From Abstraction to Practicality
It's not enough to believe Jesus' teachings - we need to put them into practice
Happy… Thursday after Ash Wednesday? We’re in that weird period where Ordinary Time is over but we’re not technically in the “First Week of Lent” territory (see, isn’t Liturgical living so much fun?)
We’re getting close to the end of this series and just before we get into it, I want to give you a heads up that after next week’s newsletter (the last in this series), we’ll be taking a week off to prepare for the following series (which we’re very excited to tell you all about).
If you’re behind at all on this series, you can get caught up here:
Learning to Practice the Way
It was about 11am on a dull, cloudy morning in the spring. I found myself sitting at my kitchen table alone, wrestling (again) with questions about my faith life.
At that time, I had just moved to a new city to take a new job in ministry. But despite the excitement of change, I was deconstructing, struggling to make sense of what was true in the faith I had grown up in and what was just cultural Christianity taken to its ugliest extremes.
I wasn’t really sure where I was headed at that point. I knew with certainty what my life of faith shouldn’t be, but I wasn’t really sure what to build with God in its place.
In the midst of my wrestling, I remembered a podcast I’d heard in a passing reference (on a different podcast of all places). I pulled it up on my phone, clicked on an episode that sounded interesting, and took a walk. Fast forward three months and I had listened to every single episode.
The podcast was called the “John Mark Comer Teachings Podcast,” essentially a collection of sermons on discipleship from an evangelical pastor in Portland. I - like hundreds of thousands of others - found myself profoundly impacted by the things he had to say. It’s not a stretch to say that this podcast, along with my small group and a spiritually and emotionally healthy job in ministry, saved my faith.
My faith life has developed and grown since stumbling on John Mark Comer and the excellent work he’s doing at his non-profit Practicing the Way, but there was one core idea of his that has stuck with me ever since:
It’s not enough to believe the teachings of Jesus in our heads - we need to put them into practice*
I know it seems like a pretty obvious “realization” to come to, but especially as a Catholic, it felt groundbreaking.
Up until that point, I had really bought into the post-Enlightenment understanding of formation, which is built on a key idea:
The human person is essentially a brain on a stick (the chief function of the body is to carry the brain around, in the words of Thomas Edison)
We see this model of formation all over the place (what I call abstraction). Most of what we call “formation” in a Catholic context is really just intellectual or cerebral in nature:
Classroom style courses
Discussion based Bible or faith studies
Conferences where the speaker is the source of formation
Contrast this with an Early Church understanding of catechesis which, while involving some cerebral formation, was largely dependent on embodied actions like feeding the poor, fasting, keeping the Sabbath, and withdrawing to remote places to pray. These actions formed the mind alongside the heart, the spirit, and the body.
A return to this model of formation is sorely needed. So much of the Christian life cannot be taught in a classroom - it must be experienced and practiced. Loving the poor is not something one can do by learning about the poor - they must go and actually spend time among the poor. The rhythms of feasting and fasting are not discovered in a textbook but by living the Liturgical calendar. Prayer is not something one grows in by talking about it but by putting in the hours trying to connect with God.
I’m not saying we need to get rid of teaching - that would be ludicrous. What we do need though is a shift from abstract, classroom based faith to a practical, lived faith - informed by teaching but not consisting solely of it.
Practice
As I’ve written about at length in other places (see recommended reading below), the discipline that really crystallized the importance of practice for me was the discipline of keeping the Sabbath. I think it was key because I desperately needed rest, so the idea of setting aside one day each week for it was not absurd.
Keeping this discipline was joyful and life giving, and served as living proof to myself that spiritual disciplines were worth it. For that reason, our encouragement this week is to:
Try keeping a Sabbath day this week.
Sabbath keeping doesn’t need to be complicated - set aside some time this coming Sunday to devote yourself to resting in God’s presence. A healthy Sabbath should include some individual time of restoration and some time in community, as well as time spent in prayer and time doing things that bring you delight.
The goal here is not just to stop working on Sunday - it’s to give yourself fully to rest, delight, and worship.
Recommended Reading
A super practical article I did for Behold Vancouver on keeping the Sabbath
John Mark Comer’s fantastic book Practicing the Way, where a lot of the ideas in this issue came from
The podcast I referenced earlier (I recommend starting from the oldest episodes to really get a sense of his core message)
Benediction
I’ll leave you with this good word from Psalm 86:11
Teach me your ways, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth; give me an undivided heart to revere your name.
Amen.
That’s all for this issue! We’ll be back next week for our final article in the series, explore moving from Empiricism to the Sacraments.
*This is my summary of John Mark Comer’s excellent work. For a (very worthwhile) deep dive into these ideas, I can’t recommend more his book “Practicing the Way”