they believe exactly as we do. Those from other traditions may have similar confessions to make, but I will only speak for myself.

So that’s the bad news. The good news, however, is that in order to be on an authentic spiritual journey, we actually need to have clearly articulated grounding in a particular tradition. Just as the caterpillar must fight and struggle to get out of the cocoon, we too must struggle and fight with our traditions to find our way into a more open space. Turns out that being grounded in a particular tradition gives us access to what Thomas Hart calls “a complete spirituality” which, he writes, “is more than an amalgam of practice. It is a master story, a theological integrity, and a community of practice that gives an orientation in life, a set of values to live by, a sense of direction, and a basis for hope, a relationship with Mystery, and a challenge to personal transformation.”

We as Christians have that, and eventually the authentic struggles we experience in relation to our various traditions really do pay off spiritually if we can stop short of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Authentically Wide and Welcoming

In her book, Sacred is the Call, spiritual director Sandra Lommasson writes, “growth in the spiritual life requires the sort of wrestling provoked and supported by a particularity of theological commitment and community. From this rooted depth, it is possible to become authentically wide and welcoming, to discerningly incorporate other perspectives and practices, and to work with those of other traditions in a manner truly open to the Spirit.”

Bede Griffith goes on to say, “Our aim is the deepening of our own faith which then becomes more open to others. This is not easy, for each tradition has its own position. If you try and mix them, taking a bit of Hinduism or Buddhism and you try and add Christianity to it, that is syncretism. But if you go deeply into one tradition you converge on the center, and there you see how we all come forth from a common root.”

Rooted depth, indeed! This is certainly my experience, and it brings me to a fourth observation: that from a rooted depth, the future of Christian spirituality will see us become more welcoming and inclusive. It is happening already. The emerging generations of young adult Christians simply cannot comprehend a God who does not love all God’s children equally, and who does not hold within God’s self an equal desire and an equally good plan for all to flourish. Just as good human parents do not play favorites, the God they know does not play favorites either.

Varieties of Faithfulness

Theology professor Brian Bantum (Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary) describes his journey out of a narrower and more exclusive upbringing towards a more welcoming and inclusive faith stance in this way: “There was no singular trauma or betrayal that led me away from the evangelical nest. Instead, it was the small ways I tried to bring the rest of me and my world into the sanctuary with me—and the ways I saw beautiful people cut out and ignored. I began to see histories and varieties of faithfulness. There was so much of God’s difference in the world that seemed to be held at bay in the theology of my youth. That theology swaddled us in certainty, hope, and a sense of purpose—and as it held me in, it also kept much out.”

I am particularly drawn to Bantum’s phrase “varieties of faithfulness.” What a lovely way to talk about diversity and difference. We are so quick to exclude people from our circles of influence, fellowship, and care based on our differences that we fail to recognize our differences as varieties of faithfulness—ways in which other serious and devoted Christians live out their faithfulness to God, themselves, and others differently than we do. Rather than approaching our siblings in the family of God with compassion, curiosity, and respect, we are intent on pronouncing them right or wrong and then making a “position” out of our own views—a position that often becomes a litmus test for whether we can be together or stay together.

I wonder whatever happened to Romans 14:1-4 where Paul asks this question: “Who are you to judge the servant of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And stand they will, for the Lord is able to make them stand.”

I wonder, what if Christian communities could be known as communities that hold difference, rather than splinter because they can’t?

Humbled in the Presence of Reality

Here is a hard truth: we (the older generation) are on our way out. Whether we agree with the upcoming generations of spiritual seekers and leaders or not, they will trust what they know about God deep inside more than they will trust “what the Bible says” according to our white, patriarchal, hetero-normative reading of everything. As heretical as it may sound, they do not always care “what the Bible says” if it contradicts what they know experientially about a loving God. To be more accurate, they are really saying, “We don’t care about what the Bible says the way you have interpreted it.”

Again, you do not have to agree with them, but this is real. If you don’t believe me, go have a series of true listening conversations with thoughtful, spiritually sensitive 30- and 40-something Christians. AND, if you are brave, reflect back on your own youthful self—the self who knew things on a level that contradicted some of the traditional interpretations that were taken for granted by the older generation of your time. Think Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dietrich Bonhoeffer who challenged the Church and the world with fresh perspectives on spiritual truth before their deaths at thirty-nine years old!

Then as now, current and future leaders of the church know God, too, and they will lead us deeper into the heart of our loving God if we will make way and let them.

The True Meaning of Catholic

In his book Sacred Fire, Fr. Ron Rolheiser observes that “Some of this truth is expressed in the wonderful truth of the word catholic. The opposite of a Catholic is not a Protestant, an Evangelical, or even a non-Christian. The opposite of Catholic is a fundamentalist. The word catholic means universal, wide, embracing everyone. Jesus defines the word in this way: In my father’s house are many rooms! In saying this, he is not describing a celestial mansion, but rather the scope of God’s heart. God’s heart is not a house with one room. God has a catholic heart (lower case c), a nonfundamentalist heart. In a fundamentalist’s house there is only one room, it might even be a good room, but it is a single room with no place for anyone not of its own kind. A true catholic heart has a room for everyone.”

I hope that makes us all want to be catholic (lower case c) because the future of Christian spirituality must and will be catholic in this sense—welcoming and embracing with room for all in the conversation, at the table, and in God’s house. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we as Christians were known for that?

Welcoming the Stranger

What we’re really talking about here is nothing more and nothing less than growing in the Christian practice of welcoming the stranger—that is, the one who is strange to you. The person who is different in personality or in the way they present themselves in the world. The one who has been shaped by different life experiences and cultural realities than you. The one whose experience in their body is different than yours. The one who holds a different opinion or “position” on a theological, social, or political issue than you. The one whose ethnicity or citizenship has shaped them differently than you have been shaped. Do we dare to welcome them and listen to them with openness and inner hospitality rather than dismissing them, marginalizing them, closing our hearts and minds to them, or (God-forbid!) walking away?

Are we willing to welcome the one who is strange to us in one of those ways, thus welcoming Jesus like the disciples did on the Emmaus Road? Think about it: if those two disillusioned and dejected disciples had refused to welcome the stranger, they would have missed the entire transformative encounter that came after (See Luke 24:13 f). Might this more welcoming and inclusive stance be a more “Christian” and a more Christ-like stance than what we are doing right now?

Christine Pohl, in her book Making Room, describes hospitality to strangers as a way of life that is fundamental to Christian identity and as a fundamental expression of the Gospel. From what I can see in Scripture, there aren’t a lot of spiritual brownie points given out for welcoming friends, family, the people we like and those with whom we find easy agreement, as lovely as that can be. It is welcoming the stranger—the one who is strange to you—that holds the most promise for welcoming the Divine Presence.

Imagining a Different Kind of Future

One of my favorite things about the way we gather in the Transforming Center is the fact that we intentionally create space for people who are strange to each other in a myriad of ways to welcome each other on their own journey between the now and the not-yet. For us, this is a spiritual practice. Rather than taking hard and fast positions on things, we trust that being together in this welcoming and inclusive way will be more transformative than rejecting people (or having them reject us) because of our positions on some of the controversial issues on which faithful Christians disagree. We welcome and celebrate the diversity that characterizes the body of Christ, and in doing so we find ourselves changed.

It is not always easy to hold steady in this place of creative tension, but time and again we witness transformations that could only take place as people who are strange to each other welcome each other and commit themselves to journey together. We are convinced this is one of the most significant things we can practice, model, and create space for in the body of Christ at this time—for ourselves and our own transformation—and also for the sake of others.

As I often do, I close with a favorite poem. As you read it, notice what happens in your body. Notice what shifts or even protests within you. Be curious and wonder what it means to you to be “right” and by whose standards, and why it matters so much. Let yourself imagine a future in which it is less important to be right, and more important to participate in God’s unconditional love for all God’s children.

The Place Where We Are Right
Yehuda Amichai
(Trans. Stephen Mitchell)

From the place where you are right
Flowers will never grow
in the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.

© Ruth Haley Barton, 2024. Parts of this article were first presented at The Future of Christian Spirituality Conference in honor of Fr. Ron Rolheiser in 2019.

Read more from our ongoing series The Future of Christian Spirituality.

• Introduction: A Protestant’s Journey Toward a More Unified Faith
• Part 1: The Role of Desire in the Spiritual Life
• Part 2: The Charism and Practice of Spiritual Direction
• Part 3: A Spirituality that is Practice-Oriented and Practice-Based
• Part 5: Profoundly Justice Oriented

Read more: The Future of Christian Spirituality: Part 4 | A More Welcoming Stance from a Rooted Depth

As my director and I transitioned into a new kind of relationship I was still thinking that the answers would come primarily through verbal exchange. I was hoping for advice and a quick fix—in 3 easy steps if possible! Now, I thought, rather than doing psychological talking we would do spiritual talking. And we did do some talking but eventually this wise woman said to me, “Ruth you are like a jar of river water all shaken up. What you need is to sit still long enough so the sediment can settle, and the water can become clear.”

Well, I couldn’t even imagine at that point what it would be like to sit still long enough for anything to settle! I couldn’t imagine not having an agenda or a prayer list or a study plan. Even methods that don’t work are better than no method at all! I couldn’t imagine not using words—even if they were just formed in my head but never spoken. After all, I am a word person. My whole life as a writer and speaker revolves around being able to make sense out of things by putting them into words. If something couldn’t be put into words or processed with words or solved with words, what good could it be? I couldn’t imagine letting go of what I now call “effortful Christianity”—that is, a spirituality based on my own efforts to fix and to solve and to make progress in my spiritual life.

I had been working at things so hard for so long that such a seemingly non-productive “activity” as sitting alone in silence was completely outside my normal categories.

A Jar of River Water All Shaken Up

Even though my mind had a hard time grasping what this settling would actually be like, the image of the jar of river water captured what I knew to be true about myself. I was the jar of river water all shaken up and the sediment that swirled inside the jar was the busy-ness, the emotions, the thoughts, the inner wrestlings that I had not been able to control by any other means I had tried. This was a moment of self-knowledge—which is where all good spiritual journeying begins. As Richard Rohr writes, “A good journey begins with knowing where you are and being willing to go someplace else.”

The image of the jar of river water helped me identify where I was, but it also captured my longing and desire to go somewhere else. To be still long enough so the swirling sediment could settle, the waters of my soul could become clear, and I could see whatever it was that needed to be seen . . . well, that image called to me with the hope of peace, clarity and a deeper level of grounded-ness in God I had not yet known. In the desire this image stirred up, I recognized an invitation to be still and know beyond my addiction to noise, words, and performance-oriented activity. It captured my desire for something more and different, something beyond the head knowledge that was no longer sustaining my soul.

Beyond Belief

This movement in my own journey brings me to my third observation about the future of Christian spirituality—that it will be practice-oriented and even practice-based, rather than merely beliefs-oriented and institution-based. This is hard news for those of us who are part of churches and institutions whose mission is to get people to believe stuff and join the institution. But for us to enter into the future the Holy Spirit is stirring up, we must grapple with the fact that there comes a point when human beings are looking for an experience of the Divine and true seekers will go anywhere to find it.

We must also face the fact that we live in a spiritually savvy culture where people have lots of options for satisfying their spiritual hungers and we’d better be ready to offer that which truly satisfies. Just like there came a point in my own life where I could not and would not settle for less than a real encounter with the Divine, the generations coming along behind me will not settle either. Sometimes those encounters happen unbidden and unsought, but most often they take place in and through intentional engagement in a wide variety of spiritual practices that open us to the transforming presence and activity of God. (The word “wide” is important here because oftentimes different traditions only emphasize a narrow selection of preferred and approved practices rather than offering up the full array of practices found in the broader Judeo-Catholic Christian tradition.)

These practices are not magic, nor are they a way of forcing God to show up on our own terms. They are not a means for making brownie points with God or proving our spiritual superiority to others. They are not a self-help program by which we take control of our journey and work hard to change ourselves. They are not a legalistic straitjacket designed to help us gain acceptance into a group we want to be a part of. Rather, spiritual practices are means of grace—concrete ways of opening to the mystery of God and the work only God can do.

The Power of Practicing

My spiritual director knew all this, and she was ready for me. She began by inviting me into the practices of solitude and silence without actually calling them that because she knew that as a Protestant Christian (known by what we protest!) I would have been afraid to move beyond the narrow confines of my own tradition. She knew that at that point it would not have been helpful to point out that these practices were emphasized within the Catholic tradition because at the time I wasn’t even sure Catholics were Christians—I am embarrassed to say. But through her wise guidance and care, I pressed on and began discovering new (for me) spiritual practices that were actually very old—practices that we as Protestants had lost access to in the Protestant Reformation. I was humbled to learn that we literally threw the baby out with the bathwater and that was one of the reasons I felt so spiritually impoverished.

What was helpful, though, was knowing that all the great ones of our faith practiced solitude and silence—Jesus did it, Elijah did it, David did it, Moses did it, Mary did it, and Paul did it. Only later—once I had experienced the power of what God could do in and through these practices—was I able to grasp the fact that they are a part of my own historic Christian faith, reaching back farther than the more short-lived Protestant tradition. I discovered Catholic theologians like Fr. Ron Rolheiser who have carried these practices forward for us in a compelling and highly nuanced way. In Fr. Ron’s book, The Restless Heart, I encountered his description of the inward journey and the practices that take us beyond loneliness and restlessness to finding our true home in God. I underlined most of that book and was truly humbled by the riches contained within a tradition that my own “tribe” had taught me to reject.

By the Renewing of Your Minds

I am telling you all this to make the point that it was what I experienced in the practice that showed me my wrong-headedness and changed my belief. Not the other way around. I eventually learned that my spiritual director was encouraging the use of two classic spiritual practices that spiritual seekers have engaged down through the ages in order to open to the experience of knowing and hearing God more deeply. Solitude and silence were practices that helped me experience what Scripture was describing in verses like Psalm 46:10 “Be still and know that I am God.” I can’t just make myself be still; but what I can do is enter into a practice that creates the environment in which this can happen. Now I was experiencing the reality of God in my own life rather than just believing things.

So, this is a good place to talk about the limits of the mind when it comes to spiritual transformation. Too often we assume that the word “mind” as we encounter it in verses like Romans 12:2 (“be transformed by the renewing of your mind”) and Philippians 2:5 (“let the same mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus”) refers primarily to the intellect. And from there we have concluded that being a Christian and behaving Christianly has to do with believing the right things.   

This could not be further from the truth. We have all known brilliant teachers and theologians who have all the “right” theology but somehow it hasn’t changed anything; they are still selfish, or arrogant, or unable to love and fully engage with those around them. Sometimes they even use their knowledge and intelligence to bully others. How can this be?

The reason people can know so much and still not change is that spiritual transformation is not primarily about having the right belief systems in place—although that can be a good place to begin. For transformation to take place, it must impact us at every level of our being. Paul’s choice of words bears this out. The Greek word nous (translated mind in Romans 12:2) includes, but goes far beyond, intellectual or cognitive knowing. It denotes the seat of reflective consciousness—the thought patterns from which our behaviors originate. The mind encompasses both how a person perceives and understands the world as well as the patterns of feeling, judging and determining that shape our actions and responses in the world.

It is these thought patterns and the attitudes and behaviors that emerge from them that need to be transformed.

Desperately Seeking Change

The mind functions in large part to protect the self, to figure things out on its own terms according to the relationships and experiences that have shaped it over time. It works hard to control and manage reality and has its own plans for remedying the human situation outside of Christ and abandonment to His divine will. Thus, any approach to transformation that seeks to bring about real change must go beyond merely grasping information at the cognitive level. It must incorporate full, experiential knowledge of God that impacts our deepest inner orientations and trust structures, our false-self patterns, and any other obstacles that prevent us from fully surrendering to God. This is what the Holy Spirit of God must penetrate in order to change us, and spiritual practices open us to this.

Here is an example. I am a nervous flyer and have been for years. When I have a flight coming up, I dread it for days. At takeoff, my palms sweat. During the flight I feel every little bit of turbulence as a shock through my body and my heart rate accelerates. I talk to myself a lot in order to stay calm, reminding myself that most intelligent people I know do this and they are completely confident and peaceful in doing so. I watch the faces of those around me who don’t seem to be nervous at all—in fact, some are sound asleep!—and try to mimic their peaceful demeanor. The minute the plane touches down, I am thanking God for another day of life on this planet.

People have tried to help me with this by sharing facts and statistics demonstrating that more people die in car accidents than plane crashes. They offer reassuring statements about planes being able to handle a whole lot more turbulence than what we are experiencing right now. And on and on the facts go. But the thing is—at the level of my body and my emotions, I am still afraid! No matter all the reassuring facts I have learned, my palms are still sweating, my heart is still beating wildly, and I can’t concentrate on what I’m reading! Knowing the facts help a little bit but it is not deeply transforming. I’m still afraid of something that all good reason tells me I needn’t be afraid of. Knowing the facts has not transformed the fear. There are other levels of my being that are not transformed and would need to be for me to be released from this fear.

Practicing New Ways of Being

So, yes, transformation begins with clear teaching that illuminates the path to true change; in fact, we need good information because without it grave mistakes can be made. But teaching is only the beginning. Authentic change and transformation requires engaging in the behaviors, relationships, practices and experiences that help us internalize truth then live out of that truth in ways that change how we respond in the world. To paraphrase a statement from Richard Rohr, we do not believe our way into new ways of living; through practice, we live into new ways of believing.

Thus, the future of Christian spirituality must be and will be practice-oriented and practice-based—because we will not settle for anything less than real encounters with God that bring about real change.

© Ruth Haley Barton, 2024. For a more detailed account of this journey, see Ruth Haley Barton, Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God’s Transforming Presence (InterVarsity Press: Downers Grove: IL, 2004)

Read more from our ongoing series The Future of Christian Spirituality.

• Introduction: A Protestant’s Journey Toward a More Unified Faith
• Part 1: The Role of Desire in the Spiritual Life
• Part 2: The Charism and Practice of Spiritual Direction
• Part 4: A More Welcoming Stance from a Rooted Depth
• Part 5: Profoundly Justice Oriented

Read more: The Future of Christian Spirituality: Part 3 | A Spirituality that is Practice-Oriented and Practice-Based

In my previous post on the future of Christian spirituality, I described getting to a place in my spiritual life where I felt stuck in terms of my longing to experience deeper levels of transformation. I needed help opening to a reality beyond myself and I needed guidance for beginning to rearrange my life for what I most deeply wanted. Help came through a spiritual director—someone more experienced in the ways of the soul than I was, more practiced at recognizing God’s invitations in the life of another, and willing to offer support in making a faithful response.

Our paths first crossed because she was a psychologist. I sought her out for therapy because I assumed that my “problems” were psychological in nature and could be “fixed” on that level. Psychological insight and process were indeed valuable.  Invaluable, really. Looking back, I don’t think I could have taken the spiritual journey God was inviting me into without taking some basic steps toward psychological health and wholeness—things like differentiation from my pastor family’s beliefs about God and learning to hear God for myself, wrestling with the deforming discrimination I had experienced as a woman in the church, and working through the anger, sadness, and disillusionment I was carrying because of what I had witnessed as a pastor’s kid.

The psychological work we did actually made the spiritual journey more possible.  

A Shift in Focus

Eventually, however, this wise guide observed that what I needed was spiritual direction.  She asked if I would be willing to shift the focus of our times together from therapeutic fixing and advice-giving to my relationship with God and the invitation to spiritual transformation contained within the questions that I was bringing. As a Protestant I had never heard of spiritual direction, given that spiritual direction is a gift that comes to us from the Catholic tradition, but I trusted her to know what was best and so we made the shift.  

When we entered spiritual direction, I had been working very hard at the spiritual disciplines my Protestant upbringing had offered—Bible study, prayer, and service—with a bent towards theology, statements of faith and intellectual assent.  I was sure I could “become a better person” if I just tried harder.  But part of my desperation was the fact that the practices and habits that people had told me were supposed to work in bringing about my transformation were no longer working, no matter how faithful I was to their program.  I was embarrassed and felt very defeated. 

Surprisingly, my spiritual director encouraged me to stop doing what wasn’t working (!) and instead pay attention to what I was longing for.  It was the strangest and most wonderful feeling to let go of the Bible study and prayer methods I had practiced for so long, in faith that there might be something new for me! While I continued to function in the arenas where I had responsibilities, I now had a private place for letting go of what wasn’t working and trying some new things. This was all very hopeful. 

Transitions in the Life of Prayer

Another helpful moment came when my director pointed out that I was in a transitional place in the life of prayer—not falling off the spiritual path—which I had been so afraid of.  She began to guide me into fresh (for me) disciplines that corresponded to my longings and desires, fostering new experiences with God. Her concrete guidance into practices like solitude and silence that were rooted in the broader Judeo Catholic Christian tradition, along with the confidence she conveyed, marked out a new path for me. 

This space for reflecting—without judgment—on my spiritual practices was a great gift.  In this space, I was able to quiet my feelings of “ought” and “should” and instead pay attention to those practices that were no longer fruitful for me.  I found the freedom to let go of what wasn’t working and claim fresh disciplines that corresponded to my most authentic needs and desires.  The practices of mindfulness, paying attention to one’s breathing, building time into each day for silence and beyond-words communion with God, staying attuned to inner dynamics of consolation and desolation and allowing such awareness to shape my decision-making began to revitalize my parched and weary soul. 

Her experience with a wide variety of spiritual disciplines opened a treasure trove of spiritual possibilities for me, and offered a world of hope that there was more to the spiritual life than I had yet experienced.  

Spiritual Direction as Opening to Mystery

We live in what could be called a post-therapeutic culture, a culture in which psychology, which at one time seemed to be the answer to anything and everything, is now acknowledged to have limits.  We are not saying psychological therapy is not valuable, but we are now more ready to admit that it has limits in terms of what it can accomplish towards our transformation.  Even with the best psychological help, there comes a point when what most needs to be done in our lives only God can do—and so we need help in finding ways to open to the mystery of God and God’s transforming work in the human soul.

Thomas Merton describes this well in his book Spiritual Direction and Meditation. He said, “The whole purpose of spiritual direction is to penetrate beneath the surface of a [person’s] life, to get behind the façade of conventional gestures and attitudes which he/she presents to the world, and to bring out his/her internal freedom, his/her inmost truth, which is what we call the likeness of Christ in his/her soul. This is entirely a supernatural thing…for this work belongs first and foremost to the Holy Spirit.  The spiritual director cannot do such a work by him/herself. The director’s function is to verify and to encourage what is truly spiritual in the soul.” (gender inclusive language mine) 

 Many psychologists are now acknowledging the limits of their discipline and are shifting at least part of their approach to incorporating elements of spiritual listening and spiritual practices into their work. It is not that we are throwing out psychology but that we are seeking to fully integrate it with spiritual direction for a more holistic approach to our spirituality. Speaking for myself, I needed a gifted and highly trained director who knew which aspect of the person needed attention when and in what order.  At times she would even tell me that she was returning to a more therapeutic approach when that seemed to be what was needed.  But she would let me know that’s what she was doing and ask my permission, so the lines did not get blurred. 

Towards a More Integrated Approach

Something else my spiritual director drew attention to that surprised me was the significance of attending to and caring for my body as part of my spiritual journey.  One of the first things she helped me become aware of (that I had not been aware of previously) was the false bifurcation I was living in; I was completely cut off from the awareness that I don’t just have a body, I am a body.  Because of the dualisms embedded in most religious training, she pointed me to the story of Elijah in Scripture (I Kings 19) so I could see that this great prophet’s journey into the presence of God began with rest and attending to his body. 

All of this brings me to my second observation about the future of Christian spirituality—it will include greater acknowledgement and intentionality around the charism and practice of spiritual direction emerging as a special gift from the Catholic tradition.  Such directors will be trained to attend to all parts of the human person as a unified whole—body, mind and soul—helping directees become more integrated in their approach to their spiritual journey. We will foster this kind of integration in our training programs, rather than continuing to propagate approaches to spirituality that slice and dice the human person into parts and pieces.  

Spiritual direction is a gift of our historic Christian faith that is fundamentally different in tone, spirit, and content from the discipleship, mentoring, and therapeutic models we have tended to rely on in our approach to transformation.  Because the spiritual life is, by definition, reliant on attentiveness to the human spirit becoming more and more responsive to the Holy Spirit of God within, relationships where individuals are supported in seeking greater attentiveness to that Spirit will be central to the future of Christian spirituality. 

© Ruth Haley Barton, 2023. Adapted from a presentation given at The Future of Christian Spirituality Conference in honor of Fr. Ron Rolheiser in 2020.

Read more from our ongoing series The Future of Christian Spirituality.

• Introduction: A Protestant’s Journey Toward a More Unified Faith
• Part 1: The Role of Desire in the Spiritual Life
• Part 3: A Spirituality that is Practice-Oriented and Practice-Based
• Part 4: A More Welcoming Stance from a Rooted Depth
• Part 5: Profoundly Justice Oriented

FOR FURTHER REFLECTION

Visit our spiritual direction page to learn more about spiritual direction for leaders and explore Ruth’s reading recommendations on this topic.

The Transforming Center is pleased to offer a listing of spiritual directors who have completed our two-year Transforming Community® experience, completed a recognized training program in spiritual direction, and have at least two years of experience.

Read more: The Future of Christian Spirituality: Part 2 | The Charism and Practice of Spiritual Direction

Truth be told, it was desperation that first drew me deeper into the spiritual journey. I was raised a pastor’s kid in a Protestant, fundamentalist home—which means that I knew a whole lot more about paying attention to “oughts” and “shoulds” than giving any attention at all to desire and desperation.  As the very responsible eldest daughter of this pastor, I was “saved” in family devotions when my dad, who was in seminary at the time, was practicing his preaching on us.  One night he delivered a particularly effective sermon on heaven and hell, and even at the tender age of four, I knew what side of THAT equation I wanted to be on, so I “asked Jesus into my heart” right then and there.  

Later on, in junior high school, I made a more mature decision to commit my life (what I understood of it at the time) to being a Christ-follower, but by the time I reached my early thirties I felt stuck spiritually. Married with three young children, on staff at a church I loved, and studying in seminary, my star was beginning to rise, but inside my soul there was another level of truth that needed to be told. In the midst of outward busy-ness and achievement, there was an inner chaos that was far more disconcerting than anything that was going on externally. 

Even though I had been a Christian for many years and was now leading others, I was struggling with some of the basics of the spiritual life. 

Struggling with the Basics

For one thing, I could not seem to consistently love my husband and children; there was an element of selfishness and self-centeredness that was being exposed in the crucible of marriage and parenting that was frightening to acknowledge. At best I was impatient with the demands of life in the company of others; at worst I was angry that people wouldn’t just leave me alone to pursue my own dreams and ambitions.

At first I trivialized my struggle by categorizing it as something like an early mid-life crisis, but the deeper truth was this: after years of being in church, studying my Bible to gain right beliefs, and doing all the Christian things, I still had not moved much beyond self-centeredness and self-interest.

Particularly when love was demanding or inconvenient or interfered with my own desires, I did not know how to die to myself in even the smallest of ways. True transformation seemed just beyond my reach.

What Lies Beneath

As it turned out, my limited capacity to love was the tip of an iceberg that hinted at an even larger reality. Right under the surface of my busy life lurked questions of the deepest kind, questions I could no longer quiet. There were questions about identity and calling: Was there anything truer about me than the “externals” of gender-related roles and responsibilities? Was there anything more defining than how hard I could work, the level of excellence I could achieve and other peoples’ assessment of that? 

There were also questions about the possibility of true spiritual transformation: What about those stuck places that I was just beginning to acknowledge—those places where I could not break free to love? Was there any power effective enough to touch those intractable places in the here and now, or was my best hope for transformation some distant possibility beyond the grave? And there were questions about what was lurking deep in the subterranean levels of the soul: What was motivating the frenetic quality of my life and schedule? Why did I find it so hard to say no, even when my over-commitment hurt those closest to me? Would I come to the end of my life only to mourn poor choices that did not value that which is of ultimate value?

This Can’t be All There is! 

These were painful questions indeed and paying attention to them stirred up emotions I had somehow managed to keep outside my awareness: anger about past pains and present injustices that covered for deep wells of sadness underneath. Confusion about things that I used to be so sure of. Undercurrents of loneliness and longing for more but more of what—God, love, belonging, peace? I wasn’t sure how to articulate my longings, but it felt like I was being swept away. The more I tried to suppress my emotions and questions, the harder I worked to resist them or pretend that they didn’t exist, the more they seemed to wield a subterranean power over me. 

Amid much outward productivity, the interior spaces of my life echoed with words like, “There has to be more to the spiritual life than this.” Sometimes the words were quiet and wistful, full of a profound sadness. At other times they were feisty, fighting words full of a lack of acceptance: “THIS CAN’T BE ALL THERE IS! And if it is—I’m not sure I want it!” Sometimes there were no words at all—just longings I could not even express in words.

What does one do with such unwieldy aspects of the human experience? How does one adequately describe the human heart’s desperate longing for God in the midst of so much religious activity? What do you do when all of the dogmas and methods for seeking God offered within your tradition—Bible studies, prayer journals, more and better preaching, self-help books, small group gatherings—come up so empty? Where does someone who is involved in leading others on a spiritual path go to articulate questions that seem so dangerous and almost sacrilegious? 

This was not a good time to admit to any kind of spiritual emptiness or acknowledge any kind of serious questions about my faith. It was a time for being “good”, for being available when people called, for maintaining outward evidences of spiritual maturity and commitment commensurate with the opportunities that were coming my way. And yet, these interior groanings were real and needed attention. 

What We Do With our Desire 

Although I would not have known to name it this way at the time, this is the stuff of our spirituality. This is where I got in touch with my desire and realized I wanted God more than anything else—more than loyalty to family and religious tradition, more than my job, more than being accepted in the circles I was a part, more than any success I was experiencing, more than theological rightness and certitude, more than looking good in other peoples’ eyes. More than anything.  

This was a frightening time and it was at this moment that Fr. Ron Rolheiser appeared as my teacher.  The very title of his book, The Holy Longing, gave me courage to go on, and his statement, “Spirituality is, ultimately, about what we do with our desire.  What we do with our longings, both in terms of handling the pain and the hope they bring us, that is our spirituality…it is about what we do with the fire inside us, how we channel our eros.” 

It is hard to express what this meant to a young, passionate, melancholy and yet very conservative religious woman who had never in her life considered that there was anything good about desire.  That first chapter alone changed my understanding of myself and of Christian spirituality.  Phillip Sheldrake’s book, Befriending Your Desire, helped me as well, where he writes, “At the heart of all of us is a center that is a point of intersection where our deepest desire and God’s desire in us meet and are found to coincide.”  Who knew?  Not me, until I read these great spiritual authors. It changed the trajectory of my life and witness.

A Deeper Respect for the Role of Desire 

This brings me to my first observation about the future of Christian spirituality:  it will be propelled by greater understanding of and respect for the role of desire and desperation in the spiritual life. As strange as it may sound, desperation that keeps us in touch with our deepest spiritual desire is a really good thing in the spiritual life.

Desperation causes us to be open to radical solutions, willing to take all manner of risk in order to find what we are looking for. Desperate ones seek with an all-consuming intensity because they know their very life depends on it. Like the cancer patient who embarks on a quest to a foreign country, seeking cures that are beyond what can be found in familiar territory, spiritual seekers embark on a quest for that which cannot be found within the borders of life as we know it. We embark on a search for healing that has not been found in all the other cures we have tried. We run all the way out to the edges of our own answers until we have exhausted the possibilities and are finally ready to admit our powerlessness in the face of the great questions and unfixables of our lives.  We come to the point where we know we need help opening to a reality beyond ourselves, and we are willing to rearrange our lives and our priorities in order to find it. 

The Question Jesus Asked Most 

When he was here on earth, Jesus routinely asked people questions that helped them get in touch with their desire and name it in his presence.  He often brought focus and clarity to spiritual conversations by asking some version of the question, “What do you want?  What do you want me to do for you?” Such questions had the power to elicit deeply honest reflection in the person to whom they were addressed, and it opened the way for them to get on a new path of health, hope and healing. 

So what about you? What longings and desires are you aware of right now?  How does it feel to be invited to pay attention to these inner realities as fuel for your spiritual journey? 

FOR FURTHER REFLECTION

For more on the role of desire in the spiritual life, see Sacred Rhythms, Chapter 1. and listen to Season 1: Episode 1 at 20:03 of the Strengthening the Soul of Your Leadership Podcast.

© Ruth Haley Barton, 2023. Adapted from a presentation given at The Future of Christian Spirituality Conference in honor of Fr. Ron Rolheiser in 2020.

Read more from our ongoing series The Future of Christian Spirituality.

• Introduction: A Protestant’s Journey Toward a More Unified Faith
• Part 2: The Charism and Practice of Spiritual Direction
• Part 3: A Spirituality that is Practice-Oriented and Practice-Based
• Part 4: A More Welcoming Stance from a Rooted Depth
• Part 5: Profoundly Justice Oriented

Read more: The Future of Christian Spirituality: Part 1 | The Role of Desire in the Spiritual Life