Jesus Brand Spirituality

Sample Chapter

For centuries, we’ve specialized in breaking things down to manageable units to aid our understanding—the body into separate systems, matter into its constituent parts, successful relationships into ten quality characteristics. We’ve ground things into a pretty fine dust to measure and weigh and otherwise examine; but the magic, the mystery, the wonder of life is found in the connections. We’re better at taking things apart than putting them back together.

For too long, the active and the contemplative dimensions of spirituality have been viewed in isolation from each other, distorting both. Practitioners have tended to specialize in one or the other. But Jesus combined both in his own person. He was an activist, a man with a message on a mission, working to make the world a better place. But he was also a contemplative with an inner life marked by a deep awareness of God that connected him with others and all living things.

“Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed” (Mark 1:35). This wasn’t the beginning of a day of retreat from the world, but a day of active engagement as Jesus traveled to villages throughout Galilee, spreading his message and resisting evil.

Jesus brand spirituality connects us to God, one another, and all living things. The emotive aspects of that connection—the warm, loving, and powerful feelings that often come with faith— are designed to move us to action on behalf of God, one another, and all living things.

REGAINING OUR BEARINGS ON SPIRITUAL EXPERIENCE

When it comes to spiritual experience, we in the developed Western world have been through a centuries-long wasteland. The recent explosion of interest in all things spiritual—whether the fad over angels, or the varied New Age practices, or kabbalah (a form of Jewish mysticism), or the Pentecostal and charismatic movements within Christianity—is a kind of early gasping for air, as if we’ve been holding our breath for too long.

This underdeveloped understanding of spiritual experience can be traced to our forefathers, who toyed with the notion that we are all just complicated machines—thinking brains influencing doing bodies. The tendency to reduce things to their parts is characteristic of a convergence of factors that created the modern era, including the advent of rationalism and the scientific method.

Where does that leave the mystery of existence itself? The founding philosopher of the modern era, René Descartes, began with a first principle: “I think therefore I am.” He viewed the body as a machine, often guided by a nonmaterial mind. “I think therefore I am” was never intended to tell the whole story of who we are. We could also say, “I sing therefore I am,” or to paraphrase Desmond Tutu, “You are therefore I am.” But in time, “I think therefore I am” became the dominant understanding.

As a result of our long and productive love affair with rationalism, we tend to suffer from an anemic view of what we call “spiritual experience.” Various Christian movements have sought to restore a legitimate place for spiritual experience, but the options are still limited. The evangelical quadrant is marked by the experience of conversion or new birth, a more or less sudden (but always dynamic) transition that is described in accounts that have a definite before-and-after flavor. (1) The renewalist quadrant is shaped by the experience called “Spirit baptism,” marked by the transrational experience of speaking in tongues.

Even within these religious persuasions, many feel conflicted by the topic of spiritual experience. Perhaps you come from an evangelical background, but your story of coming to faith doesn’t fit neatly into the before-and-after motif. Maybe you attend a church in the renewalist quadrant, but you don’t have the same experiences that are celebrated there, or you have them without the requisite frequency or intensity. You feel as though you’ll always be the designated driver.

Perhaps the whole idea of religious experience as portrayed in popular culture or experienced in brief forays into this realm is a complete turnoff and contributes to keeping you on the outside of faith looking in.

Many years ago, I invited my father-in-law, an executive at General Motors, to a charismatic prayer meeting. My father-in-law stood there in a state of utter confusion while two young men behind him prayed loudly in tongues—he would have called it gibberish—for about thirty minutes, and the rest of the crowd was singing and swaying and raising a cacophony of prayer and praise. What was I thinking, inviting him into this? I thought. Afterward, bless his heart, my father-in-law was looking for something positive to say before returning home. He put his arm on my shoulder and said, “Ken, I can’t say that I understand what the hell you’re involved in here, but you sure are raising a great family.” It’s one of the most powerful compliments I’ve ever received in my life, but it came at a great cost to my father-in-law!

Let’s begin by backing up. Let’s understand spiritual experience as something that is part of our humanity.

NEUROSCIENCE SAYS IT’S NORMAL

Neuroscientists are still in the earliest stages of understanding the human brain. Compared to our understanding of other things, our understanding of the brain is primitive. But some things are becoming clear. New research suggests that the human brain seems to be wired for mystical experience. (2) Buddhist monks or Catholic nuns meditating under the watchful eye of brain imaging devices have the same parts of the brain lighting up. Something’s really happening, and that something is an important part of what it means to be human. Whether some people are more prone to such experiences than others is unknown, but the parts of the brain lighting up are parts we all have.

Let’s assume there’s more to the realm of spiritual experience than is represented by our current and rather meager expectations or by what we perceive to be the authorized experiences in a particular religious framework. When it comes to mystical experience, we are just coming out of the Age of Polite Silence.

This has affected everyone, regardless of belief or religious background. The reason we tend to think of spiritual experience as weird is that, until recently, it has been relegated to the fringes of our worldview.

PERCEPTIONS SHAPED BY WORLDVIEW LENSES

Reality is more than we can take in raw; we first have to filter it through our senses. Then we have to make sense of what our senses detect. Enter a worldview. A worldview can be thought of as the lens through which we interpret what we perceive from the world based on our assumptions about reality. We assume that certain categories of phenomena do happen and others don’t; these assumptions shape our expectations. As the psychologists have demonstrated in their experiments, our expectations shape our perceptions. This is an important point. We can all see that perceptions shape expectations.

If we see the sun rise every morning, we expect it to rise this morning. But expectations and assumptions also tend to shape perceptions. When the unexpected happens, we tend to have more difficulty perceiving it, or we interpret it with preexisting categories that may or may not be helpful.

Imagine being on the shore of the island called Guanahani, now part of the Bahamas, when Columbus sailed in aboard the Pinta. You’ve never seen a large ocean vessel emerge at the edge of the horizon from parts unknown. Because it’s so unexpected and unfamiliar, your mind might play tricks on you before the reality registers. For the same reason, it takes an inordinate amount of time for people to recognize a playing card that has a black heart as anything other than a spade.

Our worldview assumptions are all the more powerful because they remain mostly unexamined. We inherit them from the culture in which we are imbedded, and they are reinforced in multiple ways. In fact, that’s one of the primary things a culture does: it reinforces a worldview.

There is no single Christian worldview, no single American worldview, no single twenty-first-century worldview. Instead there is a shifting set of lenses, many of which we share in common with others.

We can have experiences that register only on the far fringes of our worldview. They are not widely regarded as normal; we have only limited language to describe them, so we don’t. These remain strictly private experiences with little reinforcement. When this occurs, such experiences may seem weird or dim. They may barely register.

As a result, we find ourselves in a worldview-induced state of confusion regarding spiritual experience. We crave spiritual experience, but it may also bother us because it feels like we’re giving in to an appetite for the weird.

In fact, I think it’s possible that those who are enamored of certain spiritual experiences may have a tendency to emphasize the culturally unusual aspects of the experience as a way of assuring themselves and others that they are truly spiritual. If your worldview tells you that spiritual experiences are weird, but you also want them badly, you may pursue what is weird as a way of pursuing what is spiritual. So the “weird factor” can cut both ways, putting some people off while causing others to accentuate the weirdness. It’s a messy business, religion, especially when we aren’t very adept at understanding certain aspects of it.

And yet, for all this, spiritual experiences abound throughout the culture. In a survey conducted in 1975, 35 percent of respondents reported having had spiritual experiences at least once in their life. (3) I have a friend who did a postdoctoral fellowship in cultural anthropology at Harvard and now teaches at a major university.

About ten years ago, he told me of a professional anthropology society that held a workshop that for the first time considered the idea of “spirit” as something more than just a cultural construct. The room was packed because many anthropologists had witnessed some fascinating “spirit phenomena” in field studies around the world; often these phenomena didn’t seem to be well explained by the existing categories of cultural anthropology. Even cultural anthropologists view the world through their own worldview lenses.

So spiritual experiences, including contemplative or mystical experiences, haven’t had much of a place in our worldview beyond the fringes. But that’s changing. As this change continues to unfold, we will eventually get better bearings. All of this won’t seem so weird when our worldview shifts to make more room for it. It will happen. Hurry up, I say. I’m tired of thinking of the mysterious dimension of being human as weird instead of beautiful and intriguing and most of all, important.

Let’s take a fresh look at the word contemplative, for starters, because Jesus was a man of action and contemplation.

CONTEMPLATE FOR A MOMENT

To contemplate simply means to look at something thoughtfully and steadily. Behold. Your life has been littered with contemplative experiences. The following examples only scratch the surface of the possibilities; they don’t even begin to suggest the available categories of experience.

You’re out on the ocean. The ocean catches your attention for a brief moment. It seems to be saying, Take me in. So you look around, and the busyness of your thoughts, having nothing to do with the ocean, starts to slow down. Or it happens without your paying attention to it. The enormity of the ocean presses in upon you. Your eyes widen, as do your mind and your heart. Time slows because you are absorbed in what lies before you. Something about the vastness of the ocean seems to be connecting with something inside of you. The world out there and the world in here make a brief connection. As one of the ancient prayers Jesus would have used says, “Deep calls to deep” (Ps. 42:7).

Or you’re heading out to go deer hunting again this year. Your wife says, “I wonder what the appeal is, since you hardly ever bring home a deer.” Ouch. But as you’re driving up north, you ponder that casual, not-intended-to-be-caustic remark. You realize that you just like being there.

You like being out in the woods and having an excuse to sit quietly in the deer stand up in a tree with your cell phone turned off. You like being able to tell yourself, Be quiet; I’m hunting now, when your mind acts up and starts reminding you of things left undone. You like it when the feeling of anticipation leads first to impatience (Hurry up, deer! ) and then into a hopeful calm. You’re alert but quiet and still. You’re content to be there as long as it takes. Whatever it is feels good.

Or you are looking in your toddler’s bedroom at night. The moonlight is shining through the window onto your little one’s serene face. Your little one who has been a holy terror lately and causing no lack of irritation in you. Only now, all that feels like ancient history. A feeling comes over you that is just that, a feeling; if you had to use words to describe it, they might be, It’s worth it, or All shall be well. Maybe you are at a major league baseball game waiting for something interesting to happen. Or in a concert venue before U2 comes out. Or sitting in a pocket park in Manhattan surrounded by people and tall buildings. All of a sudden . . . no, sudden is too strong a word. All of a moment it happens, and every last shred of annoyance you usually feel in crowded conditions evaporates; you feel very closely connected to everyone and everything around you. The moment passes as mysteriously as it came.

It’s ironic that we sometimes think that a person in a state of contemplation is “out of it.” In fact, contemplation is about perceiving connections with the reality around us. The inner world and the outer world feel connected. When we comtemplate, we feel more connected within ourselves and with others and the world around us.

JESUS WAS APPEALING, NOT WEIRD

However the spirituality of Jesus affected him, it did not make him weird. It didn’t disconnect him from the world or the people around him. It made him beautiful and intriguing. It made him appealing, as though by connecting with him we might connect with everything that’s beautiful and intriguing about God and ourselves and others and the world around us.

Check out the character of Jesus in the movie Jesus of Nazareth, directed by Franco Zefferelli. Yes, it’s true; the actor playing Jesus has blue eyes! And he never blinks on camera. It’s the director’s way of making us think, There’s something different about this guy. What’s different is this: he doesn’t meet our expectations for the founder of a world religion. He seems too entirely human for that. Appealingly human. Like that scene in the movie when Levi the tax collector throws a party for his friends, including the rich upper class of fellow tax collectors (considered traitors to the national cause) and their loose women friends. If cocaine had been around in those days, it would have been there at the party.

Levi invites Jesus to the party as the honored guest, and Jesus comes! And what’s more, he seems to be having a great time. All those up-and-outers and their loose women seem to really like Jesus because he likes them. They ask him for a little entertainment, which he provides by telling them a story. In the movie, Jesus tells his longest and most involved story, the story of the prodigal son, at this party. “A man had two sons. The younger one said to his father, ‘Father give me my share of the inheritance now, because I’m out of here!’” He’s got them in the palm of his hands with that story.

Wow, we think. I would love to be like that when I grow up!

SEEING BEYOND

When we think of spirituality, our minds immediately go to prayer in its various forms. We may think of contemplative or mystical prayer as being especially spiritual. Then we think about the prayer we’ve heard from others around the dinner table or prayers that we’ve prayed ourselves, such as when we’re in a real bind and ask God for some help. It seems like “brown paper bag” prayer. It’s nothing to crave, per se. Thank God for brown-paper-bag prayers, the ordinary prayers we all do much of the time. Life would be too intense if we couldn’t pray that way.

But don’t let that fool you or bore you. There’s more to prayer than that. Because there’s more to us than that. We are mystically wired.

We are made or adapted for contact with reality that goes beyond what we think of as ordinary. Call this reality the transcendent dimension—that which goes beyond. By transcendent, I don’t necessarily mean something separated from ordinary reality—not separated from the material world, for example, or from the everyday things that happen around us and occupy our attention. I mean something that goes along beside it, is intertwined within it, and goes beyond it.

The God whom Jesus reveals is a transcendent God. He’s the God out of whom everything that exists came into being, which ties him very closely to it all; but it also sets him apart from it all, since nothing else is that out of which all things came.

Jesus is about putting us in touch with all of that. All of it: the material world and all the wonder that the material world is an expression of, what is and what transcends what is, including God.

But that’s not the whole of prayer. I think of prayer as a catalyst meant to affect our understanding and experience of all of life. So prayer isn’t our relationship with God, but it’s a powerful catalyst in our relationship with God. Prayer is a catalyst in our relationships with others and with all living things. Prayer affects our interactions and connections with what we call the material world: our work, our play, our science, our engineering, our gardening— everyday and out-of-the-way things— our living, our dying, and whatever happens after that.

So what does Jesus have to teach us about prayer? WITH GOD, BUT From a certain point of view, not much. Jesus didn’t teach a lot about prayer. Writers like Henri Nouwen and Thomas Merton have taught a lot more about prayer than Jesus ever did. In the Gospels, we overhear Jesus praying some, especially in the gospel of John. He has a few parables about prayer. And of course, we have the disciples asking Jesus to teach them to pray, in response to which he gives a very brief prayer that we call the Lord’s Prayer.

On the whole, Jesus had a rather scattershot approach to teaching us about prayer. I think it’s possible Jesus didn’t consider that his primary job.

Human beings had been praying long before he came along. Jesus was part of a rich tradition of prayer treated extensively in the Hebrew Scriptures and passed down person to person through the ages. The book of Psalms is the prayer book of the Hebrew Bible, and it’s a book Jesus quoted often. The Psalms, for example, provide Jesus with his last words as he died. There are 150 distinct prayers in the book of Psalms, most of them longer than the prayer Jesus taught us to pray.

I think it’s possible that Jesus focused more of his energy on revealing to us the God he prayed to, knowing that this, more than anything, would affect our prayers, which would catalyze much more than that.

SEEING THE WORLD AS JESUS DID

To go to the heart of the matter, the contemplative life of Jesus helped him to see the world through the eyes of his Abba, Father. Jesus’ favorite and distinctive manner of addressing God was with the Aramaic term Abba, a form of “father” that leans in the direction of “papa.” I didn’t know this at the time, but when I knelt and prayed the Lord’s Prayer at the age of nineteen, asking for more of a God connection than I had known and experiencing that eerie but beautiful feeling that God wanted to be my dad, I was having an Abba, Father moment.

We know this is a primary aspect of the spirituality that Jesus meant to pass on to others, because it’s right there in the prayer he passed on. “When you pray, say: ‘Our Father . . .’” (Luke 11:2 NKJV).

Intimacy is yet another word that’s wearing out through overuse. Instead, let’s call it closeness. Proximity. The nearness of another.

Abba, Father is about that. We know that Jesus had closeness with God. And this closeness affected the way he perceived and experienced reality.

John the Baptist was out in the Jordan River performing baptisms as a sign that it was time for people to start fresh because God was coming close. Jesus submitted to John’s baptism even though John thought Jesus didn’t need it. The Gospels say that after Jesus prayed, “Father, glorify your name!” he heard a voice saying, “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again.” The bystanders, however, only heard thunder (John 12:28–29). Which was it? It might have been both. As the ancients said it, the heavens opened, it thundered, and in the thunder Jesus heard a voice come to him. We’ll never know for sure, but it may not have been the first time. We know it wasn’t the last.

Often when Jesus prayed, he sensed the nearness of God by hearing something. Before appointing the twelve apostles as his hand-selected messengers, he spent the night in prayer. Listening. Which ones, Abba?

Simon, Andrew . . . We know that when Jesus addressed individuals by name, they sometimes melted. As in the garden on Easter morning when Mary Magdalene saw the Lord and thought at first that he was the gardener. All he had to do was say her name, and she melted. She felt the closeness. Was that because Jesus heard Mary’s name spoken by Abba, Father?

Often it seems that Jesus saw things that others couldn’t make out as easily. When some of the religious leaders were protesting that his healings on the Sabbath day constituted a violation of God’s command, Jesus explained himself by saying, “The Son . . . can do only what he sees his Father doing” (John 5:19). In other words, he didn’t just go around willy-nilly healing people because he had a mind to. Jesus kept his eyes open (the traditional practice of Jewish prayer) so that he could see what the Father was doing and then go do it with him. It’s possible that when Jesus saw the leper and was “moved with compassion” (Mark 1:41 NKJV), he interpreted that movement within his own gut as a sign of Abba, Father’s nearness with him and the leper. Perceiving that, he reached out his hand to touch the man and together with Abba, Father, made him better.

It’s possible that when Jesus got up before everyone else and left the house and went to a solitary place to pray (Mark 1:35), he wasn’t alone. He was alone with Abba, Father.

Does this sound appealing?

PRAYER IS A LENS

Think of prayer as analogous to the scientific method. The scientific method is a particular discipline, a particular set of lenses that help us see the world differently by looking at it from another angle. The scientific method isn’t just about facts and figures and data and experiments; it’s about using those things as a way to change the way we imagine the world. The best scientists are not always the smartest; they are often the most willing to use their imaginations. A long time ago, we used to think that the material world was made of smaller and smaller pieces of hard matter called particles. Stuff was made up of molecules, which were made up of atoms, which were made up of subatomic particles, like a collection of tiny billiard balls grouped together in the nucleus and circling around it like planets around the sun. That was then; this is now.

Now, through the discipline of the scientific method, through the use of experiments and data and facts and mathematics, scientists imagine the world differently. In fact, there’s a growing gap between how scientists perceive the world and how the rest of us do, because they are looking through this lens called the scientific method, which becomes more difficult to see through the thicker it gets. They see the world of physical matter as being foamy and cloudy, popping into and out of existence, impossible to pin down exactly, impossible to predict precisely, mathematical, and almost mystical. Honestly, read something written by the physicists who study matter at the quantum (the micro-mini) level. They sound a little loopy.

The scientific method doesn’t just shift your perceptions of reality at a weird or esoteric level—the sort of thing you talk about in your dorm room late at night. It’s also about more everyday things.

I saw a public television special on the plight of certain ocean animals. The biologist was explaining that the shark population was in precipitous decline worldwide. How could that be, since the ocean is so huge? How would you even be able to know that the shark population is in decline? You need the scientific method to devise a complicated means to do a shark census. Tag the sharks and track them over time. Count them in certain parts of the ocean and extrapolate from there. Looking through that lens, your perceptions about the world, in this case the shark population, shift.

The scientific method changes perceptions that touch your heart and make you sad, glad, or mad. On the special about sharks, the biologist pointed out that one of the reasons for the sharp decline in the shark population is the common practice of hauling these impressive animals onto the dock of a boat, slicing their fins off while they are writhing on the deck, and tossing them alive back into the ocean, where they can no longer be seen. It turns out you can make a lot of money from the shark fins. How do people let themselves do such things?

Partly because they don’t use their imagination. Once that shark is out of sight, it’s out of mind. Maybe when the finless shark goes back into the ocean, it slips away into oblivion. But the narrator said these sharks drown. I grew up in the city of Detroit, so I’m not up on my fish. I asked a biologist what it means that a shark can drown. I learned that sharks get their oxygen from the water by swimming through the water. The water runs past their gills, and their gills pull out the oxygen, and they do what we do when we breathe. Ahh! But without their fins, they can’t get going. They just move around chaotically in the water. So they can’t breathe. And that’s how they die down there: gasping for oxygen like we do in one of our drowning nightmares.

So the scientists are seeing the world differently than we are because they are looking through this lens that changes their perceptions. This is why some of them get a little hot under the collar, and when you ask them how they really feel about all this, they sound like one of the Hebrew prophets thundering out denunciations in the name of the Most High.

Prayer, in Jesus brand spirituality, is a lens like that. It helps us to see the world through the eyes of God, understood and experienced as Abba, Father.

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1. Charles Colson, Born Again rev. ed. (Grand Rapids: Chosen, 2004). This 1976 best-seller details one such before-and-after conversion experience.

2. See, for example, Andrew Newberg, MD, Eugene D’Aquili, MD, PhD, and Vince Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away (New York: Ballantine, 2001).

3. See Newberg, D’Aquili, and Rause, Why God Won’t Go Away, 107.