Foreword
Foreword
“I hate organized religion. I’ve moved way beyond it.”
“I despise the institutional church. I don’t need institutions to depend upon.”
“I don’t believe in communities of worship. I am strong enough to be on my own.”
“I don’t like religion at all. Hypocrites and selfish people invent it to serve their own purposes.”
“However, I’m very spiritual.”
You will hear such language over coffee in the browsing rooms of the giant bookstores. It is commonly voiced when celebrities chatter about themselves on late night television. College students will flock to religious studies courses but avoid chapel before they go off variously on their own to find the meaning of life or to commune with the spirit in the woods or get connected with the energy in the universe or be touched by angels.
Helping you become very spiritual — no italics, please, for the word “very” this time — is a goal Richard Foster has set for himself in Streams of Living Water. But every page shows that he means something different than do authors of the best-sellers found on bookstore shelves marked “Spiritual-Occult-Metaphysical-Holistic-Wholistic-Alternative-Ancient-New Age.” Too many pages show that he and those authors only coincidentally use the same words—Spirit, spiritual, and spirituality — as they attempt to convey very different things.
Think of the self-acquired, self-advertised spirituality as a kind of vapor: thin, particled, almost invisible, shapeless, hard to grasp. Whoever boasts the possession of it can escape criticism or judgment. You cannot make congregations out of the clientele that buy into it; they despise concrete community. Think of the kind of spirituality Foster is encouraging as thick, rooted, concrete, always seeking shape, graspable by anyone who would appraise it and reject or improve it.
What are the differences between the two sorts? Many, of course, but at the core is the fact that the first kind is unmoored and the second is moored. The unmoored makes up reality as it goes along; it flits and is fleeting, leaving one at sea. The moored sort, on the other hand, has a harbor and an anchor, a home port from which one heads forth into the storms or to outlast the calms and to which one returns for replenishment.
Moored spirituality is responsible to textual traditions and the communities that attempt to live by them. Those who relate to it may come from any number of religious traditions. They spend their lives studying the Qur’an or the Upanishads or living in connection with communities that derive from Torah. In the present case, the texts and the communities are Christian, rooted in the Bible and, especially, in Jesus Christ. Foster is not ungenerous to others, but this is the place he knows and advocates, having no choice in the matter because he has been called there.
Richard Foster does not talk about moorings and place. His metaphor is “streams,” with Jesus Christ as the source. Some French writers have coined a wonderful word for what this is about: ressourcement. That means resuming to the source, the headwaters, dipping deeply, and coming forth refreshed. To do this in the present case Foster asks us in each chapter to visit a number of classic Christian people who can serve as paradigms and then to visit some people in the Scriptures. And in each chapter there is also someone from our time, to assure that we understand that the source still pours forth streams in which we can bathe or from which we can drink.
Foster cannot not be the teacher. I note how often he needs “first,” “second,” and “third” sequences (and many longer than that) in order to help us find our ways into the disciplines of faith and to find ways to make them memorable. While those numbers are cold and abstract, warmth and clarity come when he talks about people in the tradition, the stream.
And how varied are these people. I think that some of the unmoored spiritual people — it’s time to pay them a compliment now — who are often more adventurous and imaginative than many stolid Christians, reject the faith because it is bland and boring. Its saints and heroes seem outclassed in a head-to-head encounter with the guru of the week, the shaman of the season, the channeler of the half-decade.
Bland? Boring? Right off Foster says or shows “Not so!” as he takes us out to the desert with crazy Antonius and shows that that monk was not all crazy. Foster is ecumenical; his streams flow together. Here is William Seymour, a black Pentecostal founder, who gets rejected even by white Pentecostal pioneers. Here is Phoebe Palmer, not a “mainstream” character in the kind of church history I started out to teach four decades ago. Yet here she is, up there with high-class literary figures, martyrs, and founders.
Asking us to learn from such an assortment of characters who might often have wondered how Foster gets to see their streams of influence flowing together takes some nerve on his part. No one is likely to find all the paradigms congenial. But it is likely that readers will end up learning more from the surprising and abrasive misfits than from the congenial people who fit so smoothly into our preconceived ways.
Foster belongs to a small but I think and hope a growing company — I see Kathleen Norris and Nancy Mairs in it and before them, Henri Nouwen and more — a company of those who ask us to be more patient than the readers of the “spirituality” books at the mega-stores are. He wants us not just to pick and choose but to be judged by what we read, always with the possibility in mind that we will change and be changed. When some of those who have rejected Christian community start turning away from the “spiritual” people because now they have come to look bland and boring, when they start looking for streams of living water, I think they will find Foster and, behind his stories and lessons, their source both congenial and durable. Having a mooring at that source does not mean getting to stay at home while the winds would blow into the sails. It means knowing where the lighthouses and beacons are, where the harbor is into which to return for momentary retreat before the next sailing forth into the turmoil of the world.
Knowing such a mooring and finding the streams are acts that, according to his book title, we should “celebrate.” Whoever reads these pages and walks in their way is likely to do precisely that. I invite you to accept the mentoring of a reliable, seasoned guide in Richard Foster and, several paradigms back behind him and his other subjects, the figure of Jesus Christ.
Martin Marty