Spiritual formation: my so-called life.

September 26, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

A professor at PLTS years ago said that “integrity means your whole life is made from one piece of cloth.” His thought stuck with me. I suppose because at that particular moment I was living a double life: a Lutheran seminary student struggling to keep up with graduate studies and two part-time jobs, and a lonely, emerging gay man trying to understand myself. Looking back at the two lives I was living, I really needed to know what happened that put me in such straits.

If life should be “knit from one piece of cloth,” it is not to be a patchwork of whatever scraps we have on hand, to put our so-called lives together.

Easier said than done. How does one put together a life? It is not like, at the outset, we can design the kind of human being we intend to become. Infants are 100% dependent upon adults. Children are impressionable. I was impressionable as a tot. So were you. Life impressed us, but it was the life we were actually living that made the dents, the impressions, day after day, not the life that we shoulda/coulda/woulda lived.

Some people can honestly blame their parents, their dysfunctional environments and upbringing and catastrophic experiences that warped them, twisted them or shaped them into what they are as adults. But many of us blame, to some degree, just because it’s a way of blowing off or deflecting self-criticism. “It was my hard, unforgiving dad. It was my alcoholic mother. They made me screwed up.” Yada yada ya.

The truth is that all of us have many opportunities for mid-course corrections. We have many chances to look inside and see if we are the people we wanted to be, or the people that we could be if we’d stop making excuses for our own failures or weaknesses.

Then we can blame the culture, if we need to blame something. Our times and our culture do not encourage reflection or inner maturity of any kind. In our culture, we are merely “customers” or “consumers” (to those who have something to sell to us), we are “constituents” or voters (to politicians who have something to sell to us), we are “unchurched” or “prospects” (to preachers who have something to sell to us), and we are “clients” (to lawyers, estate planners and undertakers who have something to sell to us). I could have a lot of fun playing out those metaphors even more.  The culture as a whole is trying very hard to get control of impressionable people, if we allow it to define us.

But the point is we can’t look to pop culture, celebrities, the media, elected officials, or even most religious gurus to help us define ourselves, re-invent ourselves or even understand who we really are inside. We have to look to ourselves.

I quoted Jesus (from John 3:7) a couple of days ago: “Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’” Spiritual re-birth is the process of starting over from the inside out, so that our lives have the integrity we cannot have otherwise.

Spiritual growth is a uniquely personal thing. Not private. Not lonely: We don’t go it alone, because after all the Spirit of God is with us in the process of spiritual growth. The indwelling spirit works within and upon our own spirits to re-form us (reform us), to re-weave our lives as if from one piece of cloth.

But spiritual growth is personal and unique for each of us. It is the one thing about life for which we must accept full responsibility. If we have outlived the failures and the foibles of our parents, our upbringing and all the damage that adolescent peers have inflicted on us, we still have this incredible opportunity before us, like an open door, to change. To become. To grow. To seek integrity and to live it out.

God is with us. I am not talking about religious practices and customs. I am talking about deeply personal and interior growth, in that place in the human heart where God really dwells and works with us to become the people we are meant to be. You can do it. God help you.

— Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

Posted in Spirituality, Recovery, Coming Out | Print | No Comments »