2 Abandoning Quick Fixes for a Long Journey: Training

2

Abandoning Quick Fixes

for a Long Journey

Training

Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it to get a crown that will last forever.

In order to journey steadily, we must apply ourselves to doing well the stretch of road immediately before us on the first day of the journey, and not waste time wanting to do the last lap of the way while we still have to make it through the first.

I REMEMBER NOT feeling the peace I was hoping to find, but I walked forward anyway. In front of me was a tall stone building with long grimy lines. The parking lot was empty.

I was alone.

Upon opening one of the wooden doors, a long, low-lit hallway revealed itself. Without a “Check In Here” sign, I tiptoed down the corridor, peeking into rooms. After the third room, a dark-haired woman appeared, “Can I help you?”

“Yes, Jonathan Bailey,” I said, touching my chest.

“Right this way,” she motioned.

“We don’t normally do this,” she said, easing herself into the cubby of her desk. “We’re more monastery than retreat center.”

Not an encouraging sign, I thought. After finishing the paperwork, she drew a map to my room. I found it without much trouble.

The memory of the room is still vivid: There was a small writing desk butted against the wall with a table lamp for light. Catty-cornered was an upholstered chair, and a twin bed was against the wall. Everything was dated and bare and it didn’t bother me at all. I was drawn to the austerity, the simplicity—I liked the margins it made.

I had come to the monastery to try a new spiritual discipline I had just read about.

This was my first silent retreat.

Death by Degree

After putting my things away, I decided to take a tour: I visited the library, the chapel, and the walking path on the back of the property.

All in silence. All alone.

After a couple hours, I stepped back into my room, sat on the bed, and just stared at the wall. Hanging in front of me was a wooden crucifix. I’m not sure I’d ever seen one in person. Growing up, my evangelical tradition preferred bare crosses. They were not comfortable displaying Jesus suspended on wood.

And maybe that absence had been starving me, leaving me hungry for one of the essential ways we participate in our purgation: Asceticism, which is just a heavy, theological word for practicing spiritual disciplines of self-denial—like fasting, solitude, or almsgiving. This is what I mean by training, the steady work of grace that reshapes our desires toward love.

Psychologists would probably call my longing a deficiency need, where the lack of a certain experience creates a craving or urgency for it.

I wanted transformation like a transaction, one dramatic act in exchange for inner change.

Being a novice in purgation, I didn’t understand the cross. I thought of it like a guillotine, with its tall frame and sharp blade. The guillotine was designed to execute immediately; the cross was the polar opposite. It was designed to execute slowly, to prolong the process.

One of the earliest recorded uses of crucifixion was about 330 years before Jesus was born, when Alexander the Great captured the island of Tyre. To instill submission from his new subjects, he ordered his men to fasten the surrendered soldiers to wooden stakes. Initially, they used rope, but when supplies ran low, they resorted to nailing the soldiers’ limbs directly to the wood. Those bound by rope endured for several days, while those nailed to stakes died within twenty-four hours.

Regardless of how it was done, the purpose of crucifixion was to kill slowly and painfully, with an emphasis on humiliation.

This could not have been lost on Jesus when he invited his listeners to take up their crosses. Why use crucifixion as a metaphor? I can’t think of a less persuasive way of inviting people into a life-giving journey of transformation. It’s hard to think of a worse metaphor.

It couldn’t have been that he just wanted to communicate that something inside us needed to die. There are less grisly ways to communicate that. So why crucifixion? Maybe because he wanted us to know that learning self-denial is a long and painful process.

And why is that? Why is the process so drawn out and difficult?

The Mystery in Me

Atop one of the white, chalky cliffs of Dover sits a small tree with a curious shape.

Its branches do not grow up, but out—not skyward, but sideways. The branches sprawl in the opposite direction of the sea because of the coastal winds that continually beat upon it. It’s strange to see a tree growing laterally instead of vertically—a kind of break with its nature.

I started my own purgative journey like that tree, misshapen and bent. We all do.

By the time I became conscious of my need to train with Christ, my way of being in the world—feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting—had already grown sideways, hardening into unnatural appetites, cravings, itches, compulsions. All of which left me rarely doing what my heart wanted. I remember feeling constantly torn between the upward call of Christ and all of these downward pulls within me.

I still do. I live with a steady friction between my longing and my living.

And this, I think, has been the hardest part about navigating the purgative stage. I want to give myself to Christ in a way that’s immediate and comprehensive, and yet there are so many places inside of me that I don’t control and cannot change by simply deciding to.

The result has been a bewildering conflict. The monk John Climacus, writing many centuries ago, might as well have been describing me when he said: “This body . . . is my helper and my enemy, my assistant and my opponent, a protector and a traitor. . . . I embrace him. And I turn away from him. What is this mystery in me?”

The desert Christians—the early monks who sought God in the Egyptian wilderness—came to describe these “downward pulls” as passions, which means “to be acted upon,” much like the coastal winds acted upon the tree, misshaping it.

Today I think of passion as a positive thing, a sign of enthusiasm, but for them it meant something different. Passion was a craving or a compulsion, something that constantly pulled you down into a life you really didn’t want. I prefer the sister term vices, which evolved as another way to describe those same inner struggles—things like envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and more.

We all encounter vices in ourselves—and in others—as the common forms of egocentrism. They’re what sin looks like settled in our character; ingrained ways of feeling, thinking, speaking, and acting that are unloving to ourselves, others, and God.

Just as the tree’s branches slowly grew, day by day, week by week, year by year, into their unnatural shape, so, too, my own human desires slowly grew, day by day, week by week, year by year, into their unloving shape.

And maybe that helps answer our question: Why is self-denial such a long and painful process?

Because the pace at which we learn negative habits and patterns is basically the same pace we unlearn them. Transformation takes just as long as formation—maybe longer.

I thought the opposite was true.

I think it was all of Jesus’ miraculous healing stories, all of those transformed hands and feet, and eyes and ears that gave me the impression that my vices—like lust and wrath, and sloth and gluttony—could be transformed in a few miraculous moments. But as Dallas Willard often said, “Jesus never healed anyone’s character.”

I knew this, but I didn’t.

Something inside me still believed that I could accelerate my transformation. If I did something significant for God—like a forty-eight-hour silent retreat—he would respond with an equally dramatic change in me. I thought I’d wake up from my retreat more loving, more patient, more like the person I wanted to be.

It turns out vices can’t be beheaded—they must be crucified.

And that takes time. It hurts. And we’re going to feel a little foolish going about it.

Hurrying Holiness

Back at the monastery, I remember wanting to escape. And so I did. I got in my car and took a break from the silence. This was my purgative pattern back then: I would jump into a spiritual practice, be unable to endure or maintain it—and abandon it.

For example, one of my first attempts at fasting was something like:

No food for three days.

I can’t recall if I achieved it. But that didn’t matter because the whole experience made me hesitant to fast again. The problem was that I didn’t think any of my actions were over-the-top. I thought they were normal.

I’d come across fasting in a book, maybe The Confessions or New Seeds of Contemplation or The Interior Castle, and then decide to implement it. What I failed to recognize at the time was that what I read about in books was very often not meant for beginners. How Augustine or Thomas Merton or Teresa of Ávila fasted was not how I should begin fasting. All three were in the religious vocation, deeply rooted in monasticism, and further along in their journey.

But it just seemed natural to put into practice what they were writing about.

Being a novice, I didn’t have a filter for how to transpose spiritual practices from someone further along the path to someone like me who was just beginning—let alone living out a different vocation in a different time and place. That’s the kind of insight that develops in the illuminative stage.

And so this purgative pattern kept repeating:

I remember being inspired by the meditation chapter in Celebration of Discipline and trying a full hour—but the ticking clock and my cramping legs made it too distracting to finish.

I remember my friends and I spending months trying to help a homeless man escape street life—but the reality of his addiction and our limited capacity to help made it impossible.

I remember trying to memorize the first letter of John—but the rigorous reading, writing, and quizzing made me give up before memorizing the first chapter.

I failed at all of these practices, not because they weren’t attainable, but because I was aiming for heights that at the time were beyond me. They were too extreme, excessive, or severe.

Again, I think I was trying to accelerate my crucifixion, trying to get it over with, speed it up. I was pursuing practices with intensity but very little wisdom. It’s what my transactional mindset believed: more effort = quicker results.

I was in a hurry for holiness.

And I guess that isn’t all that bad. Who doesn’t want to finally break free from the vices that limit our love? Who doesn’t want to be permeated with God’s gentleness, joy, and self-control? Who doesn’t want to shed the heaviness of self-centeredness for the lightness and freedom of others-centeredness?

Yes, those early days were a blessing and a curse. I was getting involved with God—but I was going to extremes and none of it was sustainable.

It took years of trial and error before I finally recognized that training requires nurture, not force.

Small Enough to Carry

One of my favorite Desert Fathers, Abba Matoes, understood my beginner’s zeal. He said, “I prefer some light activity that lasts to one that is onerous at first and soon broken off.”

The old monk was putting words to something I was only just beginning to sense: I needed practices that were sustainable. Maybe that’s what Jesus was getting at when he said: “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11:30).

I had a yoke to carry: I needed to do something, but it should be easy. I had a burden to bear: There was weight involved, but it should be light.

In other words, training takes lightness.

If a barbell is too heavy, you can’t get enough reps to grow muscle. If you try to run too far, you’ll burn out before you build stamina. I hadn’t yet learned that growth in the spiritual life works the same way. If I could go back and relive my early training days, I think I’d start with something like this:

Fast a snack, not a meal.

Take three quiet minutes in the car, not a full hour of silence.

Memorize one verse, not a whole chapter.

Our practices need to be light enough to live with. Because when they’re livable, they last. And when they last, we’re right where we want to be—participating in our transformation.

Of course, over time, we may want to stretch. We may want to increase the intensity of our practices a little.

Maybe you fast a meal . . . then two . . . maybe a day?

Maybe you sit in silence longer . . . twenty minutes . . . maybe an afternoon?

Maybe you memorize the chapter . . . then two . . . maybe the whole book?

But you get there by starting small, by doing what you can actually sustain. That’s how you train.

But don’t make my mistake: The goal of training is not to increase the intensity of your spiritual practices—it is to deepen your union with God. We’re not spiritual weightlifters; we’re apprentices in love. We’re not stacking more plates on the bar to transform faster; we’re learning how to be receptive to grace.

I didn’t understand that at first. I thought I was growing because my spiritual regimen was. But more practice doesn’t necessarily mean more Christlikeness. John Chrysostom, an early Christian bishop, saw it long ago:

Don’t say to me: “I have fasted for so many days! I have not eaten! I have not drunk wine!” . . . Show me instead that, being wrathful, you became meek; and being cruel, you became compassionate. . . . I am not concerned with what is on your table, but whether your evil disposition has been transformed.

That’s the true test of training: Are our practices leading to love—making us more patient with our spouse, more gentle with our kids, more quick to forgive our coworkers?

And I can’t say this enough: It’s grace that transforms us, not spiritual practices.

Training is simply about learning to become more receptive to grace. It’s less like weightlifting and more like surfing. The weightlifter is always trying to add more—more reps, more resistance. The surfer isn’t asking “Can I do more?” but “Am I in position?” They’re not trying to create the wave. They’re learning to spot it, to cooperate with it. They’re learning to get a feel for it. To read the swell, to ride it, to move in rhythm with a current they can never control.

That’s the kind of training we need.

It builds instincts. It teaches sensitivity. And it tunes us to the motion beneath us.

Becoming Spiritually Literate

After exiting the monastery grounds, I remember driving to another one of my sacred places, the bookstore. I liked this particular one because it had a coffee shop inside and I could do two of my favorite things at once: sip coffee and read books.

After grabbing my cup, I went straight for the Christian Living section. At the time, this is basically what spirituality meant for me. My Christian life was dominated by reading, by becoming spiritually literate. In fact, I felt most like a Christian when I was learning about Christianity. I hadn’t understood what Thomas à Kempis recognized centuries earlier:

Well-ordered learning is not to be belittled, for it is good and comes from God, but a clean conscience and a virtuous life are much better and more to be desired. Because some men study to have learning rather than to live well, they err many times, and bring forth little good fruit or none.

That was me. I was erring and I didn’t even recognize it—I wanted learning. I wanted to know. I wanted to understand. My trap, however, lay in the assumption that simply gathering information would produce transformation. But that wasn’t happening.

My library was expanding faster than my character was transforming.

In the first centuries of the church, Christianity spread rapidly across the Roman Empire, even though about 90 percent of the population was illiterate. Most believers had only a few key texts of Scripture in their memory—but those few were enough. They didn’t need to consume vast amounts of writing to be transformed; they simply practiced the few things they had, and the world has never been the same.

Spiritual literacy is valuable, but when it dominates our Christian practice, it frustrates transformation instead of fostering it. Thomas Merton was right, “The spiritual life is first of all a life. It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.”

Unfortunately, I was learning that lesson the hard way.

But again, all of this is normal in the purgative stage. We don’t beat ourselves up because of it. It’s simply part of the process. In the beginning, we overemphasize information acquisition because we’re trying to figure things out. We don’t have the benefit of lived experience, so we overcompensate by adding layer upon layer of information. This was my misstep. I needed to slow down consuming information and start practicing the information I had. As one of my favorite spiritual directors, François Fénelon, once wrote to one of his directees, “You already know a great deal more than you practice. You do not need fresh knowledge half as much as you need to put into practice what you already know.”

Of course, I knew some of the basics when it comes to training with spiritual practices: Dallas Willard taught me that grace was not opposed to effort but worked with my effort. Richard Foster taught me to train instead of try to be like Christ. But what I hadn’t learned yet was what practices to start with, how to sanely implement them, and, maybe most importantly, how to maintain them. In other words, I didn’t know how to train with spiritual practices inside a Rule of Life, all of which emerged later, in the illuminative stage.

Honestly, what I needed was in-person guidance from someone further along the path: a wise mentor, a spiritual director, or a contemplative pastor, to use Eugene Peterson’s lovely phrase.

Solo Spirituality

Looking back, I can see that I was a lone traveler.

Not that I didn’t have some friends who met regularly for spiritual conversation, support, even practice—but no one further along the journey who could guide me with the kind of lived experience that made trusting them feel natural and compelling. No one who could look me in the eye and say:

I remember that . . .

Be attentive to this . . .

It happened to me too . . .

It was just me, a few friends, and a lot of books. But the more I explored the Christian tradition, the more I realized how central the mentor-mentee relationship was. I couldn’t get around it.

Regular, face-to-face guidance from someone further along the journey was the norm. And it’s so much more than guidance; it’s their Christlike character that naturally forms you. As one Greek monk put it: “When you live with a saint, you too are sanctified. You assume something of his saintly habits from his words and from his silence. His prayer affects you. Even when you don’t speak, something takes place, something holy and divine is transmitted to you without your realizing it.”

It’s hard to find saints—I don’t mean the canonized kind, but the everyday kind, hidden in plain sight. They never announce themselves, yet something about them feels different. They’ve suffered, and it’s made them softer. They’ve failed, and they’ve let mercy teach them. They’ve learned to listen more than they speak. Time with them leaves you steadier, quieter, more at peace.

Those are the saints we’re looking for.

People who’ve trained with Christ, who’ve been at it for a while, and who are growing in God’s kind of love.

Do you have anyone like that in your life?

Someone you can meet with regularly—someone whose very presence helps you remember who you’re becoming?

Confronting My Pseudo-Saint

After an hour of thumbing through books, I grabbed some fast food and recharged my enthusiasm.

When I returned to the monastery, it was dark. I got to my room, turned the knob of the table lamp and tried reading through the entire letter to the Romans. I think Dallas Willard mentioned this practice on an old cassette tape once. It was harder than I thought, so after the twelfth chapter I bowed out and went to bed.

The room got quiet—so quiet that I began hearing all the noises an old building makes. And that’s when the hysteria kicked in.

I remember staring at my door, wondering if someone would break through. It was locked, of course, but surely some sadistic monk had a key. I closed my eyes and tried falling asleep, but the thought kept looping. So I slipped out of bed and picked up the desk chair and angled it under the doorknob. It probably wouldn’t stop someone from forcing their way in, but maybe it would give me a chance to prepare.

I laid down—more looping—the fear intensified with each iteration.

I couldn’t close my eyes without previewing the nightmare. I remember feeling overwhelmed. I remember not being able to take my eye off that brass knob.

Did it turn?

Was it turning?

I couldn’t do this.

I shot out of bed, stuffed my duffel bag, and eased open the door. I peeked down both sides of the hallway. It looked empty.

So I ran—the library and chapel and Catholic statuary whizzing by.

Mercifully, the front door was unlocked. I can still hear the gravel clicking beneath my feet. I reached my car door with bag in hand. I threw the lock into place as soon as the door closed.

I was safe.

Looking back on that experience, I see that I not only wanted to accelerate my crucifixion; I also wanted to be thought of as a spiritual hero. On the drive out to the monastery, I was already imagining the stories I’d tell when I got back—and the quiet nods of respect for my spiritual athleticism.

To be fair, there was a genuine longing for silence, but mixed in with all that longing was something less pure: I wanted to be noticed and admired. There was a part of me that was performing. I wanted to be seen as someone devoted, someone serious.

But the purgative invitation is never to perform—it’s to participate with God. That, I was slowly learning. Thankfully I didn’t feel like sharing much about my first silent retreat. I arrived at the monastery a “hero.” I left humiliated.

Noticing all of this was humbling and liberating. Humbling, because it forced me to confront an unflattering aspect of myself. Liberating, because with recognition came the possibility of an even deeper transformation.

Again, all of this is symptomatic of purgation. We all want the virtues right away, and what we get instead is a clearer picture of our vices. When we begin training with spiritual disciplines, God begins our transformation by altering the way we perceive ourselves, gently correcting our self-deception. As this happens, we slowly trade illusions for reality, and the more we live in reality, the more transformation is possible.

Maturing Participation

Looking back on those early days of training in the purgative stage, I can see how juvenile it was:

Again, who doesn’t look at the fruit of the Spirit, the virtues of Christ’s life, the beauty and radiance of God—and grab for it? Like Mary Magdalene in the garden or Adam and Eve in Eden, we grasp.

It’s not all that bad, just premature.

I think what surprised me most about those early days is that I was still living out of my old transactional mindset even though I thought I left it behind.

What’s worse is I thought a mindset could be left behind. I guess I thought of it like a raincoat or a baseball cap, something I could take off after a thunderstorm. But a mindset doesn’t work like that—it was embedded within me, woven into the way I viewed the world, and it wasn’t going to automatically disappear because I wanted it to.

So not only did I have to come to terms with the slow and often painful process of Christlike transformation, I also had to do it while wrestling my old mindset—the thing diametrically opposed to the transformational process.

There was a silver lining, though—I was noticing it.

And noticing, the spiritual masters say, is actually a kind of growth in itself—a kind of advance, an illumination. Which reminds me of a line often attributed to Henri Nouwen: “You don’t think your way into a new kind of living. You live your way into a new kind of thinking.”

That’s exactly what was happening to me, the more I threw myself into training with spiritual practices, the more opportunities I had to reflect on my own stumbling—all of which led to greater self-awareness and understanding. And all of that led to more nuanced training, helping me to navigate the threefold path with increasing insight and sensitivity.

But to be clear, my purgation isn’t over.

Even though the stages build on one another, I still revisit it. The Threefold Way is like that. It’s linear and circular. I make progress, yes, but round and round I go, revisiting purgation with new perspectives and deeper understandings.

I’ve had to learn that this cyclical nature doesn’t mean I’m stuck. Rather, it simply reflects the layered process of transformation. Just as a tree cycles through the seasons, each bringing death and life, so, too, do our spiritual seasons cycle, bringing deeper crucifixion and greater resurrection.

Knowing this has allowed me to be more at ease with my transforming self, and that increasing ease has created the conditions for more illumination, even union.

But I would soon discover that purgation is more than training with spiritual practices. It also includes dealing with the various forms of affliction thrust on us by living in a crumbling world.

In Sum

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