Spiritual Formation: Following the Movements of the Spirit
by Henri J. M. Nouwen
Henri Nouwen, the world-renowned spiritual guide and counselor, understood the spiritual life as a journey of faith and transformation that is deepened by accountability, community, and relationships. Though he counseled many people during his lifetime, his principles of spiritual formation were never written down. Now, Michael Christensen, one of Nouwen's longtime students, and Rebecca Laird have taken his famous course in spiritual formation and supplemented it with his unpublished writings to create the definitive series on Nouwen's thoughts on the Christian life.
From Opaqueness to Transparency
The Empty Teacup
There is a story about a university professor who came to a Zen master to ask him about Zen. Nan-in, the Zen master, served him tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full and then kept pouring. The professor watched the overflow until he could no longer restrain himself. "It is over-full. No more will go in!" "Like this cup," Nan-in said, "you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I teach you Zen unless you first empty your cup?"
-101 Zen stories, a 1919 compilation of Zen koans from the Meiji era (1868 – 1912) in Japan
Spiritual formation begins with the gradual and often painful discovery of God’s incomprehensibility in the face of life’s great mysteries and limitations. We might be competent in many subjects, but we cannot become an expert in the things of God. God is greater than our minds and cannot be caught within the boundaries of our finite concepts. Thus, spiritual formation leads not to a proud understanding of divinity, but to a docta ignorantia, an "articulate not-knowing."
God Cannot Be Contained
God cannot be "caught" or "comprehended" in any specific idea, concept, opinion, or conviction. God cannot be defined by any specific emotion or spiritual sensation. God cannot be identified with good feelings, right intentions, spiritual fervor, generosity of spirit, or unconditional love. All these experiences may remind us of God’s presence, but their absence does not prove God’s absence. God is greater than our minds and greater than our hearts, and just as we have to avoid the temptation of adapting God to our finite small concepts, we have to avoid adapting God to our limited small feelings.
This is a difficult reality to accept in a culture that suggests we are trained to master a subject, define all knowledge, and control our destinies. Doctors, lawyers, and psychologists study to become qualified professionals who are paid to know what to do. A well-trained theologian or minister is only able to point out the universal tendency to narrow God down to our own little conceptions and expectations, and to call for an open mind and hearty for God to be revealed.
How then are we, like the professor in the parable, to seek this incomprehensible God? When we are willing to empty our cup and detach ourselves from making our individual experience the criterion for our approach to others, we may be able to see that life is greater than our personal life, history is greater than our family history, experience greater than our own experience, and God greater than our god.
Both theological reflection and spiritual formation require an articulate not-knowingness and a receptive emptiness through which God can be revealed. Just as theology asks us to empty our cup so that we can open our mind to the incomprehensible things of God, spirituality asks us to empty our mind so we can open our heart to receive life as a gift to be lived. Even more than our mind, it is our heart that needs to become empty enough for the Spirit to enter and fill it. This process of self-emptying and spirit filling is called spiritual formation – the gradual development of the heart of God in the life of a human being, aided by contemplative prayer, inclusive community, and compassionate ministry.
Contemplative Prayer Makes the Clouded Clear
For those who pray from the heart, the world loses its opaqueness and becomes transparent: that is, the world of experience starts pointing beyond itself to the luminous Source of wisdom and understanding, to the translucent realm of the Spirit of God. To contemplate is to see, to make visible that which is hidden from ordinary sight.
Evagrius Ponticus, one of the Desert Fathers who had great influence on monastic spirituality in the East and West, calls contemplation a theoria physike, which means a vision (theoria) of the real nature of things (physike). The contemplative is someone who sees things for what they really are, who sees the real connections of how things hang together, who knows – as Thomas Merton used to say – "what the scoop is." To attain such a vision, spiritual discipline is necessary. Evagrius calls this discipline the praktike - the taking away of the blindfolds that prevent us from seeing clearly. Merton, who was very familiar with Evagrius’s teaching, expressed the same idea when he said that the contemplative life is a life in which we constantly move from opaqueness to transparency, from the place where things are dark, thick, impenetrable, and closed to the place where the same things are translucent, open, and offer vision far beyond themselves.
The practice of conemtplatice prayer reveals to us the true nature of things; it unmasks the illusion of control, the possessiveness of possessions, and the pretense of the false self. For those who practice contemplative prayer, the world (mundus) no longer is opaque or dark bus has become new and transparent – the "new earth" shining with its inherent character. To live spiritually in the world is to unmask the illusion, dispel the darkness, and walk in the light.