Getting Out of the Spiritual Exhaustion Cycle
Walking with Jesus in community - for the long haul
Happy 2nd Week in Ordinary Time and welcome to the VERY FIRST edition of our newsletter: On Becoming Love!
We’ve been thinking and dreaming about this publication for a long time and how to make something that will actually be helpful for you. If you have any thoughts on how we could improve, feel free to respond to this email with your ideas!
With intros out of the way, let’s dive right in!
I started noticing something a few years ago. When I’d ask people how they were doing in their spiritual lives, almost everyone told me that they were experiencing desolation. For one reason or another, following Jesus was not working for them. The one exception to this rule was when I’d talk to people who either:
a) Just had a conversion-type experience,
Or
b) Just came back from some kind of retreat/conference/mission and were on a spiritual high.
I wasn’t exempt from this either - the generally downward trajectory of my spiritual life often left me looking for another “encounter” moment to rejuvenate it.
In other areas of my life (like the Mass for example), I’d struggle deeply to enter in. When I’d look for help, it seemed like the only answers were some variation on “read this book by Scott Hahn” or “watch this Ascension Presents video.” Learning about my faith was helpful, but it didn’t teach me how to immerse my body and soul more deeply into the Liturgy. Something was missing, but it was more than head-knowledge.
I don’t think this experience is uncommon for many Christians, and I wonder: if so many of us struggle with following Jesus, for most of the time, is it possible that we’re getting something wrong?
To make very simplistic work of a very complex problem, I believe that we in the modern West have fallen into a few subtle assumptions about following Jesus that are getting in the way of a truly transformative spiritual life. Here are the seven I think are most common:
Individualism - Following Jesus is something I do on my own, supported by a community
Self Reliance - I carry the weight of “effort” in my walk with God
Radical Traditionalism - The Holy Spirit only works in clearly defined or approved patterns OR
Emotionalism - The Holy Spirit only works in miraculous moments
Proselytism - Evangelizing just means converting others
Abstraction - Faith is about belief in the truth
Empiricism - Faith is primarily concerned with visible realities
As you can see, there’s a lot of truth in these statements, but each contains slight problems. Any combination of these assumptions has the potential to wreak havoc in our walk with God over time.
I believe that there is more on offer in the abundant way of Jesus. When He tells us to repent and believe in the Good News, He actually means that it’s good - too good to pass up on.
Putting it Into Practice
My hope is that at the end of each of these newsletters, we’ll look at some ways to take the concept and put it into practice.
However, it’s one thing to give suggestions on how to live something out, and an entirely different thing to see how concepts are actually being lived out by real people. For that reason, we’ll anchor most of these practices in real examples from the life of our own Catholic, young adult community in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
The practice this week is very simple: have a look over those seven assumptions and see if there are any you find yourself, or your community, falling into.
This is an exercise our community does organically. Being aware not only of the strengths of our approach to following Jesus, but also the weaknesses, allows us to be open to where the Lord may want to lead us. Discussing these weaknesses on a regular basis and being aware of them helps us grow - if you want to be holy, know yourself.
Deeper Dive
If you’re curious about any of these ideas, here are some resources we recommend for a closer look.
The book The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer
This article from The Atlantic by David C Brooks: The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake
This article from Behold Vancouver: Learning the Practice of Staying in Love With God
Benediction
To close, I want to share with you this good word (from the Latin, bene = well, dicere = say, literally “to speak well of”) written by Catherine Henry, a member of our Becoming Love team. If you’d like, you can take this word with you into the week and pray with it as you consider how your journey of following Jesus is going.
Most Holy Trinity,
in the perfection of your love enlighten and come into the depths of my weaknesses.
Reveal to me the ways I allow daily chaos and rigidness to create gaps in my unity with you, Jesus.
As you reveal these Lord, help me to not feel overwhelmed by my weaknesses.
Rather, place in me a steady conviction to take the next small step closer to You.
Lord, lift this burden of spiritual exhaustion
and replace it with the delight and peace of your presence.
Amen.
Thank you so much for joining us! Next week, we’ll explore the first of these assumptions and try to understand how to move from individualism to community.
God Bless,
James Pereira