Is the Spiritual Life a Battle?

I hope not.

When I was a busy pastor, I craved solitude: a break from the relentless inputs and expectations of parish life. I imagined peace, reverie, and unbroken time in the presence of God.

However, my part-time-hermit solitude has not been like that, in the four years since I left parish ministry. I am more grateful than I can say that I have time to think, read, write, and spend time with God, but I can’t characterize it as unbroken, reflective, or peaceful, even 20% of the time.

There are still distractions, interruptions, and struggles. There are many voices telling me what I should or shouldn’t be doing, criticizing me, suggesting many many ways I could be a better person or Christian. Hermit life, even part-time, is not serene. Anthony the Great, who spent 20 years alone in the desert, was often depicted wrestling a mob of demons in midair (first Schongauer, later Michelangelo). Extreme, but not entirely off base.

We probably all battle voices and inner demons like this. Are they louder in solitude? I’m not sure. But when I was a parish priest, I was sure the voices were those of my parishioners, the vestry, my bishop, and congregational development gurus. I blamed them for the incessant noise in my head. Now, I can’t. The voices and expectations are clearly coming from inside me. And maybe they always were.

I am sure some are remnants of voices from my growing up – parents, teachers, middle school bullies. I do juggle expectations, rejections, and critical reviews in my writing work. But I have noticed that the most unforgiving expectations and harshest judgments come from voices that are inside myself.

But why? Who is this, really, saying and thinking these things? Is it me? Society? Patriarchy? Demonic forces? What do I need to do to stop it? Or answer? Or not let it bother me so much?

I have been reading the Buddhist teacher and psychologist, Jack Kornfield. His teaching and insights makes for a fruitful dialogue with my Christian tradition. This week, his work with one of his students particularly struck me, because of the contrast to Anthony fighting his demons: “[This student] took a vow of kindness towards all the forces of difficulty that assailed her. After a time, she could see her feelings and fears with less clinging” (Wise Heart, 251).

I am trying to imagine greeting all my frantic, fearful, angry voices with kindness and compassion, not clinging to them or grappling with them. I am trying to imagine seeing my feelings, fears, and voices as mine, but not me. They belong to me, but I’m bigger than them; I can separate myself from them. (Maybe.)

The Christian tradition has most often, in my reading anyway, imagined the interior struggle as a battle – fighting off the demons, wrestling with angels until they knock your hip out of joint, touching your mouth to a hot coal, going without food or water, quoting scripture back and forth with the Evil One out in the desert. But I’ve also noticed that fighting against something in me often makes it get bigger.

Paul fought “a thorn” inside himself for years. But its power over him wasn’t broken until he heard God telling him that, nope, this thorn would never leave him, but God would give him the grace to live with it, somehow.

In Genesis 32, the angel pleads with Jacob let me go! – because it is Jacob who has to decide the wrestling match is over.

Wherever the hubbub of critiques and nagging voices in my inner life comes from, I am realizing that I will never get rid of them or silence them. But maybe through meditation, self-compassion, breath exercises, and God’s grace, I can learn to live with them. Maybe even to love them? Because they are not going to disappear.

I will keep you posted if I get any better at this.

Meanwhile. . . this past week I submitted the manuscript for the second volume of Everyday Connections — for Year A. Hooray! This is the second of three volumes of the study / prayer guide I’ve been working on (based on a full sermon commentary series, called Connections). The first volume, for Year C, which starts this Advent, is coming soon and available for pre-order:

MY LATEST BOOK

Everyday Connections: Reflections and Practices for Year C

Week-by-week, choose from a selection of reflections, practices, and questions to help you get excited again about scripture, to think about your own life, to give you new sermon ideas if you need them, to scratch your head and say, “Huh, that’s a good question. I’ll have to think about that.” I love this book even if it is rather big, a little expensive, and a bit delayed (see below).

Pre-order, if you can, which helps greatly with those almighty algorithms. Bookshop is independent and cheaper right now, and Amazon is where algorithms can help new readers find me, so both are virtuous choices for purchase.

NOTE: the printing of Year C has hit a snag because of – get this – a paper shortage. My editor is working with the printer to figure out what the new release date will be. I don’t know if this will also affect the e-book release.

THINGS I AM RE-READING

E.M. Forster’s novels: Howard’s End, A Room with a View, and Where Angels Fear to Tread

I read these books and watched the Merchant Ivory movies with gusto in the 1990s. A new and excellent 4-part mini-series of Howard’s End (2017) sent me back to read them again. Howard’s End is the most interesting; the other two are very funny and compelling but characters are a little flat. I’m still thinking about this, but it strikes me that, in all of them, Forster is fixated on middle-class whiteness. Primarily, that in a “superior” race and class, there is danger — lethal danger — in the desire to be good and of service, especially to those we perceive as “needy”; that our self-righteousness and ideals, even as admirable, caring, justice-oriented people, can get in the way of real human relationships, with awful consequences. Howard’s End was published in 1910! Wow. (That novel is also about houses and where we live, another obsession of mine. But I’m keeping this short.)

THINGS I’M EATING

Three-Ingredient Summer Salsa (The Homesick Texan, per Smitten Kitchen)

Guys, this is amazing. Too many tomatoes this time of year? With 1 pound tomatoes, 1 or 2 jalapeños, 2 cloves garlic, and a food processor, this roasted-tomato wonderfulness is easy and more delicious than I can describe.

OTHER THINGS I WROTE

How I learned to love the theology of total depravity - (Christian Century) my essay from 2019 has been circulating again, in this time when so many painful human failures are making headlines.

How we pray, how we believe— (Gather, August 2021) We can get stuck in certain ways of praying that might not match what we really believe about who God is.