Hell Breaking Apart at His Feet

Last week’s post talked about my love for the Christian classics. My book, Thirsting for God, is basically a compilation of the many lessons I’ve learned from reading the classics, and so for the next couple of weeks, I want to excerpt from that book to give you a feel for some of these lessons.

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As I sought to develop a goal, I wanted to particularly avoid falling into the exclusive “just God and me” mentality. We have seen that authentic spirituality leads us to seek the good of others. Unfortunately, we often ask, how can I become holy? How can I grow? How can I reach an advanced spiritual state? These questions may reveal that we are simply sugarcoating an unhealthy selfish preoccupation. Spiritual advancement is a good aim, but on its own it seems radically unlike the primary focus of Jesus, who told the story of the good Samaritan and said we should love our neighbors and make disciples of all nations.

This, of course, opens the door to a centuries-old argument about the way of action versus the way of contemplation. For hundreds of years, monks argued which was superior—to be devoted to prayer or to be involved in active work outside the monastery. Not surprisingly, most monks believed the superior life was a quiet life devoted to seclusion and contemplation. Thus grew the concept of forsaking the world to go into the desert or establish a monastery.

If we take Jesus as our model, we see that we don’t have to choose one or the other. Jesus was active, though not prematurely so. He waited until He was 30 to begin His public ministry. And when He became active, He never lost His spiritual center. He regularly retreated into solitude and prayer.

Jesus’s life, then, provided the first clue for my goal—contemplation (prayer, meditation, time alone with God) balanced with public ministry (teaching, healing, ministering to the poor). The two are not set against each other but joined together in a cooperative effort.