Mapping the Journey
Last week my weekly blog remained empty. Empty is an important concept, because it suggests something in need of filling, like a cavity. Which is suggestive of dental work. Which is precisely what happened to me last week. I had two abscesses around one tooth collide with a dead tooth next door, creating a dental perfect storm. One root canal and extraction later, I was out of commission for a while.
I’m back at it, although my mouth is still sore and my jaw still swollen. Just don’t talk with me about drills, digging or dentists for a while, please. (Seriously, I’m grateful for the skill of my dentist and the dental profession. "Bad teeth happen" -> my new bumper sticker.)
So today I’m going to catch up on what I talked about this last Sunday in order to launch into next Sunday’s sermon in the series: “So What’s So Hot About Christianity?”
The first Sunday (August 1) I talked about the vision that God has for the world. It is a vision of hope, that the world can be made a better place. The next week (August 8) I presented a formula that the Bible gives us for accomplishing this: “To do justice, to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God” (Micah 6:8).
I said that in order to do this work of bettering the world, we have to become better ourselves, and let this “bettering” of our souls shape and guide and temper all our actions and efforts in the world. Of course, this is not easy. The more closely we walk with God, the more we realize how out of step with God we are. The task seems even more impossible. How does God expect us to do these things and to become the people we are meant to be? We have things from our past that keep getting in the way. We have ways of behaving that are deeply engrained that block us and trip us up. We don’t do or say the things we ought to do or say, and we do or say the things we ought not do or say. Instead of being the change we want to see, we become the evil we are fighting. (See Romans 7:15-19).
In order to begin to fashion the world according to its divinely envisioned possibilities, i.e., the hopeful vision that Christianity articulates, we need to seek to heal those things in our lives that trip us up, hold us back and block us from living and becoming the vision. In order to achieve the outer goal, we need also to work on the inner life. And the inner life is shaped in turn by how we live in the outer world. Christianity is all about integrating our inner life with our outer life.
This process of integrating inner and outer is often depicted as being a journey – a spiritual journey, in fact. The Christian faith is basically about the spiritual journey we all undertake. And it is not a journey we take alone. It is a journey we take with God. Or perhaps it is better to say that it is a journey that God takes with us, because we each have journeys to make that are unique to our particular circumstances and backgrounds.
It is common to speak of the religious and spiritual life as being a journey or pilgrimage. The thing about a journey, though, is that it starts one place and ends somewhere else. That’s what the spiritual life is like. We start one place and eventually find ourselves someplace else. We start one person, and are someone else at journey’s end. Something about the trip changes us. Knowing where to go, it helps to have a map of the journey. So why a map? So as not to get lost. And so as to undertake the journey with purpose and direction. And to get a sense of the lay of the land.
I have put together a sort of schematic map to guide our journey into the spirituality of Jesus.
The diagram above sketches this journey as it traverses between three contiguous territories, named “Personal,” “Inter-Personal,” and “Social/Cultural.” Moving between each territory is a two-way information highway of sorts. As we visit each territory, we discover that there is a constant exchange along these highways. The Personal territory receives from the Inter-Personal territory such things as words, ideas, values, affirmations, scolding, love, anger, laughter, jokes, yelling, screaming, beatings, tender caresses, teachings and so on.
From the Social/Cultural territory, the Personal territory receives things such as worldviews, philosophy of life, values, language, education about history and mathematics and science, religion, political loyalties and struggle, large-scale prejudice, occupational identities, ideas and practices concerned with power, ethnic and national identity and loyalty, and so on.
But the Personal territory can also be seen to be contributing to these other territories as well. The Personal realm expresses itself in various ways through interaction with the Inter-Personal: returning love, acting out love or anger or sadness or joy, hitting back or running for protection, drawing up defensive bulwarks or reaching out in vulnerable intimacy. To the Social/Cultural territory, the Personal contributes assent and support or dissent from its programs, contribution of ideas and new knowledge, artistic expressions and creativity, bodies for armies or protest lines.
Each territory represents some aspect of how we as individuals relate and interact with the people in the world around us. We exist as self-contained persons, with our own set of internal thoughts, ideas, experiences. But we are highly permeable in that we have received most of these things from our interactions with our family, friends and culture.
All that I have just described is thoroughly documented and explored by psychologists, developmental specialists and sociologists. All of it relates to spirituality. This is because spirituality has to do with how we exist in our internal life, and how that internal life is expressed through our attitudes, words and deeds in our families, with our friends and in society at large. It’s all about relationship.
In other words, we are built for and by relationality. To be a person means to be in relation. Personality is the potential to be in relation as well as the particular qualities of relating that an individual manifests. When we enter into full deep relationship with other persons as persons, not as things to be used, as “its,” we emerge as persons ourselves.
The goal of spirituality and spiritual practice is to open our hearts to one another and to God so that we become full persons. This is the abundant life Jesus promises.
But we don’t emerge from our mother’s wombs fully formed as persons. That is the work of our contact with the world we live in, the families in which we are raised, the friends we have, and our other encounters along the way.
But as part of this formation as persons, we also experience the hurts and traumas of life.
When I speak with groups or teach classes utilizing this map of how we develop as persons, I often shift the metaphor from a road map to a set of three baskets. It is as if we have a basket that represents our personal sphere. Into our Personal basket is put every word we hear in our life, every idea expressed, every thing we see, every caress we receive and every blow that strikes us. We put language in that basket, along with values, morality, ethics, theology, mathematics, biology, and so on. Sometimes those are placed there by families or teachers or friends from the Inter-Personal basket, sometimes we get them straight out of the Social basket. But all the contents of our Personal basket shape who we are, because as we interact with our family, friends and others in the Inter-Personal sphere, we pull out of our Personal basket. And the same is true as we act upon the Social arena.
But how is it that we are to act? What effect can our words have upon those around us? How will our actions affect society? Will we speak words that can heal or comfort, or wound and demean? Will we build one another up or tear each other down?
The work of the Spiritual Journey is to look at where we are going, determine where and who it is that we really want to be, and to see what needs to be done in order to get there. It means taking stock of just what it is that we have in our personal baskets, and being honest about what it is we carry around with us. What do we need to discard from our basket, and what new habits or ways of talking do we need to cultivate?
The first steps on a spiritual journey require this sort of spiritual inventory, as it were. The old fashioned terminology is self-examination. This leads to confession. Repentance is about deciding to set our journey on a different course, and to discard the things that take us away from our goal of becoming the full persons that God intends us to be.
Several years ago I caught sight of a bumper sticker that made me laugh out loud. It said,
Where are you going? Maybe you’re not in a hand-basket, but what is in your basket? Is it helping you get to where you can live a life that is full and wise and rich in grace and peace? If not, it might be time for some housecleaning.
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