Imaginative Prayer (eBook)

Introduction

Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story; it is an event.

Pope Benedict XVI

What if education . . . is not primarily about ideas and information, but about the formation of hearts and desires? The education of desire . . . requires the pedagogical formation of our imagination.

James K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom

This book is about connection. As a father of four girls one of my greatest desires is to pass on to them a deep understanding and awareness of the experience of God. My hope is that they would feel connected to God and the story God is unfolding in their lives and in the world around them. Will they see themselves as part of God’s story? Will they feel close and connected to God as they navigate decisions that come their way and pursue risks on the horizon? Will they say yes to all that God is inviting them into? This book is about connection because of the way Jesus asks us to imagine our life with him—he is the vine, his Father is the gardener, and we are connected to him. This is how we bear fruit. This is the image he gives us. This is what he asks us to imagine.

This book is also about formation. “Spiritual formation . . . is the intentional and God-ward reorientation and re-habituation of human experience.”1 Or, more simply defined by M. Robert Mulholland Jr., spiritual formation is “the process of being formed in the image of Christ for the sake of others.”2 Whenever we’re intentionally doing something to shift our experience or understanding of God, we’re involved in spiritual formation. When we’re working, in response to God’s grace, to shift our thoughts, the patterns of our relationships, and our actions toward a greater alignment with the life and teachings of Jesus, we are doing the work of spiritual formation.

And when we help others in their journey of formation, we become connected to them and their story.

We share in their experience, and we too are formed by it.

This book is an invitation to connection with your child and to your child’s spiritual formation.

Parenting, Connection, and Formation

In my late twenties, as I tried to settle into adulthood (and feeling quite unsettled), I began meeting with a spiritual director—someone with formal training in helping me pay closer attention to my conversation with God and the movements in my soul.3 I began to notice the story of my own formational journey, which took me all the way back to childhood. This wasn’t therapy. It was a form of prayerful attentiveness to how God has been present to me throughout the seasons of my life. It is an attentiveness that seeks to name God’s activity and my responses. One glaring observation was that while I had a powerful encounter with the love and grace of God when I said yes to Jesus at age ten, my next experience of God, the next time I felt the nearness of God, didn’t come until I went to a worship service at a Vineyard church six years later.

I have a lot of questions about those six years in between. I remember being asked, at baptism, what I believed about God, about the Bible, and about the cross. What I don’t remember is anyone asking me what my conversation with God was like. Or what my experience of him was like. Or what he might be inviting me into. I think, looking back now, that I would have loved to talk more about Jesus and my experience of him. I think somewhere along the way, someone would have heard me say out loud what I was thinking and feeling. Perhaps someone would have heard in my answers that my experience of God was filled with guilt and shame. And I think someone would have helped me see it differently.

The truth is that the church tradition I grew up in wasn’t really asking these kinds of questions. Spiritual formation and the contemplative stream in the evangelical world of the 1980s was just being birthed with Richard Foster’s Celebration of Discipline, published in 1978, the same year I was born. It took the next thirty years for that contemplative stream to broaden enough to begin widely quenching the thirst of evangelical adults.4 And now those adults are parents and pastors (myself included), raising and forming children the best we know how. It’s second nature to raise a child in the way we were raised. It takes a ton of work to take the lessons we are learning and, in real time, think about how to recontextualize some of that learning for the little ones among us. When I started to sense a shift in my own formational journey, I didn’t have any idea how to offer my children a drink from the contemplative stream. I think I’m beginning to scratch the surface of what has been for me a big shift in my focus as a pastor and a parent. And that is why you are holding this book. This book is my attempt at helping to contextualize a spiritual formation for children.

And here is why.

As I set out to do some of that hard work of allowing my own formational journey to shape my parenting, I noticed something that felt unsettling to me as a pastor; I had spent nearly a decade meeting with a spiritual director, I had been trained as a spiritual director myself and offered a listening ear to dozens of people each month as part of my pastoral ministry, and yet I seemed to only be using rudimentary tools for nurturing the spiritual formation of my own children. I had grown in paying attention to my own conversation with God. I was even getting pretty good at helping other adults pay attention to their life with God. But when it came to these kinds of conversations with my own children, I quickly reverted back to asking questions about belief in God, the Bible, and the cross.

I was reading stories from the Bible and answering questions that my girls would bring up. I was trying to ask some questions I had learned through my spiritual direction practice, but I was having a hard time facilitating for them the kind of connection to God that I seemed to be experiencing in my own life. I was still focused on getting them to understand and believe the right things. And then I read a book by James K. A. Smith, a philosopher at Calvin College. Smith writes, “Human beings are not only, nor even primarily, ‘thinkers.’ We are not as defined by what we know, as we are but what we love—what we long for.”5

We are defined by our longings, and what we long for is at the root of spiritual formation.

I was having trouble connecting with my children around issues of faith because I was no longer focused on making sure I had everything figured out. I wasn’t really concerned with the questions and answers we typically think are important to pass along to our offspring. I had learned to embrace more mystery and tension than I was willing (or capable) of leading them into. I still, of course, believed things about God, the Bible, and the cross. But I was no longer connected to those things the same way; it seems that I had become connected to the vine, and all those questions that nagged my thinking self remained unanswered, though no longer central. My life with God had shifted from the importance of knowing to paying attention to what I was truly longing for. And what I longed for was the experience of God himself.

I wanted my children to connect with God, and I also wanted to connect with them in their experience of him. And yet we didn’t really have a shared vocabulary or a shared experience. I was reading Thomas Merton and Dallas Willard and finding that Wendell Berry was speaking to me as much about the gospel as anyone else had been. I had experienced some deep shifts in my understanding of my experience of God in places of silence, solitude, and imaginative prayer. I knew that I couldn’t expect my girls to become little mystics and plunge the depths of consolation and desolation. There are stages of faith to walk through, often with a more contemplative expression showing up later developmentally.6 We need seasons of certainty as much as we need what follows, which is often the tragic anguish when what we once held certain begins to trickle out the cracks in the façade of self.

But surely, I thought, there is a way to nurture them toward an awareness that God is present and can speak to them. Surely it was possible for my own children to experience God in ways similar to how I was experiencing him. How can I introduce my children to bite-sized pieces of the contemplative life and the experience of God? How could I give my children a memorable experience of growing in their awareness of what God is like? How might I help aim their desires toward becoming the kind of people who intuitively understand the world in light of the gospel?7

These were the kinds of questions I was asking, not only for my own parenting but as a pastor overseeing a kids’ ministry of close to one hundred third- to sixth-grade children. I was trying to think through how to reorient our kids’ ministry toward nurturing a connection with God and teaching parents how to ask the right kinds of questions so that our efforts as a church and parents’ efforts at home would reinforce each other. We were trying to create a culture in which parents understood that they were the most important...