Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

TIMES OF YEARNING, PRACTICES OF FAITH

Craig Dykstra and Dorothy C. Bass

I never thought I'd be living this way," she says. "Somehow I imagined that life would be simpler." She has reached forty, and she thinks she should have her life together by now, but things are just not right. Too few evenings include nourishing suppers shared with loved ones; too many are given over to the demands of paid work or housework, or lost to worry and exhaustion. Her closest friends are spread across several time zones. The old neighbors she entrusted with the house key are gone, and she barely knows the new ones. She finds community here and there, and she volunteers to help out as she can, but she is wary about getting too involved. Showing up at a PTA meeting, she has learned, probably means getting stuck with a fundraising assignment, so increasingly she stays away, in spite of her intense concern about her children and all the others. She does not feel right about this. "This is not how I intended to live my life," she sighs, turning from one task to the next.

The sighs of this woman and so many of us today come only in part from having too much to do. Even more, these sighs are born of our yearning to understand what the too-much-to-do adds up to. We long to see our lives whole and to know that they matter. We wonder whether our many activities might ever come together in a way of life that is good for ourselves and others. Does all this activity make a difference beyond ourselves? Are we really living in right relation to other people, to the created world, and to God?

These concerns engulf the unemployed as well as the busy professional, the retiree as well as the young parent, the recent immigrant as well as the lifelong citizen. Lacking a vision of a life-giving way of life, we turn from one task to another, doing as well as we can but feeling increasingly uncertain about what doing things well would look like. All the while, an uneasiness lies just beneath the surface — an uneasiness made of personal restlessness, worry about our loved ones, and apprehension about the well-being of the world.

With this book, we and eleven other authors who have known this uneasiness invite you to join us in envisioning a way of life that is whole, a way of life that can be lived with integrity in our time. We write because we believe that Christian faith offers hope and help to people who long for such a way. Each author is different; we come from a variety of Christian traditions, regions, races, and backgrounds. But we all perceive that the search for how to live aright at this time in history is an extremely urgent one. In all the communities we know, people yearn for deeper understanding of how to order human life in accord with what is true and good. And beyond this desire, we recognize another reason for urgency: the good of all people, indeed of all creation, may depend on our ability to order our lives well.

Life-Giving Ways of Life

A Catholic priest recently told a gathering of friends about a time when he arrived in Israel late on a Friday afternoon, just as everything was about to shut down for the Sabbath. Public transportation was no longer available, and the house where people were expecting him was fifteen miles away. So he picked up his suitcase and started to walk. He did not get far before a family saw him and invited him to spend the Sabbath with them. He accepted their invitation, and they all had a wonderful time. When Saturday evening came, he found his bus and went on his way.

After the priest finished his story, a Jewish friend said that he had had a similar experience while traveling through Spain as a young adult. One night, he got off a train in a village that was already asleep. A little frightened, he approached the only lighted place. It turned out to be a monastery, and the monks received him gladly. After his departure, he discovered that they had quietly slipped some coins into his pocket as he slept.

In both of these stories, we get glimpses of ancient traditions sustaining ways of life that shelter and nourish people, ways of life ready to receive strangers who are passing through. The hospitality these two young men received came from communities structured with hospitality in mind. In each of these places, hospitality was more than an individual act of kindness — it was sustained by a way of life.

What would happen in our society today if young men like these were wandering through? Perhaps they would be fortunate and find a safe place to rest. But they, or others not so different from them, might not. For is there not a crisis of hospitality in our society? It is tragically evident in homelessness and widespread hostility to immigrants. But it affects almost everyone in less noticeable ways as well. A stranger smiles, and we cautiously turn away. In our retreat from hospitality, we find that even friends and relatives sit at our tables less often than they used to.

On Not Going It Alone in a Time of Change

Today, the shared ways of life that sustain hospitality are changing all around us. And change is also affecting the other basic activities we depend on for our well-being. Change touches us in our homes, workplaces, hospitals, and schools; it tests our relationships and shapes our desires, altering our sense of what we can expect from others and what we should expect of ourselves. On the grand scale, change shows up in major technological advances or global shifts in population. But in the end it reaches into the kitchens and bedrooms even of people who rarely travel or use a computer. The basic activities of life are shifting all around us, and we are being pushed in directions we never intended to go.

These shifts have set many people on spiritual journeys, in search of solid ground. But here, too, change complicates matters, for now a dazzling array of religious and therapeutic options is available. It is hard to know what is of value, and harder still to settle into a steady way. So great is the need for insight that people look for it in many places — sometimes, indeed, in many places all at once. What will it be? Eastern meditation or Western psychotherapy, twelve-step groups or self-help books, spiritual retreats or private prayer? Some of us invest our hopes in spiritual journeys that are private and inward looking, only to find that the very same forces that prompted the journey also work against finding nourishment that is rich and enduring. Dislocated and disconnected, we suppose that self- help offers our best hope. Lacking shared beliefs, we conclude that our private preferences are the closest we can come to the truth of matters. When this happens, the solo quest only mimics the disconnectedness that gave it birth.

The fact is that inward journeys are not enough to meet our need. Our lives are tangled up with everyone else's in ways beyond our knowing, "caught," as Martin Luther King Jr. put it, "in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied to a single garment of destiny." The simplest economics teaches this truth about life in the global village. So does the science of clean air and wholesome food. And so do the desires of our hearts: who would wish to eat a feast alone while others starve? And who will not someday find themselves starving — if not for food, then for health or a dearest companion? We need to cooperate if we hope to find not just contented states of mind but ways of living that are good for ourselves and others, nearby and around the world.

Finding Companions

How important it is to have companions as we seek life-giving ways of life! This, after all, is a basic tenet of Christian faith and life: through Christ, we belong to God and become brothers and sisters to one another, sharing Christ's love for all people. Christians know that we are not made to be alone. Yet today we too are uncertain about the shape of our way of life. With the ordinary things we do each day changing all around us, even we who have belonged to the church all our lives wonder how to do these things well — how to do them, in Christian terms, faithfully.

Many Christian people seem to be unaware of the rich insights and strong help the Christian tradition can bring to today's concerns. Hungry, they look elsewhere without ever exploring and appreciating what their own tradition can offer. We write this book in part to answer this hunger with nourishment drawn from the deep wells of Christian history, belief, and experience.

The community of people gathered around Jesus Christ has explored the contours of a faithful way of life over the centuries, and it continues to do so all around the world today. This community, like everyone in it, is flawed, and there has been much stumbling and sinning along the way. But wisdom and skill have also emerged as members of this community have tried to understand and live in response to the mysterious grace of God in creation, the redemptive presence of Christ, and the ongoing work of the Holy Spirit. There is tremendous diversity within this far-flung community's explorations — and that diversity exists also among the authors and the intended readers of this book. But the need to figure out how to walk aright in each new time and place is one that we all share.

In Practicing Our Faith, we invite you to learn from the wisdom of this community by reflecting on Christian practices. Christian practices are things Christian people do together over time in response to and in the light of God's active presence for the life of the world in Christ Jesus. Look at the table of contents, and you will see what sorts of things we mean. Honoring the body. Hospitality. Household economics. Saying yes and saying no. Keeping Sabbath. Testimony. Discernment. Shaping communities. Forgiveness. Healing. Dying well. Singing our lives. These are ordinary activities, the stuff of everyday life. Yet all of them, no matter how mundane, can be shaped in response to God's active presence. And all of them, woven together, suggest the patterns of a faithful Christian way of life for our time.

Practices: A Way of ThinkingAbout a Way of Life

A way of life is a big and often baffling thing. Imagine being set down among a group of people whose way of life is completely unfamiliar to you. It would be nearly impossible to comprehend its meaning all at once, or to see how it all holds together. And so you might try to make sense of it piece by piece: this is how they eat, this is how they trade, this is how they raise their children. Gradually, you would begin to see the patterns of this way of life in the details of how people do a variety of things with and for one another.

This book follows a similar method. Rather than examining a Christian way of life as a whole, we intend to survey some of the most important activities that compose it. One of our reasons for doing this is the same as yours would be on your arrival in an unfamiliar land: things are confusing, and we want to be clear about what is going on. But we have other reasons as well. First, we want to avoid abstractions as much as possible. The changes that are sweeping the world unsettle life at its most basic levels, and we want to offer help directly at this point of need. Second, we are writing this book not for the idly curious but for people who hope to strengthen their own ways of living. Christian practices provide concrete opportunities to do so.

Why call these activities "practices" rather than using a more familiar term or no special term at all? In choosing this word, we are drawing on a concept more familiar to philosophers and social scientists than to most other readers. Even those familiar with it will find that it has a special meaning in this book. We know some explaining will be needed to show its usefulness, but we think the effort is worthwhile. Learning a new term often helps us to think in new ways, even when the things we are thinking about are as old as can be.

Practices address fundamental needs and conditions through concrete human acts. Young men traveling alone do not need to be greeted with a sermon on hospitality. They need to be beckoned inside, given some supper, and shown where to sleep. The hosts may or may not be able to articulate why they do these things, though in fact they are carrying on long traditions rooted in the Bible. They are simply practicing hospitality. And the other practices are like this; they provide concrete help for the flourishing of humanity and the rest of creation. Each is the human place where people cooperate with God in doing what needs to be done.

Practices, therefore, have practical purposes: to heal, to shape communities, to discern. Oddly, however, they are not treasured only for their outcomes. Just taking a full and earnest part in them is somehow good in itself, even when purposes that are visible to the human eye are not achieved. If one patient dies unrelieved in spirit as well as body, do healers abandon the practice when the next patient needs help? No, they do not, for they understand what they do as part of the practice of God. They are doing it not just because it works (though they hope it does) but because it is good. The observable outcome is, in a sense, beyond them; a different satisfaction comes just from taking part.

Practices are done together and over time. Enter a Christian practice, and you will find that you are part of a community that has been doing this thing for centuries — not doing it as well as it should, to be sure, but doing it steadily, in conscious continuity with stories of the Bible and in frequent conversation about how to do it better. You join by jumping in where you are: learning the hymns, volunteering to welcome the homeless, seeking companions who will support you in prayer as you say yes to God and no to the destructive forces in your life. Once in, you find that a practice has a certain internal feel and momentum. It is ancient, and larger than you are; it weaves you together with other people in doing things none of us could do alone. But each practice is also ever new, taking fresh form each day as it subtly adapts to find expression in every neighborhood and land.

Moreover, practices possess standards of excellence. The Christian practice of household economics is not just a matter of adding a warm spiritual glow to the work of homemaking. Instead, it is a matter of permitting the light of God to shine on the work we do and the money we spend, so that we can shape them in response to God's activities in creating and providing for the care and redemption of the earth and all its inhabitants. The challenge lies in figuring out what this means with enough specificity to make a difference. Part of the figuring out requires soul-stretching theological conversations with others: say, an eighteenth-century Quaker accountant, a Catholic worker of the 1930s, and an environmental scientist alive today. With these acquaintances and with people closer at hand, we also turn to the Bible for guidance.

This process is important. Because practices are so spacious and flexible, we need to be prepared to think about what it means to do them well rather than badly. We need to ask, for example, whether our way of life encourages the Christian practice of honoring the human body. Do we recognize God's image in all the human bodies we see, or do we pay exaggerated but shallow obeisance to certain bodies while permitting others to be battered and discarded? Thinking about this practice, most of us would surely discover evidence that our attitudes and behavior do not consistently honor our own bodies or the bodies of others. Instead, prejudice, cruelty, or disregard influence us personally and as a society, and we find ourselves implicitly contradicting God's strong affirmation of human bodies — bodies created in God's image, embraced in the incarnation of Jesus, and promised new life in Jesus' resurrection. Thinking about this practice, or any of the others, can help us see how destructively the basic activities of human life are sometimes organized — globally, in American society, in our churches, and in our homes. This kind of thinking can be painful, but if we are willing to risk further change, it can guide us into renewed ways of life, for our own good and for the good of all.

Finally, when we see some of our ordinary activities as Christian practices, we come to perceive how our daily lives are all tangled up with the things God is doing in the world. Now we want to figure out how to pattern our practices after God's, and it becomes our deepest hope to become partners in God's reconciling love for the world. We are never able to do this perfectly, at least not for any length of time. Even so, when we set ordinary daily activities in this context, they are transformed, and so are we. A meal becomes a time of forgiveness. A day of leisure becomes a day of contemplation. An illness turns into an experience of solidarity with the poor. An occupation becomes a vocation. Giving becomes an expression of gratitude. A burial becomes a time of thanksgiving.

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Excerpted from "Practicing Our Faith"
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