Classical Spiritual Exercises

Every moment and every event of our lives on earth plants something in our souls. For just as the wind carries thousands of winged seeds, so each moment brings with it germs of spiritual vitality that come to rest imperceptibly in our minds and wills. Most of these unnumbered seeds perish and are lost, because we are not prepared to receive them: for such seeds as these cannot spring up anywhere except in the good soil of freedom, spontaneity and love.

—Thomas Merton[i]

While waiting in line to pay for my wife’s birthday gift, I spied something called “Lavender in a Bag.” Liz loves lavender, so I had to get it. The directions were simple: “Empty the seed pouch into the soil bag, and add water.”

Upon seeing Liz’s joy over the brown bag, our two-and-a-half-year-old son, Tyler, was confused. “What is it, a bag of dirt?” he asked.

We thought about it for a minute. “Well, yes and no.”

“What do you mean?” he pressed.

“The seeds and dirt in this bag represent how everything in the whole world works.”

His big green eyes lit up.

“Just like you, these seeds need food and love and care. If we put them in the soil and water them, over time a plant will grow. Eventually the plant will sprout pretty flowers that smell nice.”

“I like flowers,” he said before peppering us with more questions.

When he’d exhausted our knowledge of the natural world, we explained that each day he could peek inside the bag to see what was happening.

For the first week, Tyler checked the bag every day to find only dirt. He was disappointed, but he held out hope that something would happen.

And something did. When he peeked into the bag on the eighth day, he was thrilled to see small sprouts pushing their way through the soil. Each day thereafter, the lavender plants continued to grow, and so did Tyler’s enthusiasm.

Driving to work each morning after checking on the lavender plants with my son, I felt an overwhelming sense of peace and clarity. It was good to see my son so excited by nature and to be able to teach him. It was nice to remember my own wonder as a child experiencing things for the first time. And it was important to be reminded that at its base, life is as simple as seeds, soil, nurturing, and growth.

Then one day, Tyler asked, “Where did the seeds go?”

Trying to recover from pride in my son’s insightful question and its philosophical magnitude (out of the mouths of babes!), all I could think to say was, “Well, honey, they became what God intended them to be.”

The moment my son asked that question, I felt as if he’d just put into words the essence of my spiritual quest. What seeds has God sown all around me? What has become of them when they hit the soil of my life? Who does God intend for me to be? How might I be more open to transformation?

To hear an interview with author Jeremy Langford, please click here.

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Arthur Paul Boers is an associate professor of Pastoral Theology at Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminary in Elkhart, Indiana. He is the author of several books on prayer. His most recent book is The Way Is Made by Walking: A Pilgrimage Along the Camino de Santiago (Baker Books, 2007). After reading it, Jeannette suggested that our readers might enjoy this conversation as much as she knew she would.

Jeannette Bakke: Arthur, in The Way Is Made by Walking, you describe walking 500 miles “to go to church.” What made you decide to undertake the ancient pilgrimage to the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain?

APB: In 2000, I visited Taizé, Iona, and the Northumbrian Community. As I traveled, I read about pilgrimages and about the Camino de Santiago. It was the third most important pilgrimage route in medieval times, and I learned that it was becoming popular again. After I came home, I found out that somebody I know had walked it, and I read his book. I wondered, “Why would anybody do that?”

Then I read a newspaper article about middle-aged women walking the 500-mile-long Bruce Trail in Ontario. I’d lived most of my life near this trail and decided to walk on it, a day here and there as I was able. I soon discovered it was reorienting me. I was seeing things differently—time moved more slowly when I walked. Days would stretch out. The scenery surprised me. I was stunned by how beautiful it was. Then I noticed that what happened to me was very similar to what happens when I go on retreat. As I walked, I started to recognize where life was off balance. I was reminded of my priorities and made resolutions to live according to them. I became convinced that long-distance walking was a spiritual discipline. Remembering the Christian tradition of pilgrimages, I quickly decided to go to Santiago. And within a couple of years, I did.

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The rite of baptism is a snapshot of the transformation that God seeks to work in us throughout the rest of our Christian lives. In the Christian churches, the rite of baptism is both a rite of entry and an instrument of transformation. But because we are taught that baptism is a one-time act, we may not know how to use this rite fully as the formational help it is intended to be.

I’d like to suggest some ways we can experience our baptism again, intentionally, on a daily basis. As Martin Luther observed, our baptism—however long ago the event—offers “a garment which the disciple is to put on every day, each day putting the old person to death a little more and nurturing the new person toward maturity.”[1] By holding our own baptism regularly before our eyes, by returning again and again to its implications for our lives, we become more fully each day the new person who came to birth by water and the Spirit.

In the words of Michael Green, “the whole of the Christian life in time and in eternity is, in a sense, encapsulated in baptism. The Christian life is a baptismal life, and it is all about dying and rising with Christ, in this world and hereafter.”[2] The rite of baptism initiates us into this baptismal life. It sets out the contours of a transformational process that we are intentionally to engage each day.

In my own spiritual journey, both Scripture and the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer have been equally formative for my understanding of the baptismal life. Scripture provides the primary images and expresses the essential significance of baptism; the liturgy (itself infused with Scripture and sound spiritual counsel) offers a means by which people can grab hold of that significance, begin to live it out, and return to in order to find help for the ongoing journey.

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[2] Michael Green, Baptism. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1987, 50.

Elijah is a stirring figure. His name, which means “Yahweh is my God,” says much about his character. Some of us, like Eugene Peterson, were influenced by Elijah from childhood and youth. Others discovered him later. Either way, he has something vital to give to us.

Elijah teaches us about the undivided heart. He is all about being God’s person, God’s servant, completely obedient to him. This single-minded character is the governing quality of Elijah’s life, and it should be ours as well.

In his book The Jesus Way, one thing that drives Peterson’s discussion of Elijah has to do with worship. Worship, it seems, is one of the ways we may lose focus in our service to God. Distracted by pomp and circumstances, we fall in with false expectations of worship. We think large congregations are more impressive than small ones. We think renowned preachers are more important than simple ones. We plan our worship to impress others and to impress God. Most of all, we fall into ways of manipulating God. We judge the worth of our worship by what we “get from God” rather than how we give ourselves to God. Yes, this is a problem today, but it was also a problem in Elijah’s time. We want to take God captive, to put him in service to our needs and wants, when in fact it should be the other way around. We should be completely surrendered to God, completely attentive to him. That is Elijah’s message. That is the Elijah way.

“You have been born anew, not of perishable but of imperishable
seed, through the living and enduring word of God.”
1 Peter 1: 23, NRSV

“Anyone wishing to save humanity today must first of all save the word.”
Jacque Ellul

At the beginning of time the debar Yahweh, the Word of the Lord, brought the universe crashing into existence. God said, “Let there be light,” and the Big Bang occurred. This ever-living, ever-speaking, ever-creating Word of God is “quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thought and intents of the heart.” As Dallas Willard has put it, God is “our communicating Cosmos.”