Protestant Spiritual Exercises. Joseph D. Driskill

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      Yet with all that mainline Protestants can offer, they continue in significant numbers to lack an appreciation for the importance of spiritual nurture per se. If this lack is not addressed, the contribution of these Christians to debates in the public square will be irrelevant. If mainline Protestants do not acknowledge their past blindness in this area and work to understand more fully humankind's spiritual needs, their other contributions to the wider religious context may well be overlooked.

      An examination of the Protestant heritage reveals that many of the spiritual practices that leaders and members felt they had to seek from outside sources were already present within Protestantism. Those who are the inheritors of the Reformation have within their own tradition spiritual practices that are life giving. These spiritual practices provide a number of alternatives for spiritual growth. They honor such Protestant principles as freedom of religious practice, the right to question authority, and the need to balance personal devotion with concern for God's world.

      By turning to the Protestant heritage, especially the spiritual life of the early movements and leaders, we discover a spiritual legacy that affirms the Protestant tradition and provides spiritual practices that deepen our faith and our commitments to love and justice. The spiritual practices and disciplines used by the thinkers and doers of the various Protestant traditions fostered an experiential relationship with God (the holy). In many cases, the spiritual practices of Protestants owe much to Roman Catholic prayer practices. Before Martin Luther was a reformer, he was an Augustinian monk who knew intimately the prayer life of that religious community; John Wesley was an avid reader who studied the lives of the early church leaders. Protestants who fail to claim the pre-Reformation church as a significant part of their heritage lose much that is spiritually meaningful.

      Developing and nurturing a relationship with God both personally and within a community of faith are essential aspects of being human. Human beings have spiritual needs that transcend the limitations of analysis and reason. Mainline Protestant churches are well positioned to advocate the importance of integrating reason and faith, head and heart, prayer and social action. As we move into the twenty-first century, we are again in a period of cultural and religious diversity, a time during which there is much religious experimentation. The Protestant heritage offers tools that will serve the mainline denominations well as they separate bogus from authentic spiritual practices.

      Insofar as an explicit focus on spirituality is a relatively new development in the life of mainline Protestants, it is hoped that this book will provide both congregations and individuals with resources for the journey. The often-unrecognized spiritual gifts of the past are as rich in their contribution to us as the hopes and dreams they engender. Using the lens of spirituality, Chapter 1 takes a fresh look at five theological affirmations that have contributed to Protestants’ self-understanding. These life-giving affirmations give an exciting new depth to our Protestant heritage and contradict those who claim “Protestant spirituality” is an oxymoron! In addition, they undergird the spiritual practices contained in this book and provide the theological context for participating in them. Chapter 2 is intended to help persons who want to incorporate spiritual practices into their daily lives. The focus is on the relationship between spiritual development and personal growth. Chapter 3 describes guidelines for teaching and leading the spiritual practices contained in Chapter 4. These suggestions will aid those providing spiritual leadership by raising issues that should be considered before attempting to lead others. For those with limited experience in teaching spiritual practices, cautions are included.

      Chapter 4 of this book is composed of eight spiritual exercises that either emerge from the Protestant tradition or are in harmony with its theological stance. These practices are not attempts to impose outdated and outmoded forms of spiritual development on others in the interest of nostalgia or in the hope of restoring the ancient order. Rather, by reclaiming these practices we can renew an experiential relationship with the divine that offers meaning and hope for contemporary life.

      

1

      Theological Affirmations

      INTRODUCTION

      A recent conversation with an evangelical African American colleague of mine alerted me to a freedom most mainline Protestants take for granted—the lack of anxiety about whether they are going to heaven or hell. She said, “It was revolutionary for me as an evangelical to realize that mainline Protestants have not lost a single night's sleep in their entire lives worrying about whether they are going to get into heaven.” “Honey,” she continued, “that's liberation for an evangelical!” A little further in the conversation she noted, “But I need Jesus. I can't get through a single day without Jesus. You white liberals don't need Jesus like I do…to cope with the racism and gender bias that are a part of daily life for me.” Then she smiled her infectious, accepting smile and said, “In a way I feel you are missing something. I just have this sense that you all may not have as close an experiential relationship with God as I do. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to be the object of racism or sound presumptuous. But I am grateful that God walks with me each day and keeps me going.”

      Many mainline Protestants could not speak of God in this way for a number of reasons, among them being the general inability to use theological discourse to describe an experiential or personal relationship with God. As noted in the Introduction to this book, this type of “God talk” has been taboo in many Protestant churches. This discourse is frequently identified with a “me and Jesus” faith paradigm assumed to represent an internally focused concern for individual salvation that ignores social ills and encourages a naive worldview where God's sweetness and light are focused upon, to the exclusion of the hidden, self-serving motivations characteristic of human existence. The ingrained aversion to this kind of “me and Jesus” approach to God has permeated much Protestant congregational life.

      As white mainline Protestants increasingly converse with African American Christians in the black church (often in the same denomination), the Caucasians are discovering that having a relationship with Jesus does not necessarily fit the “me and Jesus” stereotype described above. Clearly, the woman who spoke with me—whose relationship with God leads her to work for social justice, to nurture her own growth in faithfulness, and to endure sexism and racism at the hands of others—cannot be described as participating in an experiential relationship with a God interested primarily in personal salvation, sweetness, and light!

      As ecumenical and interfaith dialogues increase, many Protestants are discovering that there are a number of ways to speak of an experiential relationship with the Godhead. For example, as noted in this book's Introduction, spiritual directors and retreat leaders in the Roman Catholic Church use theological language to describe an experiential relationship with the sacred. They speak of God, Jesus, or the Holy Spirit in ways that bring theological reflection out of the realm of abstraction and into the arena of daily life. These examples from an African American Protestant woman and the Roman Catholic tradition make it apparent that many religious traditions have kept alive theological reflections and practices that nurture the spiritual life of their members.

      Many mainline Protestants are just now becoming aware of what the Roman Catholics call ascetical theology, mystical theology, and spiritual theology. Ascetical theology is concerned with the spiritual practices that deepen our faith; it focuses on spiritual practices and various forms of prayer that deepen our relationship with the sacred. СКАЧАТЬ