Form: Shaping Spirituality: Re-Form

In this series I have touched on a way of spiritual formation. First there is inform which we all are born into. Then as we grow most of us naturally move into preform. A great number of people remain at this stage and are not able/willing to do take the next step and die to self in order to conform to spiritual disciplines. This post will touch on what happens in the next stage: reform.

When you go to a gym and conform your workout to the suggestions of the trainer, you begin to feel differently. Whereas you may have really liked to work your biceps, the trainer forces you to also work your triceps. This feels differently. When we conform our lives to spiritual disciplines we also begin to feel differently. We may be very comfortable with prayer, but when our spiritual guide asks us to sit in silence for periods of time - it feels weird. If is a muscle we have not worked out before. Soon, the novelty of being in silence feels really quite great. It is something that we integrate into our "workout" and now feel like it is something that we will always do.

Until something throws us out of our routine. We go on vacation, we visit family, we have a death in our lives, a child is sick, we are sick, there is a three day weekend - anything that throws off the rhythm we have established in our "spiritual workout". Because the new routine of our "spiritual workout" has not had a chance to grow deep roots in our lives, we can quickly forget to continue these new disciplines. After a day or so, we rationalize away why we have not engaged these disciplines and then we wake up and then feel guilty that we have not "worked out" in sometime and then these new disciplines wither away.

This cycle of integrating our new "workout" into our lives and then it dropping out of our lives is the stage of spiritual formation I call Reforming. Like a potter who works and reworks clay, our lives are being reworked to a new shape. Let us be clear here, in the potter metaphor, you and I are not the potter we are the clay and the spiritual disciplines become the potter's wheel. If the wheel is not spinning, then the clay will just sit there and there is only so much the potter can do. The potter is able to work and reform the clay without the wheel, but the clay is limited in what shapes it can take.

Being reformed is the hardest part of spiritual formation. It is harder than conforming to new disciplines it is harder than dying to self. It is the hardest because it is ongoing. There is constant upkeep to ensure the wheel is still spinning.

And many of us just don't have that sort of discipline. However, if we are persistent, we will move into the next stage of spiritual formation - transform.

Form: Shaping Spirituality Con-form

As we move through spiritual formation, we first are at the in-form stage. Then we are able to move into the pre-form stage. Some people realizing all the information gathered and all the lenses keeping us from maturing, seek out new lenses to help them develop and mature. When we are willing and able to put down our natural lenses, then we can step into the con-form stage.


Conforming is often thought of selling out or just not being your "true self". Who would want to be a conformist? Isn't this the thing that many people do not like about religion - religion makes you be something you are not in order to make you into something you would not choose to be. So it is often assumed that religion makes people into mindless, doctrine spewing, Bible quoting people who hate all people who are not of their clan.

Yea, who would want that?


This is not the same as the con-form step in spiritual formation.


Here is an example of conforming in the way I am attempting to get at.


When you step onto the soccer field to play a game, everyone on the field conforms to a set of shared understandings (often called 'rules') in order to develop as not only soccer players but as athletes. If I were to not conform my way of being to the game of soccer then I will never grow as a soccer player and in a greater sense I can even stagnate as an athlete (I could just hold the ball and sit there).


Similarly, when we conform to a shared understanding of living, then we grow not only as disciplined people but even more generally as spiritual formed beings.


There are a number of shared understandings that have come to us through the ages that help us spiritually develop. Silence, prayer, breathing, fasting, Sabbath observation, worship, service, alms giving, meditation, listening, devotion, acts of justice, etc.


If we want to be spiritually formed and mature, then we must move beyond seeking information and seeing the world only through our preformed selves, we must con-form our lives.


There is a story told by Anthony DeMelo which goes something like this:

A man asks the teacher "Is there anything I can do to make myself enlightened?" The teacher replied. "As little as you can do to make the sun rise." The student asks the teacher, "Then of what use are the spiritual practices you prescribe?" The teacher smiles and after a moments' pause looked at the student in the eye and said plainly, "To make sure you are not asleep when the sun begins to rise."


The step of con-form is a step in which we rely on a shared understanding of how to live. We may not like all the understandings, (just as I may not like the way a referee calls a soccer game), but we bend our lives and conform to these understandings. When we do so, we begin to be formed.


*Warning* Con-form is not a stage for the impatient or those seeking a quick fix. It is a stage in which we never 'graduate' from and move on from. It is really the foundational stage of spiritual formation. Without it we are aimless and wandering. We will never be a soccer player if we do not conform to the understanding of soccer and we will not mature if we are do not con-form to shared understanding of spiritual formation. 

Form: Shaping Spirituality Pre-form

This is the second of five posts that address one way we are spiritually formed. The last post focused on In-form and how gathering information is just the starting (and not the apex) of spiritual formation, which might be a bit out of step with the way many of us were taught in the Church.

Once we gather a decent amount of in-formation, we begin to discover that we have not gathered pure and unmodified information. In fact, as we learn more about the world, we are aware that all the information we gain comes through a number of filters and lenses so that it modifies the information we gather.

There is a danger in thinking that any bit of information comes into our brains as pure and unbiased. We begin to think that what we learn is in fact nothing short of the absolute Truth. We become convinced that the way we see the world is not only the correct way but cannot understand why others do not see it the same way. "They" are morons and idiots. Be it the left or the right or anyone in between, when we buy into the idea that we encounter information as pure and untouched, we are heading down a road toward idolatry and not Christian spiritual formation.

But when we see that we all have different lenses we are using to see the world and these lenses color what we see and how we see, then we being to understand that just gathering information is not the apex of our spiritual lives. For many Christians we were taught the world looks like this image to the right.

This lens colors the way we see the world. So we think the world is kinda crappy and one day we will be in heaven and better. So we teach that people are fallen and broken and that God cannot be in the presence of sin. This makes total sense - if you are wearing these lenses. If you are not wearing these lenses, then the idea that humans are broken and fallen and "bad" is just plain nuts.

As we gather more information, we become aware that before we were in-formed we were pre-formed. We were born into a place and time and context that drives assumptions and language. We did not choose this and we are often unaware of our pre-formed natures.

Take for instance, that in different parts of the world colors mean different things. While I associate red with anger and desire, these are not universal. These associations were pre-formed in me - however I did not know that these bits of information were not universal until I saw this chart:

If the way I associate colors is shaped by my pre-formed self, then it is not the same for the way I understand God, my neighbor and my self?

I could go on about how our pre-form stage of spiritual formation takes into consideration things like the birth of formal operational thinking, the imaginary audience, and even the nature/nurture conversation. It could even be stated that many of us stay at the pre-formed stage which allows us to justify our actions. So we say things like "I was born this way" or "I was raised this way" or "I cannot help it". As though we are pre-formed and then come out as fixed creatures unable to change/adapt/evolve. When we remain in this stage and retard our spiritual formation, we are spiritually immature while feeling like we are advancing in our formation.

But the point is that when we are in-formed, we discover our pre-formed and then we are invited to take the next step: con-form.