Honesty About the Journey

God led me to contemplative prayer through back roads.

I became active in church when I was a teenager and a very attractive girl invited me to youth group. God uses all kinds of ways to enlist people in His service! My next step was to be a Volunteer in Mission in the West Virginia Mountain Project after my junior year in college. Seeing the love and generosity of the Presbyterian men and women who served this group of churches in a poverty-stricken area profoundly challenged me; I wanted what they seemed to have.

This past summer, while awaiting the arrival of our fourth grandchild, I stayed at our son’s house in Salmon Arm, British Columbia. It’s an old house with small bedrooms and limited closet space. My bedroom, the smallest, presented minor living challenges. In the morning, my air mattress was pushed up against the wall to allow enough space to unfold the card table which held my laptop and working papers. This small room was where I studied, read, prayed, attended to wounds (the dog gashed my foot with her sharp claw), and wrote this article. It was also where I received guests; my two-year-old granddaughter came across the hallway each morning to do morning stretches with Grandma after she assisted me in pushing the air mattress against the wall.

What happens when two friends talk without a script for three hours about grace, and one of  them is Philip Yancey, arguably today’s premier Christian writer and author of the landmark book What’s So Amazing About Grace? Well, I’ll tell you one thing that happened: we (at least I) forgot that we were chatting to generate an article for Conversations. Our conversation over lunch took on a life of its own.

This place is different, I thought as I sat for the first time in the bleachers of a high school gymnasium that transformed itself every weekend into Church of the Open Door. The worship session filled me with hope, and David Johnson began to preach from the book of Matthew with passion and authenticity. I instinctively knew I was home.

During my freshman year in college, I was on top of the world. I was enjoying campus life at the university Thomas  Jefferson built, playing on the tennis team and making good grades. Life was great – until I developed an eating disorder called anorexia athletica. I had heard that many female college athletes struggle with this strange disorder, but I never thought I would be susceptible to it. And I certainly never thought anorexia would become a means for me to experience grace.

David: I’m dying to ask you about your training in spiritual direction and hear where your involvement in Ignatian spirituality has taken you in recent years, but perhaps we should start a bit earlier. Since we are going to be talking about your ways of experiencing God, perhaps it will be helpful to put that in personal historical context.

Years ago, I heard a story. It went like this:

A young girl did something she knew she was not supposed to do, and feared the punishment.

Much to her surprise, when she confessed what she had done, she was not punished. “That,” her father said, “is mercy—not getting what you deserve.” Then her father asked if she wanted to go get ice cream. Wide-eyed, she agreed. “That,” her father said, “is grace—getting something you do not deserve.”

Nietzsche once wrote, “To grow wise, you must listen to the wild dogs barking in the cellar.”

I’m no Nietzschean scholar, but I don’t think he was talking about the wild dogs of depravity. The evil beasts he had in mind, I’m guessing, were what he thought to be the “givens” of existence: death, meaninglessness, isolation, and the intolerable burden of freedom that requires us to make choices in a random world that guarantees no certain outcome.

together are representatives from the prominent tributaries of Christian spirituality- incarnational, contemplative, evangelical, holiness, charismatic, and social justice. Each is participating in a dialogue, sharing with unusual transparency about authentic transformation and why it seems so difficult actually to become like Jesus.

Brian McLaren has become a very important voice in contemporary Christianity—in part, by declaring that modernity has been a noxious pill for the body of Christ. His recent book A New Kind of Christian became a tonic for many who had become soured on the church and religiosity. But it was the following quote from Adventures in Missing the Point that made us want to interview him for this particular volume of Conversations: