Faces of Spirituality

Peter Fitch, St. Croix VineyardSunday, January 3, 2016

David Hayward

So many ways to be spiritual

• What is your ultimate desire and how does the way you live help you to obtain it?

• What practices are helpful?• Which ones get in the way of real growth?

Many Biblical characters

• Bad examples like Simon Magus (who desired spiritual power and offered to pay for it)

• Good examples like Anna at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel

Luke 2:36-3836 And there was a prophetess, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was advanced in years and had lived with her husband seven years after her

marriage,37 and then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple, serving night and day with fastings and prayers. 38 At that very moment she came up and began giving thanks to God, and continued to speak of Him to all those who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.

There’s Mary and Martha38 Now as they were traveling along, He entered a village; and a woman named Martha welcomed Him into her home. 39 She had a sister called Mary, who was seated at the Lord’s feet, listening to His word. 40 But Martha was distracted with all her preparations; and she came up to Him and said, “Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to do all the serving alone? Then tell her to help me.”

Luke 10:38-42

41 But the Lord answered and said to her, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and bothered about so many things; 42 but only one thing is necessary, for Mary has chosen the good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”

There’s Peter and Paul

• Paul has the job of telling all the non-Jewish nations that God has demonstrated His great love for everyone in Christ—he “preaches the gospel in season and out of season”

• Peter writes that we ought to be ready to give an answer to those who ask about the hope that is within you

Different Pharisees in the Talmud

Presented by Bruce Metzger in The New Testament: its Background, Growth and Content, p. 41

Many styles appropriate

• Some are good fits for different periods of life• Some are better for some personalities than

others

A few unifying thoughts . . .

Too Easily Pleased

We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.

(C. S. Lewis, “The Weight of Glory”)

It has to be about Love

“Prayer doesn’t consist of thinking a great deal, but of loving a great deal; therefore do whatever most arouses love.”

Teresa of Avila, Interior Castle(Fourth Mansion, Chapter 1)

Don’t worry so much about yourself

If you are willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to yourself, then you will be for Jesus a pleasant place of shelter

Thérèse de Lisieux (letter to her sister)

Focus is Love

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity . . . Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love . . . Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer . . . If we turn our mind toward the good, it is impossible that little by little the whole soul will not be attracted thereto in spite of itself.

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

The Goal: A New Normal

Yet eventually, if we make it this far, we will be brought to a stable union or ‘spiritual marriage’ (the ‘unitive way’ of the perfect’) in which our whole human nature is harmoniously integrated, and we are able to enjoy a more or less continual awareness of the Trinity within while remaining attentive to creation around us, in a state that John

The Goal: A New Normal

compares to that of Adam and Eve in paradise. This sublime participation in the inner life of the Trinity is what John identifies as the goal of the journey, to be experienced clearly and openly in the life to come.”

On St. John of the Cross Spiritual Traditions for the Contemporary Church 

    (Maas & O’Donnell, Abingdon, 1990)