The Slow Way: On Increasing and Deepening "Our Capacity for God"
If we don’t have a harmful view of ourselves, what tips us toward the divine? How do young people prioritize connection with God outside of fear?
“...the world fears a new experience more than anything. Because a new experience displaces so many old experiences.” - DH Lawrence
In my first book Found, I wrote a bit about the fear I lived with as a highly sensitive little girl in a religious environment that pushed constantly for correct belief and the hell-bound reality of our sinful hearts. “Surely I was sinful at birth,” I was taught. “The heart is deceitful above all things.”
I sat through endless sermons that defined salvation as a one-time (if done correctly) statement of belief through a specific prayer, which included a request for forgiveness and carried within it a true desire for a life-long commitment to Jesus. This is what it meant to be okay, even good. But if we got it wrong—whether through inauthentic motives, lack of belief, or (my biggest fear) saying the wrong words—we might be stuck with our deceitful hearts, which would lead to eternal separation from God.
Much has been written about child development and how much damage those early narratives of inner-evil and salvation-performance can do to our human need to feel safe and secure. (There’s a reason for my generations’ social-religious experiment of “deconstruction”.)
When I was a child, longing to be received by Jesus despite my deceitful heart, I experienced terrifying hallucinations at night in the dark, when my bed would change from cozy to sharp, and I would feel stuck and alone in a bed of spikes. I remember crying and praying that the bed would turn back, that Satan would leave me alone, that I would be okay.
I was taught to understand God’s love as existing only in spite of my sinfulness and core-darkness. I literally sat under teaching when I was in high school that told me my heart was a cesspool. I was disgusting all the way through. But God loved me anyway, and my decision to turn to God was the result of recognizing that the only good that could ever live in me would come from God loving me anyway.
No one taught me these things to harm me. In fact, just about everyone who taught me these ideas did so from a place of love. In my community of faith, everyone believed this. I was simply one of the sensitive souls who took it seriously, who lived to love God and for God to love them back. I’m not sure how this theology cannot teach a person to carry a specific kind of hatred for themselves. Believing I was an inner cesspool in the eyes of God gave me the secret path into God’s love. And I so deeply wanted that love.
I’ve had this question in my mind for a while, especially as I’ve come to know and love the students in my youth group. I long for them to have a vibrant connection with God that exists outside of shame and guilt. I now believe (and teach often about) original blessing, not original sin. (I prefer to call it original goodness.) And while I still subscribe to the notion of sin, I see it as anything in our lives—whether systems we allow ourselves to live within, or choices we make—that cuts against the grain of love. Sin is something we all participate in, an airborne virus we breathe into ourselves, something we need freedom from and transformation out of. But I don’t believe that I’m disgusting in my core, and I’ve vowed to reject any form of religion or give my children any faith that tells them they are worthless. I don’t want my kids or the students I pastor to see themselves as evil but loved anyway. And I don’t believe that’s how God sees us.
I’ve sought to teach them how to connect with God without the baggage of prescriptive or guilt-ridden dos and don’ts.
But here’s the thing: I’ve been wondering if that’s enough. I sometimes feel like I’m teaching my own children and the teenagers under my care from scratch. Yes, I hold a different theology than I was raised in. Yes, I know what I believe about humanity and sin. But also? I honestly don’t always know how to disconnect the feelings of desperation I had as a child from my pursuit of God’s presence. I long for the young people I love to encounter Holy Spirit in their days, to seek the comfort and wisdom of the loving presence of God. And I can teach about spiritual practices, (y'all know I love them) but practices came later for me as a teenager. What came first was the desperate sense that I needed to be saved. If we don’t have a harmful view of ourselves, what tips us toward the divine? How do young people prioritize connection with God outside of fear?
I’ve spent years unraveling the junk from the goodness in my own faith. But the truth is I’m not really sure how to help guide kids into connection without the old forms I depended on in my evangelical path.
I can teach kids all day long about ways to pray. I can preach about the incredible wisdom and paradigm-shifting teaching of Jesus (“You’ve heard it said, but I say…”). I can encourage them to serve an aching world. But as the Apostle Paul wrote: “The written letters alone will bring death, but the Spirit gives life.” We don’t come to the presence of God by doing spiritual practices. Practices transform us only after something unknowable awakens in us toward the divine. Holy Spirit gives life, the rest of it—prayer, scripture, acts of service, when taken alone—is lacking. What does that mean?
I’m reading Richard Rohr’s book Things Hidden, a book from way back in 2008. I picked it up because I wanted to know what Rohr has to say about scripture. (The subtitle is Scripture as Spirituality.) He’s thinking about what it actually means to experience God within the scripture, without elevating the biblical writings above the work of the Spirit. “I know there were times when all of us have wished the Bible were some kind of ‘seven habits for highly effective people.’ Just give us the right conclusions, we’ve thought…But the genius of the biblical revelation is that it doesn’t just give us the conclusions; it gives us (1) the process of getting there, and (2) the inner and outer authority to trust the process” (11).
Rohr compares this to the work of developing an inner life with God. Here’s how he describes the transformation of how God is understood from the Old Testament and into the revelation of the Risen Christ: “...it is not that God has changed, or that the Hebrew God is a different God than the God of Jesus, it is that we are growing up as we move through the texts and deepen our experience. God does not change, but our readiness for such a God takes a long time to change. Stay with the text and with your inner life with God, and your capacity for God will increase and deepen” (12).
Our capacity for God will increase and deepen. This is what I’ve been trying to get my head around. I long for my young people to increase and deepen in their capacity for God.
I do believe God reveals Godself to some of us. I believe this because it’s been the case in my life. But how? And why? Do I believe that there is some sort of choice God is making to flashbang into some of our lives and not others? Or are we the ones who make ourselves available to the Spirit’s presence?
I first came to the Presence out of fear and desperation for my own inner-depravity. And I actually believe that it's the very Presence that gave me the wisdom to eventually tear that script up: (“You’ve heard it said, but I say…”) And I want my students in the youth group, and my own children to come to the Spirit to have their scripts ripped to pieces as well.
Here’s what Rohr says: “God always and forever comes as one who is totally hidden and yet perfectly revealed in the same moment or event. It is never forced on you, and you do not have to see it if you don’t want to.”
Then he says that the Bible moves us from one form of revelation to another: From sacred place to sacred action, to mental belief systems, to finally, sacred time. “It is time itself, and patience with it, which reveals the patterns of grace, which is why it takes most of us a long time to be converted. . . Jesus will often call it ‘vigilance’, ‘seeing’ or ‘being awake’” (15).
I’ve am working out how to offer the young people I love a vibrant faith that insists on their own goodness, their own original spark, and I am still fumbling a bit to give them language for encountering God. I believe that the long-way of conversion is a good way. And that Jesus’s invitation to move toward wholeness is the kind of faith I want for the kids I love.
I’m not sure if there’s an answer to these questions, but I do believe that for all of us who are reconstructing our faith with courage and great hope, we have to do so with the understanding that the ones who come after us will carry the scripts we give them.
What will spark in them the capacity for the divine? What will invite them to a God who delights in them, who has made them good, who invites them to a life of seeing the hope of all things being made new?
A Slow Practice
What are the scripts you carry inside you?
I had a casual conversation with my friend Stephanie and one of my youth group students this past Wednesday after a friend’s concert about the gift of journaling, and how Stephanie has found freedom in Julia Cameron’s idea of “morning pages” (a commitment to writing three pages of anything first thing in the morning). The middle school aged girl we chatted with is a singer, a performer through and through, and we were encouraging her that if she wants to write her own songs, she has to just start writing all the embarrassing stuff first. Get it all down without judging herself. Give herself freedom to just write.
I wonder if we could give ourselves freedom to write this week, whether we consider ourselves writers or not. I wonder if we can be honest about the scripts we carry inside us, whether theology that might be harmful, or beliefs about ourselves that aren’t good or life-giving.
Here’s our practice:
I’m taking from Julia Cameron’s transformative book on the creative process called “The Artist’s Way.” We’re doing morning pages this week. Hopefully, you have access to some beautiful early summer weather, and take some time to sit outside and journal this week.
You are committing to three written pages of whatever comes to mind each day. It can literally be about what you did yesterday, what you’re worried about, or what chores or on your mind. It can also be what you’re feeling and working through.
It doesn’t have to be prayer. But if you’d like it to be, by all means go there.
It might help you to commit the time to God before you start, by praying something like this:
Breathe in: I am here.
Breathe out: You are with me.
Then write. After you fill three pages, you can come back to prayer. (Even if your pages had nothing to do with your spiritual life!)
Breathe in: I am loved and good.
Breathe out: You love me.
I really do believe that what rises to the surface for you in these pages will bring you to insight and creativity. And I hope that we can all commit to this practice each morning this week. Which, I’m pretty sure, is one way in which “our capacity for God will increase and deepen.”
A List of Things:
The Slow Way Podcast is about to celebrate its 100th episode! Do you want to help me celebrate? I’m looking for stories from YOU about what The Slow Way means to you. Here’s how to help! Record a video or voice memo of you sharing one or more of the following:
Where do you listen to The Slow Way?
How do you use the Slow Practices?
How has The Slow Way mattered in your life?
Send your voice memos to michaboyett@gmail.com and you might be included in my 100th episode!
This week I had the chance to be a guest writer over at Pete Enns’ substack Odds & Enns. I wrote about the notion of blessing and how my thinking has transformed when it comes to what it means to “be blessed” in a harsh world… “about wholeness that arrives when our stories aren’t perfect, wholeness that shows up in our limits, wholeness that is built on longings for a good and just world.” If you’re here because you read that piece, hi. I’m so glad to see you.
Also, this week MY FAVORITE interview of all the interviews went up this week at my dear friend and writing partner Erin S. Lane’s substack. It’s called “blessed are the achey” and you can read it here. And if you’re here because she sent you, hi. I’m also glad to see you.
There were a couple more podcast episodes that dropped this week. Tune into Spark My Muse with Lisa Colón Delay. She is a kindred who writes and podcasts about spiritual practices. I loved this conversation! You can also find my interview at Counsel for Life, where I talk with Eliza Huie and Beth Broom about my book from the perspective of their commitment to “mental health and the Christian life”.
Just a reminder that Amazon reviews make a big difference long term for the sales of my new book, Blessed Are The Rest of Us. Leaving a review is a way you can show your appreciation for my work, a way that means A WHOLE LOT to me. Click here to leave a review!
And as always, a reminder that Blessed Are The Rest of Us is available at 40% off the price of other booksellers at Baker Bookhouse. Just use the code SLOWWAY at checkout.