Learning to Work Without a Net

I suppose I’ve not yet wanted to come to terms with the fact that my Two Year Academy for Spiritual Formation experience has come to a close. I really think that I’ve been in denial for the last three weeks, hence the dearth of posting to this blog. For the first time in two years I’m facing my daily spiritual practices without the safety net of another week at the Academy coming up in just a matter of weeks. That glorious discipline is over. I now have to face my day to day practice without the comfort that comes from knowing that I will soon be immersed again in the beautiful and transformational experience of worship, Eucharist, covenant groups, learning, silence and spiritual friendships.

This is a day and a prospect I’ve tried to avoid. Being the creature of habit that I am, I’ve dreaded this day. I love the routine and I love the accountability that was both implicit and explicit in the pattern of the Academy. The depth and breadth of this accountability is something that I’m just now coming to realize. This has not just been a series of self-contained warm, fuzzy experiences of an amorphous and undirected love. Throughout the Academy experience there has been a strong (but not overbearing) expectation that the participants will grow in grace moving more deeply into our relationship with Christ and the setting in place of patterns of worship, practice and service that will continue to grow us all in grace and experience of the Risen Christ. In fact, even though much of the experience of the last two years was about developing a series of practices that will enable my ongoing spiritual growth and growth in grace, the goal was not simply the development of a set of rote practices…bullet points of self-imposed expectations that could very easily lose their luster, fade over time and become irrelevant as circumstances change. The Academy experience was not simply one of practice, but of heart, life and motivation. It was about a change of identity.

What I’ve discovered in these three weeks as I’ve tried to process this transition in my life is that my motivation for my faith, my life and my ministry is changing. I’m more deeply motivated by living faithfully in my relationship with Christ than I am in being professionally proficient. I understand a new relationship between these two vital parts of living under orders within the Body of Christ. While I’ve interpreted that professional proficiency is what is required of me (and that is not inherently bad, merely incomplete), the pathway to professional proficiency as a clergy person isn’t about academic training. It isn’t about institutional maintenance. I’m not called simply to turnout a conveyor of good church folks. In line with all those called by Christ who have gone before me, my call is to make disciples for Christ. This is not an academic or institutional enterprise…it is a spiritual endeavor. Without living into and out of a perfecting spirituality the goal of professional proficiency will remain a caricature of who I am called to be. What the Academy has nurtured within me is the experience that teaches me that what Christ is doing deep within my life is of first priority and that spiritual skills and practices will always be stunted until they flow out of my experience with Christ.