Protestant Spiritual Exercises. Joseph D. Driskill

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      Introduction

      Some years ago when I was a campus minister, I was invited to preach at a small rural church a few miles from the city where I lived. A student minister taking classes on the campus where I was serving needed someone to fill the pulpit for him. Acceding willingly to a routine request, I did not anticipate that a person in his congregation would share a story with me, one I have never forgotten.

      The sermon that morning attempted to address the way in which God sometimes speaks to us in the quiet of the desert. Using the last several verses from Isaiah 40, I reflected on Isaiah's observation that in the end we will mount up with eagles’ wings, but that when things are really difficult we must be satisfied simply to take a step and not faint. I distinctly remember feeling that the sermon had not gone as well as I would have hoped. But my homiletics professor had taught me not to apologize for a sermon, because it was possible, no matter how inadequate it appeared to me, that it might have spoken to someone in the congregation. It was good advice, given what happened that morning.

      As I greeted people at the door, I noticed that an older woman lingered to have a word with me. She told me she had a son for whom she continued to care because of his special needs. She said that for twenty-five years she had had to get up every night to look after him. No matter how tired she was, duty required a significant interruption of her night's sleep. She recalled how in the early days she would sometimes sit on the steps to the upstairs to catch her breath after she had tended him. She said it was not long, however, until she discovered that the quiet of her home at two in the morning drew her to prayer. She would sit in the quiet to spend time with God. Over the years these few minutes grew until she found herself praying every night for about a half hour in the hushed stillness of her home. This period of quiet and prayer had become one of the most important times of her day. It was the time she spoke with God and found the strength to carry on with her responsibilities.

      I was quite touched by this story. My attempt to address how God may speak to us in the quiet and pain of the desert was suddenly incarnated in her deeply moving witness. With tears welling up in her eyes she added the statement that stopped us both: “I have been praying this way for twenty years and never once have I felt I could tell anyone in this church about this experience. I was afraid they would think I was unbalanced or a Bible thumper if I said anything about it.” Then followed her gift to me: “Thank you for coming today. I needed to tell someone in my church about this.” Now the tears were welling up in my eyes. On reflection, those tears were not simply tears of gratitude for the gift she had shared with me; they were also tears of sorrow for a church where deep experiences of faith could not be shared without the fear of being judged.

      The attitudes and beliefs of this woman's mainline Protestant church shaped not only what she could say about God, but the nature of her relationship with God. For her to experience God's presence in the silence of the night and also speak about the importance of this was to move across the divide that separates evangelical and/or fundamentalist churches from their mainline Protestant counterparts. The fear of being ostracized silenced her voice. Her story reveals the discomfort mainline Protestants have with things identified as “spiritual,” for example, a personal relationship with God. It also demonstrates two serious spiritual needs in many churches—the need to nurture an experiential relationship with the holy and the need to recover practices that invite spiritual growth and development.

      In mainline churches believers can affirm the existence of God, the importance of the Scriptures, and the need to hear the Word in sermons, but discourse that claims a personal relationship with God at an experiential rather than an intellectual level is largely discouraged. The God of mainline Protestant churches is the “ground of one's being,” the God who requires ethical behavior, especially at the social and political levels. However, this God is not a power with whom one would admit to having an experiential relationship. How could the sovereign God of the cosmos truly care about the mundane matters of daily life? Many Protestants find repugnant the joy expressed by those who believe that the acquisition of a parking place results from divine intervention. At a deeper level they are troubled by the intimacy evangelicals appear to have in their personal relationships with God.

      The derision mainline Protestants feel about a personal, experiential relationship with God is reflected in their lack of attention to spiritual practices. Prayer, a practice commonly associated with being in relationship with the divine, often remains a child's activity. Children are taught to pray for “mommy and daddy,” friends, and pets at bedtime, and to give thanks before meals. These prayers, appropriate for the spiritual nurture of children, do not meet the emotional and social needs of growing adolescents. Yet other forms or types of prayer are seldom taught. Adults fare no better. They replace the “now I lay me down to sleep” prayers of childhood with more altruistic requests couched in more sophisticated language, but the petitionary prayer framework of childhood remains the primary option. Other forms of prayer—such as centering prayer or an examination of conscience—have been virtually unknown to many mainline Protestants.

      The disdain for emotive expressions of intimacy with God is also present in many acts of public worship. As evangelical churches offer increasingly lively hours of worship, mainline Protestants exhibit great tenacity in clinging to modes of worship viewed by significant segments of their own members as dry, boring, and irrelevant. Passionate adherence to passionless orders of worship—where oft-used hymn tunes punctuate words, words, words in introits, litanies, and sermons—characterize many mainline Protestant services. Public prayers in free church worship frequently take the form of lengthy pastoral prayers focused solely on verbal content. Times for silence, for quiet meditation or quiet reflection on Scripture readings, are minimal. This lack of vitality in worship is pervasive whether shaped by established liturgies or free church approaches where spontaneity often acquires a patterned uniformity. As a result, people seeking spiritual guidance and growth commonly feel that mainline churches have little to offer either at the personal or the corporate level.

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