God’s Spirit is continually challenging, changing, and maturing us. Although we may be able to point to a single and decisive conversion experience, remaining faithful involves a journey of continual conversion. It can never be said in our lifetime that we have “arrived.” The spiritual life invites a process of transformation in the life of a believer. It is a process of growing in gratitude, trust, obedience, humility, compassion, service, and joy. — Marjorie J. Thompson1
I am a busy person. I don’t say this to complain; I love the work I do and the role I get to play in sharing mysticism with others. I love hanging out with friends, traveling with my life partner, and investing in the simple pleasures like taking walks or listening to music or reading a good book. There are many things I could say about my life, both good and bad, but one thing is for sure: I am not bored.
In her wonderful, invitational book on the spiritual life, Soul Feast, Presbyterian minister and spiritual director Marjorie J. Thompson offers a full description of the spiritual life as a transformational process. She lists seven dimensions of this process, qualities that the Spirit calls us to cultivate in our lives:
Gratitude, a sense of appreciation and thanksgiving for whatever life throws our way;
Trust, a letting-go of anxious control and a discovery that the Spirit does provide for us;
Obedience, or deep listening, where we offer our will to the guidance of the Divine Will;
Humility, a down-to-earth quality of gentle humor and self-forgetfulness as we live in simplicity;
Compassion, a heart calibrated toward empathy and care rather than indifference and defensiveness;
Service, an impulse to generosity and helpfulness, especially to those in need; and finally,
Joy — which, if you have been reading me for a while, you know is a quality I believe most spiritual seekers (really, most people in general) tend to be deficient in.
I love this list, and I can think of even more qualities to add to it: silence, mindfulness, hospitality, awe, reverence, stillness, and wonder. Spirituality, after all, is about life — life encompassing the totality of the human experience — so perhaps even suffering, grieving, doubt, and (righteous) anger have their place on this “to-do list” of spiritual growth.
Do you see where I am going with all this?
These spiritual to-do’s seem to bring us blessings (and hopefully can contribute to that joy we all seem to need more of). But if we consider the entire list, and begin to see it as, in fact, a task list, the promise of joy gets a little wobbly and it all begins to feel rather overwhelming.
So we need a bit of balance here. Yes, there are lots of life-giving qualities available to us as spiritual seekers. But there’s also a need to live slowly, intentionally, and at a “human” pace. We don’t have to have spirituality or mysticism all figured out and tied up in a neat bow by this time next year.
The spiritual life is an invitation into the cathedral of time, the spaciousness of eternity. We can take our time as we seek to respond to the invitations and challenges that the Spirit brings us. Because spirituality is about love, even deeper than joy: and when we’re in love, we have nowhere we need to be, nothing we must attain. We simply live in love. Which, come to think of it, might be the most direct route to joy after all.
Marjorie J. Thompson, Soul Feast, Newly Revised Edition: An Invitation to the Christian Spiritual Life, Kindle Edition.