The Remarkable Alternative of Monasticism
PATH TWO
The Spiritual Life as Journey
Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great.” . . . So Abram went, as the LORD had told him.
GENESIS 12:1-4
I was first drawn to the individuals featured in this chapter while sorting out the various dimensions of my own spiritual journey. Questions and challenges that come to every honest seeker had come to me and I needed help. As I pursued these answers, whole new vistas of understanding unfolded before me.
I discovered that we are all on a journey in life. Hopefully, a journey toward the heart of God. A journey into the subterranean chambers of the soul. A journey into the spiritual unknown. At times all of us stumble and fall along the way. Still, we are able to rise again—scarred, perhaps, but wiser for the experience—and continue on. Most critical for this journey is knowing that we are headed in a Godward direction.
To see the spiritual life as journey is to recognize that every step we take in life requires reflection and discernment if we are to see God’s role in it. As we think our way along this journey, it is like following a path up a steep mountain. Occasionally we feel winded and need to stop—or even lose our footing and need to recover—but then suddenly we discover a whole new level of understanding we never knew existed.
Most of us are drawn to this journey by the massive challenges we face along the way. Will my life turn out well or poorly? If evil and suffering befall me, will I have the fortitude to withstand it? How can I become the kind of person who enters into meaningful, long-lasting relationships? Is there obvious purpose to my life and work? And, as I pursue God and set significant goals for my life, will I have the spiritual resources to keep from being derailed from the very life I seek?
These questions require answers. As we seek them, we realize that every approach to our life with God includes elements of a spiritual journey. We see this in the assumptions we make—that our spiritual journey should lead us from evil to good, from falsehood to truth and from self-centeredness to servanthood. As we pursue these answers, different expressions guide us.
Finding Our Lives in God’s Great Story
Learning to look for God requires discipline and insight. Our individual personal experiences make sense only when placed in the context of our life with God. When we see our life in the broader perspective of God’s active engagement with us, we enter the grand story of Scripture.
Every one of us requires frameworks of meaning to make sense of the world. These are often thought of as “plausibility structures,” a term originally coined to explain the way individual facts of science fit into a meaningful whole. The goal of Scripture is to teach us to see the way our life fits into God’s great story. It is to come to see our life from God’s perspective.
From the time of Adam and Eve in the early chapters of Genesis to the dramatic creation of a new heaven and a new earth in Revelation 22, the pages of Scripture are filled with the unfolding revelation of God’s love and interaction with his people. As we review the entire breadth of Scripture, we see that it teaches us to recognize the tremendous clash between various understandings of a successful life.
Success or failure in the eyes of society is measured in terms of wealth, power, prestige and personal achievement. But success in our spiritual life is measured in terms of our ability to understand and address our own spiritual condition as well as the spiritual needs of others. Yet there is almost nothing in our contemporary culture that directs us this way.
We can be successful by all the conventional measures of society and still be chronically unhappy. We are unhappy because the life we lead is unbalanced and we cannot give ourselves to the priorities and relationships that form the foundation of a meaningful life. We give ourselves instead to misplaced priorities and superficial relationships because we believe that if we just earn a little more money or gain a little more respect, we will achieve the inner peace we long for and seek.
To discover a life of balance is to find the true source of our happiness in God. It is to know that our life must connect with God if we are to engage in the activities that bring ultimate meaning to our existence. It is to submit to a process that takes time and develops across the span of our life, a process first captured in the early days of monasticism.
The Remarkable Alternative of Monasticism
Following the writings of Scripture and other key developments in the first three centuries of the early church, the spiritual awakening of the fourth century began with some of the most intense religious and military conflicts in the history of Western civilization. Wars within and against the Roman Empire, a crumbling infrastructure and rampant moral decay all opened the way for Constantine to conquer the Roman Empire. With his conquest, Christianity became the official religion of the state, and by the end of the century, the ideal of martyrdom as the ultimate act of Christian devotion had been eclipsed. In its place arose monasticism, a movement that would govern Christian spirituality for the next nine hundred years.