Spiritual Formation and Time
The Formation Gap may not be accepted or popular with many churchgoers. In fact, of the Three Primary Problems we are exploring, this one tends to resonate the least. That statement doesn’t offer the best incentive to keep reading, but hang in there with me.
The premise is this:
- The primary goal of discipleship is to become more like Jesus from the inside out. As we take this journey, we become better attuned to God, others, and ourselves, and slowly become more loving. This type of steady transformation has a family, community, and world-changing impact.
- Therefore, the essential question we’ve been exploring is, “How does one person become more like another?” Based on our inspection of various formative environments, we’ve concluded that the best way for someone to be formed more like another is to intentionally engage with other like-hearted people in small gatherings that feature five elements: time, habit, community, intimacy, and instruction.
- However, much of modern Christianity no longer attempts to embody all five elements; instead, it tends to rely heavily on event-related, monologue-oriented instruction.
- This means many people apprenticing with Jesus (or interested in doing so) don’t have access to communities designed to help form their character. Many Christian institutions don’t consider themselves character-forming groups, and many people don’t expect their spirits to be formed within or through them. They may expect to serve or be educated, but education and formation aren’t always the same thing.
There is plenty to recognize and celebrate about many institutions. However, at least according to my straw polls over the years, few institutions view their primary role as helping shape their communities’ hearts.
Trauma and Time
Today, we start exploring the five key elements, starting with time. In our fast-paced, high-tech, ever-changing societies, what role does time play in our spiritual formation?
Chances are, you are already familiar with how time impacts our healing and formation.
Several years ago, I fell out of a tree and cracked a few ribs (it’s a funny story now, but not so much back then). The injury took a second, though the recovery seemed to take forever. I could barely move or breathe for the first few weeks. It took about six weeks for me to move freely, and I didn’t feel normal for about six months. I could still feel some restriction and tightness two years later.
There’s not much to do when you crack your ribs except take pain medication and sit around and wait. The body just needs time to heal. However, cracked ribs won’t heal properly without other environmental factors: good nutrition, plenty of rest, and careful, progressive movements.
Our hearts function similarly when we experience relational trauma, though, just like the body, we require certain conditions in which to heal and re-form properly.
Dutch psychiatrist Bessel Van der Kolk writes,
“One does not have to be a combat soldier, or visit a refugee camp in Syria, or the Congo to encounter trauma. Trauma happens to us, our friends, our families, and our neighbors. Research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has shown that one in five Americans was sexually molested as a child; one in four was beaten by a parent to the point of a mark being left on their body; and one in three couples engages in physical violence. A quarter of us grew up with alcoholic relatives, and one out of eight witnessed their mother being beaten or hit.”
Van der Kolk goes on to explain how trauma results in the “loss of self.” When I broke my ribs, I lost energy, mobility, stamina, and function. When we suffer relational trauma, we often lose many of the same things, as well as our sense of identity.
We explored an example of this last week – narcissistic abuse often results in the scrambling of our sense of who we are. The disorientation can be paralyzing because our hearts struggle to grasp reality.
Speaking of reality, Van der Kolk was deeply impacted early on in his career by one of his teachers, who said, “Most human suffering is related to love and loss, and that the job of therapists is to help people acknowledge, experience, and bear the reality of life – with all its pleasures and heartbreak. The greatest sources of our suffering are the lies we tell ourselves.”
To heal, to be formed, to be re-formed, is to accept and embrace reality.
That’s why we often stress the importance of becoming increasingly attuned to God’s ideas—they are what’s real. We also desire to become increasingly attuned to our hearts. Without paying attention to them, we will struggle to know our genuine ideas and desires.
Rub Some Dirt On It
The West tends to suffer from wildly unfair and untenable expectations of how long it should take to heal and re-form from relational and emotional trauma. Because we now have access to instant everything (food, information, products, services, money, marriage, divorce, etc.), we live with the idea that our hearts should heal just as quickly. Watch any sitcom, and you’ll see this idea reflected: a character experiences a profound loss and, by the next episode, cracks jokes and acts as if nothing ever happened.
Worse yet, others wonder why we continue to suffer after being instructed on how to “fix it.” The solutions are supposedly simple: Just pray more, forgive and forget, get out there and serve, and move on.
However, human beings aren’t projects that need to be fixed. We are people to be loved. And formation is not simply a matter of inputting accurate information into our brains.
You Put Your Right Brain In…
Neuroscientist Dr. Jim Wilder and Pastor Michael Hendricks wrote an intriguing book called The Other Half of Church. I suspect they agree with Dallas Willard’s assessment of The Great Omission. They write:
“We used the phrase ‘spiritual formation’ which is a fancy way of talking about how we become more like Jesus in our daily lives. We react to life like He does. We value what He values. We treat people the way He treats people. It is the process of ‘putting on the character of Christ.’ We all agree that this was the central task of the church. We also agree that the church was mostly failing at this task (italics mine).”
They assert that modern Christianity primarily focuses on the left side of the brain, which handles things like conscious thought, speech, strategies, problem-solving, and logic.
“However, neuroscience has revealed that the right brain is bigger, faster, and has more horsepower. The right brain handles things like individual and group identity, emotional attachment to others, how we assess our surroundings, and relational attachments.”
And then they bring their case home:
“Our right brain governs the whole range of relational life: who we love, our emotional reactions to our surroundings, our ability to calm ourselves, and our identity, both as individuals and as a community. The right side manages our strongest relational connections (both to people and to God) and our experience of emotional connectedness to others. And character formation, which is a primary responsibility of the church, is governed by the right brain, not the left brain.”
If their assessment is accurate, it does not suggest we discontinue biblical instruction—far from it. However, it suggests that we may not be intentionally engaging in experiences and relationships that help shape instruction into genuine spiritual formation.
Building deeply formative relationships with others may be challenging when our modern church experience primarily revolves around a weekly event and some isolated studies with people with whom we otherwise have little connection.
If spiritual formation heavily depends on secure relational, emotional attachments to God, others, and ourselves, this is where Jesus might be inviting us to view time differently.
If time in vulnerable, long-term, secure relationships is one of the key influences on our journey to become more like Him, is that time available? Do we focus our time on a small number of people, or do we spread it out to as many as possible, supporting and maintaining an untenable number of relationships and communities?
Less is More?
The idea that we are invited to spend time with fewer people but in more significant, meaningful ways may be hard to digest, depending on where we live and our culture. Here in Texas, the concept could be considered insulting. Everything truly is bigger here: stores, churches, houses, and contact lists. We tend to be valued here based on the people we know – the more, the better.
I’ve always been fascinated by the small number of people Jesus spent time with. Yes, he occasionally taught large crowds, and He was certainly mobbed when He healed people. But it seems that He spent most of His time with a few close friends. Even after the resurrection, He didn’t appear to thousands in an attempt to gain notoriety. He spent time with a surprisingly smaller number, encouraging their hearts and preparing them to do the same.
Gentleness, compassion, and patience are welcome balms for our wounded souls when our hearts break. Jesus knows this, which is why I suspect He spent so much time with a small number of people. To become more like Him, I wonder if we would consider who He might be inviting us to be in a focused, vulnerable relationship with, understanding that spiritual formation is a messy, long-term, up-and-down adventure.
We likely need each other far more than we’d like to admit and, in some cases, far more than we have time for. The quest to become people of depth takes some surprising turns, and one of those turns reveals that our often frantic, disconnected lives may be driving our inner sense of isolation. We simply aren’t wired to keep so many balls and relationships in the air. It may be counter-cultural and counter-intuitive, but perhaps making space for one or two fellow long-term sojourners is healthier than trying to maintain our contact lists and disparate communities
