Graceful Practices

Amy Plantinga Pauw

Covenant Network Conference
Nov. 3, 2005
Memphis, TN

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The Christian life is a material life. When we talk about spiritual practices we are not talking about an attempt to put our bodies to the side somehow and concentrate on the inner life of faith. Spiritual practices are about a way of conducting a bodily life. Practices involve gesture, posture, seeing, hearing, touching, speaking. Practices require a habituating of our bodies. When Itzhak Perlman picks up his violin, and you watch it become an extension of himself, you are witnessing a profound bodily habituation. Likewise with Christian spiritual practices. When Christians from Mali gather around a deathbed in the last hours of someone’s life and “sing them out” that is a deep bodily habituation. Practices are spiritual because they catch us up in the life of the Spirit, not because they are disembodied.

Nor are spiritual practices primarily an individual exercise. They are about a pattern of human existence lived out in community—a shared pattern that can be seen by others. This comes through so beautifully in Kathleen Norris’ reflections on spiritual practices. Because spiritual practices are rooted in communities they ineluctably involve issues of tradition, culture, and power. Spiritual practices are not a pious escape from these basic communal issues and struggles. During the time of slavery in our country, some of our Presbyterian forebears spoke about the spirituality of the church as a way to avoid confronting the maldistribution of power in their communities and the cruel and unjust treatment of human bodies. By contrast, I will assume that the spiritual practices of the church are about our material, bodily lives in community, with all the messiness, ambiguity and potential for conflict that bodies and communities involve. The good that God intends for the church has to be worked out in historical communities, and thus there is no way for our spiritual practices to avoid the processes of negotiation, error, confession, risk, and change.

Spiritual practices involve negotiations of power. For example, no matter how modest its resources, every Christian community has economic power, and makes decisions about how that it to be exercised: stewarding material resources is a spiritual practice. Likewise, every Christian community has polity, that is, political, decisions to make about arranging its common life: shaping communities is a spiritual practice. As Larry Rasmussen has noted, the perennial Christian strategy is to gather the folks, break the bread, and tell the stories. But every Christian community has to figure out how people gather and who gets to break the bread and tell the stories; it’s those kinds of basic communal questions that have brought us here this weekend.

Spiritual practices are an attempt to catch up with and respond to God’s merciful and transforming presence in the world. Christians have been at this for a long time. When we engage in spiritual practices, we affirm our ties to an enormous community of faith that stretches across space and time, far beyond the confines of a single congregation or denomination. Yet the scope of spiritual practices is ultimately even broader. In one of his hymns, Brian Wren revels in “how grandly love intends to work till all creation sings.” Spiritual practices share this grand vision, and so cannot be confined to the inner lives of individuals, or even to the flourishing of one religious community. Spiritual practices are ultimately concerned with God’s intentions for all creation.

Hospitality, forgiveness, reading Scripture, giving and receiving, shaping communities, prayer, discernment, and healing are all examples of the kind of practices I have in mind. This afternoon we will be focusing especially on shaping communities. But spiritual practices are not items on an à la carte menu. They complement and deepen and strengthen each other. Together they form a coherent way of life in the world that God made and loves. Despite their great variety and dynamism, they are not “random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty.” They are instead intentional, communal ways of responding to God’s mysterious and uninvited initiative in our lives and gateways into deeper knowledge of God.

It is important to preserve both sides of this: practices as responses to God and as gateways to God. Spiritual practices are concrete responses to beliefs and convictions about God’s active presence. For example, we know God as gracious host, the One who welcomes us into a life-giving and life-sustaining network of relations with our fellow creatures and with God’s own self. And we respond by practicing hospitality in the limited confines of our own lives. In our practices we try to glorify God, that is, to reflect back just a little bit of the love, beauty and justice that God is. We do so trusting that the Holy Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know how to pray, says the apostle Paul, but the Spirit intercedes for us. Likewise, we don’t know how to heal, how to forgive, how to discern God’s will, how to read Scripture. But we trust that in our modest attempts to practice our faith, the Spirit is present. So spiritual practices are a response to God, arising out of our deepest Christian convictions.

Practices are also gateways to knowing God that deepen and sometimes even challenge our Christian beliefs. There are some things you can know only by doing. Jonathan Edwards, one of my theological heroes, liked to say that the devil went to the best divinity schools--a comment, I suppose, on the best divinity schools as well as on the devil. What he meant was that, on one level, the devil's intellectual grasp of the claims of Christian faith was excellent--but it was what Edwards called a speculative, notional knowledge. What was utterly missing were the practices of faith, and the love of God and neighbor that would unleash the transformative power of that knowledge in life-changing ways. In the same way, there is a distinctive knowledge of a religious tradition that is best attained within the framework of its ongoing practices. Engagement in these communal practices, over time, can give rise to new knowledge, to new capacities for perception, that are not otherwise accessible. Living within the circle of self-understanding of a religious tradition yields a special kind of knowing. While it may seem logical to achieve clarity about our convictions first and then to shape our spiritual practices accordingly, this is not the way it actually works in the life of faith. The theory/application model is inappropriate here. We are always figuring out what we believe in the midst of practicing our faith. Indeed, reflecting on our faith is itself a spiritual practice. A practicing Buddhist knows things about Buddhism that an expert in world religions cannot. Likewise, we may find that we acquire a deeper knowledge of God’s hospitality to all of creation only when we make some fumbling attempts to practice hospitality ourselves.

You’ve noticed by now that the way I’m talking about spiritual practices goes against a popular understanding of what is means to be spiritual. A common way of thinking about the spiritual life roots it in an inward religious experience that transcends words and social traditions. In this way of thinking, most of the time we operate within a socially constructed, ordinary view of reality. But there are those extraordinary moments when that reality collapses and we catch a glimpse of the transcendent, of a reality that is totally other. It is in these moments of private spiritual experience that one’s true religious identity is grounded. These experiences then receive institutional forms in practices and doctrines, but these concrete expressions never capture the vividness or the freedom of the original experience. Communal religious practices, in this view, are always at best domestications, if not distortions, of the original spiritual encounter with God. There is little sense that communal practices and traditions may be vehicles of divine presence, conveying God's love and presence to us in ways that only social language and bodily actions make possible. So the claim that God meets us in the flesh, in our cultural, communal location in and through our embodied practices, is a bold one. It echoes the bold claim of the incarnation, that in Jesus Christ, God has taken on our flesh and made a home with us.

            On the other hand, it is possible to make inflated claims for communal Christian practices as a failsafe means of forming Christian virtues and character and of commending the Christian faith to the world. Theological discussions of Christian practices sometimes paint an idealized picture of exemplary communal practices perfectly aligned with pious intentions and correct theological construals. The concrete history of Christian practices looks very different. It is an ambiguous history, marked by countless examples of good practices done for bad reasons, of once vibrant practices becoming confused and sinful, of communal practices becoming so strong that they dominate the conceptual space, degenerating into an unreflective “but we’ve always done it this way” mentality. The idealized picture of Christian practices glosses over issues of how decisions about communal practices are made, and the complex ways in which spiritual practices both resist and accommodate prevailing cultural norms. When you look at the spiritual practices of real live Christians, you can see why some are tempted to champion private spiritual rapture as the foundation for Christian experience of God. Embodied, communal spiritual practices are a messy and ambiguous business.

Yet it is there in the mess and ambiguity that we meet God’s grace. Hence one of the meanings of my title, Graceful Practices. Spiritual practices are grace-filled because they are places in our ambiguous lives where God meets us, where the most important thing we can do is to show up, open to God’s work in our hearts and our communities. This stress on grace is crucial, because a focus on practices can tempt us to turn our gaze away from God’s grace towards our own spiritual accomplishments. Spiritual practices are not merit badges, something to which we can point to assure ourselves of our exemplary life and our worthiness to stand before God. They are not a proof of our moral integrity by which we convince others of the rightness of our faith. As David Kelsey has recently argued, “living in trust that our lives are justified by what we do in accord with standards of excellence lies at the very heart of sin. What we do sinfully need not even be immoral; even if what we do is morally good, it is sin if we trust the doing of it to show that our lives are worth living.”1 To call practices graceful is to remind ourselves that practices are like holding out our hand to receive the bread of life at communion. They are a communal act of faith that is at the same time a concrete acknowledgment that we are not whole, that we are not at peace, that we need healing and nourishment that we cannot provide for ourselves. Practices are an acknowledgment of our ongoing need for grace, and at the same time they are structured ways of showing gratitude for the grace God has already bestowed on us.

The title Graceful Practices also implies that we try to step gracefully in practicing our faith. We try to live, as Paul says in Colossians 3, as if we had truly been raised with Christ—clothed “with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness and patience” (Col. 3:12). This is particularly important in practices like shaping community and reading Scripture, which have not always been conspicuous showcases for Christian kindness and humility. To practice our faith gracefully, we do not plow down those who stand in our way. We give an honest account of our gospel convictions and practices and stand behind them, but we do this, as I Peter 3:16 counsels, with gentleness and reverence. Since God has justified us by grace, and not on the basis of our exemplary beliefs and practices, we have room to be graceful with those who disagree with us. We can put away our badges of victimhood and progressive farsightedness and acknowledge that all of us still see through a mirror darkly. Graceful practices resist the temptations of strident dismissiveness or smug intolerance. Graceful practices leave room for generosity, even in disappointment and defeat.

Of course, graceful practices do not eliminate disagreement. You might even say that they make genuine disagreement possible, by dismantling the self-protective mechanisms that keep us from really listening to each other. The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre has defined a tradition as an ongoing argument—to those of you who are part of the Presbyterian tradition, this definition will come as no surprise. His point is that conflict in inherent in tradition because of a built-in unpredictability about what the excellence of an ongoing tradition requires. You need both rule-breaking and rule-keeping, MacIntyre insists, for a living tradition to flourish. Rosa Parks, whose life our whole nation has been celebrating this week, is an eloquent example of how rule-breaking was required for the flourishing of the American tradition. But unfortunately, says MacIntyre, we have no rules to tell us whether it is rule-keeping or rule-breaking that is required in a given situation. So we argue.

In the realm of spiritual practices, we are not arguing about whether to preserve foundational Christian practices like breaking the bread and telling the stories. We are not arguing about the necessity of a practice of common prayer, about the need for mutual confession and forgiveness. We’re not arguing over the need for shaping communities by the Word and Spirit. We’re arguing about the rules that contribute to doing all these things decently and in good order. Presbyterianism has argued that these kinds of rules are desperately needed to keep human communities from tumbling into chaos. But the Presbyterian tradition has also insisted that these kinds of rules are subject to pragmatic and prayerful re-evaluation from time to time. We are given no complete set of operating instructions for the Christian life, no infallible Book of Order. And as the missiologist Andrew Walls has noted in another context, God has a tendency to make tender mockery out of all the particular forms of church government to which Christians have earnestly devoted themselves. 2

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1- David Kelsey, Imagining Redemption (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2005), 57. (return)

2 - Andrew Walls, The Missionary Movement in Christian History (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2004), 246. (return)