The Slow Way: Deepening Into a Discoverable God

God is discoverable. And prayer is an unfolding, lifelong journey into that discovery.

for the frantic strivers, serial doers, and weary achievers

At some point in the past month, I discovered a beautiful quote from Ronald V. Wells somewhere in a book. (What book? Don’t know. Who can remember these things?) That quote led me on a search through the Google machine for Wells, which led me eventually to his book,  published in the early eighties, which arrived from my favorite used online bookstore straight into my mailbox. I love finding gems like Spiritual Disciplines for Everyday Living, a book about cultivating a spiritual life. In it, Wells insists from the beginning that all spiritual practice is based on the hypothesis that “the universe and God are discoverable.” 

Discoverable. 

I’ve been ruminating on this word this week. What does it mean to believe that God is discoverable? Wells calls this a necessary hypothesis: “I will live as though God is real and it is possible for persons like me to experience the Divine presence, not once but often when the practice of the presence of God becomes my lifestyle.” 

In other words, the spiritual life has to begin with a premise that God can be experienced, encountered. Starting from here is harder than it seems. Faith is not an unmovable feature inside us. It is less a mountain, and more an ocean, always moving, sometimes deep, sometimes shallow. Sometimes the places on the shore the water used to reach are now dried up. But the work of the spiritual life is to receive that constant shifting, not as failure of belief, but as part of the process. 

In Wells' book he begins by considering what prayer is. And he quotes Evelyn Underhill (also a new name to me!) who wrote in her book The School of Charity: “We pray first because we believe something...and with the deepening of prayer, its patient cultivation, there comes–perhaps slowly, perhaps suddenly–the enrichment and enlargement of belief, as we enter into a first-hand communion with the Reality who is the object of our faith. 

Prayer enlarges our belief, deepens it, she’s saying. Prayer is the act of cultivating our faith. Underhill was writing about faith as a process, one in which we move through varying levels of belief. Beginning with a vague “something” when it comes to trusting in the presence of God, and slowly over time and practice, experiencing how that faith deepens. 

I think this idea is significant and has been missed in much of the American evangelical church, which, in my experience, has most often defined faith as the act of subscribing to a set of intellectual beliefs as the prerequisite for belonging. There are a lot of problems with the idea of faith as a mental exercise or intellectual agreement. First, it assumes that every intellect is able to subscribe to ideas. If Christianity is only mentally agreeing with a creed, then the spiritual experience becomes limited to only those with a certain kind of intelligence. Does that mean that those who live with intellectual disability, dementia, or mental illness can’t experience full-connection with the Divine? When we limit faith to the mind we’re making that claim.  Faith has to run deeper than the intellect, not only because our intelligence is not the thing that determines our humanity, but also because if the spiritual life only exists in the mind, it only takes a few hard realities of life that don’t line up with our understanding of doctrine, or the unraveling of a couple of threads of ideas, for our spirituality to fall short of our experience of the world. 

Wells describes the work of faith as moving from information to experiential knowledge. I love this phrase: experiential knowledge. Faith has to move from the mind into the body in order to survive, because faith can never be proved intellectually, it can only be known, experienced.. 

I wonder if the massive amount of young people leaving evangelical Christianity and working through the “deconstruction” of their faith is a result of the Church’s failure of imagination. For the past forty years evangelical Christianity has been defining faith as a set of beliefs that must be subscribed to, checked off, and committed to. If faith is only a set of official ideas that must be agreed with in the mind, it doesn’t stand. Eventually, one of the big ideas fails to be true in an individual’s life, and the whole building collapses. 

Life is too complicated. It’s messy. The problem of evil busts through the side door of our neatly constructed ideas. The black and white of traditional thinking about sexuality falls apart once you care about someone who doesn’t fit those binaries. The promise that if you follow the rules God will give you joy collapses when you’re the one walking through the tunnel of depression, or the one sitting at the side of a loved one who is dying too soon. 

As Wells says, “Too long we have reduced religious awakening to a one-time conversion experience with the implication that this once-and-for-all glorious event was the sum total of what it means to become religious or spiritual. The result is that many persons, having experienced a deep personal commitment to God and Christ, are left without any continuing guidance or nourishment, to drift into dutiful, religious observance.” The one-time event of conversion, the mental check-list of necessary doctrinal statements, these aren’t wrong. They’re just not enough. To rest the whole story of God on these things is to live in shallow waters. Waters that might easily dry up as soon as the weather changes. 

So what is faith?

Wells says it’s a commitment to life-long pilgrimage, a willingness to walk through various terrain, sometimes rugged and despairing, sometimes exhilarating. It’s living with the scriptures until they become the “engrafted word.” It’s becoming “singly intentioned,” or as Thomas Kelly called it, to learn to “center down” into the presence of God.

Twenty years ago, my faith as I understood it began to falter. I was disappointed in the faith tradition I’d been raised in. I began to see the cracks in the lives of the pastors and leaders who led my tradition. I begin to see how the system of faith I’d been handed wasn’t protecting my friends from pain, or devastating life-mistakes, or sorrow. And I began to have a gut-knowledge that many of the issues I’d been given dualistic answers to were much more complicated than I had imagined. The world and the experiences of people were much bigger than simplistic right and wrong answers had prepared me for.

In other words, what caused the crisis in my intellectual ascription to ideas around faith was the Church itself, not the temptations of a secular culture, or some notion of science as anti-spirituality. My faith as I knew it began to unravel simply because the humans who made the rules that defined faith failed to be perfect, and life failed to pan out in the way their teaching said it would. Twenty years ago, when doubt creeped into just every intellectual claim I’d staked my Christianity upon, my faith was rescued. Not by certainty. Not by a well-oiled argument. I was rescued by pilgrimage, experience, practice. 

I had known enough of the presence of the Spirit in my young life of faith, that it had settled deeper in me than my mind. So even when my brain began to reject certain ideas, my body remembered the Presence of God. My body saved my faith.

There is something significant in this conversation that I’m still sorting through. But I’m wondering if it begins here: in bringing faith from the head into the body, a process Wells calls moving from “reflection into practice.” 

And maybe that’s why I started this newsletter in the first place, because I desperately want to give words to the process of Christian spirituality as pilgrimage, as an unfolding that deepens us. Because the Christian faith is not compelling (and I’d go so far to say it’s heretical) if it is simply a lens for thinking about political ideas, some distorted Christian nationalism, or a dualistic belief system in which the good guys are in and the bad guys are out. 

When we think of faith as practice we move beyond ideas into spiritual connection. Our lives become lived with God, deepening beyond the intellect. And when that with-God-ness settles in the places that can’t be touched by the arguments or proofs or certainties of those who believe or don’t believe, there becomes room for knowing and resting in Reality.

And if the Church is going to survive, if we as individuals are going to cultivate a spiritual life that flourishes, maybe it comes back to Wells’ original premise: God is discoverable. And prayer is an unfolding, a lifelong journey into that discovery. 

To live inside that kind of faith, we learn to surrender our control. We practice showing up, over and over, asking God to be discoverable, not simply in our minds, but in our bodies, in our moments and daily tasks, in our relationships and connections, in our suffering and in our hope. 

A Slow Practice

I am so drawn to two of the big ideas I mentioned above. One is Wells’ phrase: becoming “singly intentioned” in our spiritual lives. The other is the phrase that came from Thomas Kelly: that we can “center down” into the presence of the Divine.

Can we practice those ideas today? I want to keep our practice simple, and give us a chance to consider how the spiritual life can live outside of the mind. So today, let’s use our bodies in prayer. Can you make some space and time for a walk? A walk without music or podcasts in your ears! (I know. Hard.) And as you move, pay attention to your breath. 

Sometimes words aren’t the thing we need in prayer. Sometimes we need connection that comes only through movement. As you walk and breathe, welcome God’s Spirit to your body. If you need words to help you connect you can pray something like: Here I am, Spirit. Come close. 

It’s good and right to let go of our need to control prayer by using the “correct” language. Sometimes when we give our bodies permission to experience God in all that’s happening in the silence, we make more space for connection. 

Here I am, Spirit. Come close. 

Allow yourself to walk and move in the silence. Spiritual unfolding often happens in the moments we don’t feel anything at all. So try to let go of your expectations, and allow yourself to be reminded that your life, your breath, comes from the One who is Love. Love is discoverable. Love is here.

Oh, and also . . .

• Just a reminder that my List of Things is now a separate email for paid-subscribers only. I’m calling it The Slow Seven, and its first installment will be out this Wednesday! If you’re interested in subscribing, you can sign up here. 

• I’ll be preaching tomorrow at my church, Good Shepherd New York, and you can stream the digital service here tomorrow, anytime after 11 am Eastern Time. 

• Will you think about leaving a comment below?! Sometimes my newsletters feel half-baked, like I need to keep the conversation going. I feel that way today. I’d love to know what you think, and what it means to you for spirituality to live in the body as opposed to the mind.