I wanted to do a podcast that would lean into my skills as a church historian. I also wanted a focus for my YouTube channel. While thinking on these things, I realised that having some sort of specific angle of approach would help me focus which topics to choose. Why not the spiritual life?
I realise “spirituality” is the topic of my other podcast, which approaches its topic from the angle of the Anglican tradition. This is different, though. On this podcast, I am moving mostly chronologically from the apostles onwards and discussing different sources, moments, events, practices, movements, figures, aspects of church life, etc., specifically from the perspective of the spiritual life.
One hope is simply to illuminate the history of the church regardless of how I or the viewers may feel about any specific aspect. Knowing the history is in and of itself, if you ask me.
Another hope is that meditating on any of these topics may bring life and light into the spiritual life of my listeners. This is not detached, purely professional history, folks. Sorry. I’m hoping to use history to make you love Jesus more.
Seems like the best use one can make of the past, quite frankly.
Episodes so far: “What is spirituality?”, “The Apostolic Age”, “The Apostolic Fathers”, “Martyrdom: The Spirituality of Death, Part One”, and “Martyrdom: The Spirituality of Death, Part Two”. Part One of the Martyrdom chapter focusses on St Ignatius of Antioch and Part Two reviews things through the lens of St Augustine’s sermons on the martyrs.
Listen, like, and subscribe, my friends! Let others know, too!
Finished off the manuscript that has brought me to Oxford with enough time to browse a used bookshop. Found this:
The book, that is, not me.
Unfortunately, that blurry photo taken with my webcam in Starbucks tells you only the amazing size of my 99p book find. It is The Practice of the Presence of God.
I’m quite chuffed about this purchase. For one thing, it’s a practical size of book. One of my rants (yet to be blogged) is the move from pocket books to trade paperbacks by series such as Penguin Classics and Oxford World’s Classics as well as a great many Christian publishers. But back in 1961, they knew how to print pocketbooks.
This one would actually fit in your pocket, after all.
Of course, I don’t just buy small, cheap books willy-nilly.*
The Practice of the Presence of God is one of those books that people who talk about Christian mysticism talk about. Written by a Carmelite lay brother in the late 1600s, this little book turns up in many places, including the bookshelves of Protestants who doubt that Catholics are ‘saved’, and with the recommendation of Richard J Foster of Celebration of Discipline fame as well as Jim Houston, The Transforming Power of Prayer, and Dallas Willard (mind drawing a blank on which book of his references this one).
I have never read it, since my spiritual reading tends to be contemporary or ancient/mediaeval (more late ancient than mediaeval), so I’m looking forward to this.
My photo of St Dominic meditating on the cross by Fra Angelico at San Marco, Florence
I have talked with some other ‘young people’ who were raised in the Church who have found that the sort of Christianity we put on offer at our local congregations and in many popular books is merely intellectual(ist) or emotional(ist) or sometimes both. But what about a religion or faith or spirituality that touches the deep chasms of the human soul, the vast interior world of the human heart, itself an image of the infinite simplicity of the Triune God? What about that kind of living, believing, thinking?
When this sort of disillusionment hits, different people take different approaches. One friend struck out into the land of the chemical — MDMA and marijuana led the way to cocaine (and who knows what else). Another friend went the much safer (at least physically) route of exploring Hinduism. Another friend I know has taken an interest in Islamic Sufism.
The drug-free path or a version thereof, from what the Interwebs shows me, seems to be a popular journey for a lot of young people raised in the Church. At some point, what’s being fed to our young congregants ceases to satisfy, so people start hunting for nourishment wherever it is to be found.
I get that.
And I am too immersed in the thought of Justin Martyr and too sympathetic to Augustine’s appreciation of Platonism to think that my friends won’t find Christ’s eyes looking out at them from between the lines of an ‘eastern’ religious text or the power of the Triune God battering their hearts as they enter the path of contemplation under the tutelage of Hindus, Buddhists, or Sufis. (Don’t forget this post on Christianity and eastern religions.)
Jesus Christ is the logos who orders the entire cosmos, who undergirds everything. He is the Reason of God, and each of us, made in God’s image, shares in that Reason. He can draw us all up to himself. The exitus from God has happened in every human heart, and not every guide on the reditus need be a Christian. I have profited from the Stoics.
But we need not look beyond the community of the faithful to find reliable guides on the spiritual journey. My general concern about Christians who become more interested in any philosophy beyond the Faith is whether they will still cling to Jesus and the Trinitarian Faith in the long run. And if we are dissatisfied with what we’re being served, we can explore the depths and riches of the interior world — enter the rooms of the Interior Castle — from within the Christian tradition.
But often, the problem with these spiritual masters of the past for one wishing to sail out into the sea of the interior world is the fact that simply reading them is itself a discipline — and very often it is difficult to apply their lessons to our lives. Or no visible, practical lessons seem to be forthcoming. So where do we go for guides to the spiritual world?
The church does not have a shortage of spiritual guides today, we just don’t always know where to look. I encourage you, if you are disillusioned with the shallowness, intellectualism, and/or emotionalism of your church today, before giving into accedia and going elsewhere, try to deepen your own walk first — perhaps a deeper connexion with Christ will deepen your appreciation of your own church.
Here are some recommended spiritual guides:
Richard Foster. Start with his most famous book Celebration of Discipline. Foster ranges far and wide across the Christian tradition, bringing in ancient, mediaeval, and modern, Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, his fellow Quakers, Anglicans, Baptists, and so on. Here you will get descriptions and practical tips on how to enter into the love of God and actually live for Him, being transformed, through twelve disciplines: meditation, prayer, fasting, study, simplicity, solitude, submission, service, confession, worship, guidance, and celebration. This is one of the most-purchased and least-read books out there — and, I think, even less applied than read! His book Prayer: Finding the Heart’s True Home helped sustain me while I was a missionary in Cyprus.
Kallistos Ware (Timothy). Foster is probably the most practical guide to the spiritual life I’ve encountered. But Ware’s works, especially The Orthodox Way but also, to some extent, The Orthodox Church, are excellent avenues into the world of Eastern Orthodox spiritual paths and spiritual thinking. He lacks the aggressive anti-western aspects of certain other writers on similar topics (e.g. Lossky, Romanides), but presents so appealing an image of Orthodoxy that you want a taste of that inner world, even if you are hesitant of joining him for doctrinal reasons.
Anthologies of the Masters. Although the lessons are not always easy to apply, reading shorter excerpts from the deep spiritual writers of the Christian tradition can be a good way in — so long as we are willing to go deeper. I have appreciated Richard J Foster and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics, which has a range of authors from St Gregory of Nyssa to John Woolman. I started but did not finish the anthology Light from Light: An Anthology of Christian Mysticism by Louis Dupré and James A. Wiseman, recommended by Edith M. Humphrey in:
Ecstasy and Intimacy: When the Holy Spirit Meets the Human Spirit. In this book, Humphrey investigates what she calls ‘spiritual theology’, looking at Scripture as well as those who have gone before (tradition as it is lived, I suppose) and at her own lived experiences as a Christian. She wrote while still an Anglican, but the influences of the Eastern church are visible.
If you read any of these, hopefully a few things will happen: You will be drawn deeper into the Father’s embrace and delight more and more in the self-giving love of the Most Holy Trinity. You will pray and meditate more. You will read Scripture with fresh eyes. And you will start to read more of the masters in full, starting with such classics as St. Augustine’s Confessions (in Chadwick’s translation for Oxford World’s Classics, not Pine-Coffin’s for Penguin Classics!) and Thomas a Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ and maybe popping in on more recent spiritual guides such as Merton’s The Inner Experience.
And, having started to read the masters in full, may you be drawn deeper into the Father’s embrace and delight more and more in the self-giving love of the Most Holy Trinity, pray and meditate more, and read Scripture with fresh eyes.
Classically Christian 