Egotism

Roy Keely:

“Egotism is pathological self obsession, a reaction to anxiety about whether one really does count. It is a form of acute self-consciousness and can be prevented and healed only by the experience of being adequately loved. It is indeed, a desperate response to frustration of the need we all have to count for something and be held to be irreplaceable, without price.“

— Dallas Willard, pg15, The Divine Conspiracy

Following in the steps of Christ

I just finished reading The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard. I recommend it as a great resource to understand why spiritual disciplines exist and the power that comes through them. At the end of the book, Willard put in an article that he wrote for Christianity Today back in 1980. I thought the last paragraph of the article was a good summary of what the book conveys:

“Nothing less than life in the steps of Christ is adequate to the human soul or the needs of our world. Any other offer fails to do justice to the drama of human redemption, deprives the hearer of life’s greatest opportunity, and abandons this present life to the evil powers of the age. The correct perspective is to see following Christ not only as the necessity it is, but as the fulfillment of the highest human possibilities and as life on the highest plane. It is to see, in Helmut Thielicke’s words, that ‘The Christian stands, not under the dictatorship of a legalistic ‘You ought,’ but in the magnetic field of Christian freedom, under the empowering of the ‘You may.’”

Silence

The second discipline of abstinence that Willard talks about in The Spirit of the Disciplines is silence. He says this about it:

"silence is frightening because it strips us as nothing else does, throwing upon the stark realities of our life. It reminds us of death, which will cut us off from this world and leave only us and God. And in that quiet, what if there turns out to be very little to ‘just us and God’? Think what it says about the inward emptiness of our lives if we must always turn on the tape player or radio to make sure something is happening around us."

Solitude brings freedom

I'm still reading The Spirit of the Disciplines right now, by Dallas Willard. I'm about 2/3rds of the way in, and he's just now getting to what the disciplines of the spiritual life are. He breaks them up into disciplines of abstinence and disciplines of engagement. The first of the disciplines of abstinence is solitude. He believes solitude to have "primacy and priority among the disciplines." He points out how it frees us to connect again with the reality of God's rule in the world:

"The normal course of day-to-day human interactions locks us into patterns of feeling, thought, and action that are geared to a world set against God. Nothing but solitude can allow the development of a freedom from the ingrained behaviors that hinder our integration into God's order."

And as painful as it may be, solitude also allows us to get a healthy account of ourselves, in all our messiness. Solitude frees us to be authentic. He quotes Louis Bouyer as saying this:

"Solitude...serves to crack open and burst apart the shell of our superficial securities. It opens out to us the unknown abyss that we all carry within us...[and] discloses the fact that these abysses are haunted"

It also brings freedom to have meaningful conversation:

"Henry David Thoreau saw how even our secular existence withers from lack of a hidden life. Conversation degenerates into mere gossip and those we meet can only talk of what they heard from someone else. The only difference between us and our neighbor is that he has seen the news and we have not."

Go and be free.

Spiritual Disciplines lead us to the enjoyment of God

I'm still reading through a book about spiritual disciplines by Dallas Willard (see right sidebar for more info). One of the reasons I wanted to read the book in the first place was my perceived inability to rightly engage in them. In college, I was blessed by a ministry that showed me how to meet with God and how to get to know Him. Through disciplines such as bible study, scripture memory, prayer, fellowship, and evangelism, I grew in my understanding of who God was.

Over time however, I slowly began, without even me knowing it at the time, to equate my position in Christ to the doing of these spiritual disciplines. Ultimately it was a self-righteousness that was creeping in and distorting my view of who God was. After leaving college, and thus the constant accountability of a fellowship to continue in practicing these disciplines constantly, I began to become a little more lazy. And then I began to recognize that I had practiced many of the disciplines in college for the wrong reasons. I began developing a bad taste in my mouth for anything that I would count as a discipline for fear of doing it legalistically.

I believe I'm slowly starting to build up these disciplines again in my life in a healthy way, though it hasn't been easy. And in reading this book a few moments ago, I was struck and encouraged by what Willard has to say about all this. He says:

"Jesus was a master of life in the spirit. He showed us that spiritual strength is not manifested by great and extensive practice of the spiritual disciplines, but by little need to practice them and still maintain full spiritual life. To have misunderstood this point was the fundamental and devastating error of Christian asceticism in the Western church from the desert fathers up to the time of the Reformation. Yet when we look closely and continually as Jesus, we do not lose sight of this one fundamental, crucial point-the activities constituting the disciplines have no value in themselves. The aim and substance of spiritual life is not fasting, prayer, hymn singing, frugal living, and so forth. Rather, it is the effective and full enjoyment of active love of God and humankind in all the daily rounds of normal existence where we are placed. The spiritually advanced person is not the one who engages in lots and lots of disciplines, any more than the good child is the one who receives lots and lots of instruction or punishment."

That is a glorious truth for you and I to hear. How often I have focused on the disciplines themselves without understanding the end result enjoying God. He goes on to say this:

"The need for extensive practice of a given discipline is an indication of our weakness, not our strength. We can even lay it down as a rule of thumb that if it is easy for us to engage in a certain disciplines, we probably don't need to practice it. The disciplines we need to practice are precisely the ones we are not 'good at' and hence we do not enjoy."

May God give us strength to practice disciplines as we seek to enjoy Him.

On the Spot Obedience

I've been reading The Spirit of the Disciplines by Dallas Willard. It's really good stuff so far. He's addressed some things recently that I have been thinking about. It's an idea similar to what he talks about in Divine Conspiracy, thought put in a slightly different way. It's basically that idea that we sometimes seek Christlikeness by asking the question "What Would Jesus Do?" in this particular situation. Willard says that there is a flaw in this thinking. He says:

"the idea conveyed is an absolutely fatal one--that to follow [Christ] simply means to try to behave as He did when He was 'on the spot,' under pressure or persecution or in the spotlight. There is a realization that what He did is such cases was...the natural outflow of the life he lived when not on the spot."

And he says a couple of paragraphs earlier:

"We cannot behave 'on the spot' as He did and taught if in the rest of our time we live as everybody else does...Jesus never expected us simply to turn the other cheek, go the second mile, bless those who persecute us, give unto them that ask, and so forth. These responses, generally and rightly understood to be characteristic of Christlikeness, were set forth by Him as illustrative of what might be expected of a new kind of person."

Solitude pt. 2

About a year ago, I posted a quote by Os Guinness about solitude. I just recently read another very intriguing paragraph by Dallas Willard (in the Divine Conspiracy). What he says really hits me right now, because I haven't had much of this kind of time. Even when I do manage to create some solitude, my mind is often racing around, making sure I have all my future plans in order. I really needed to be reminded that I am not in control.

"[Solitude and silence] take the world off our shoulders for a time and interrupt our habit of constantly managing things, of being in control, or thinking we are. One of the greatest of spiritual attainments is the capacity to do nothing. Thus the Christian philosopher Pascal insightfully remarks, 'I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they are unable to stay quietly in their own room.'"