Shaped by Dr. Mulholland

M. Robert Mulholland, Jr. is on the short list of authors who have influenced me the most. He influenced me in direct ways (as I have read and re-read his books and listened and re-listened to his teaching). At least as profoundly, however, is the indirect ways he has influenced me through the personal relationships he had with others who have critical roles in my life (such as my pastor, Steve Brooks, and one of my primary teachers, Ruth Haley Barton).

Dr. Mulholland’s teaching is well-known among some groups of people, while many others are not familiar with his name nor what he wrote and taught. His teaching is so needed and helpful that I want to do my small part to spread it.

To do so, I am beginning a series of posts in which I’ll try to describe my own reactions to statements from him which stopped me in my tracks or shifted the way I thought about something.

The list below will serve a constantly-in-progress table of contents to his statements and my reflections on them. I'll use it both to park statements about which I want to write a reflection in the future, and to link to the reflections I've written.

•  “Our spiritual journey is not about our setting out to find God. It is a journey of learning to yield ourselves to God and discovering where God will take us."
• Often we "will expend amazing amounts of energy and resources to be in the world for God. But, you see, we are called to be in God for the world."
• "Graspers powerfully resist being grasped by God. Manipulators strongly resist being shaped by God. Controllers are inherently incapable of yielding control to God. Spiritual formation is the great reversal: from being the subject who controls all other things to being a person who is shaped by the presence, purpose, and power of God in all things."
• "The question is not whether to undertake spiritual formation. The question is what kind of spiritual formation are we already engaged in?"
• "One of the chief characteristics of the religious false self is its ability to manipulate the scripture consciously or, more often, unconsciously to avoid a transforming encounter with God."
• "We become either agents of God’s healing and liberating grace or carriers of the sickness of the world."
• "The Word became text to provide a place of transforming encounter with God so that the Word might become flesh in us for the sake of the world." (The Way of Scripture, 16)
• "In the mystery of an incarnational God, Jesus is both fully God and fully human. In that same mystery, the text is both fully divine and fully human...Those who see Jesus as merely human miss the presence of God in him. Those who see the text as merely human miss the possibility of genuine encounter with God in its pages." (The Way of Scripture, 17)
• "There are two fundamental ways of being human in the world: trusting in our human resources and abilities or a radical trust in God...You might describe these two ways of being in the world as the 'false self' and the 'true self.'" (The Deeper Journey, 23)
• "I heard a wise teacher say, 'Repentance is not being sorry for the things you have done, but being sorry you are the kind of person that does such things.'" (The Deeper Journey, 23)
• "I began to realize that underneath the thin veneer of my religiosity lives a pervasive and deeply entrenched self-referenced being which was driven by its own agendas, its own desires, its own purposes, and that no amount of superficial tinkering with the religious facade made any appreciable difference." (The Deeper Journey, 23)
• "My false self, like all false selves, is a control freak that manipulates people and situations to protect it from disturbances to its status quo." (The Deeper Journey, 24)
• "The temptation to take over God's role in our life is the essence of the false self." (The Deeper Journey, 27)
• When he says, "If anyone would come after me, they must deny themselves," and "Whoever loses their self for my sake will find it" [,] Jesus is not talking about giving up candy for Lent. He is calling for the abandonment of our entire, pervasive, deeply entrenched matrix of self-referenced being." (The Deeper Journey, 47)
• "Our religious false self may be rigorous in religiosity, devoted in discipleship and sacrificial in service––without being in loving union with God." (The Deeper Journey, 47)
• "Rigorous religious practices, devoted discipleship, sacrificial service, deeper devotional activities may do nothing more than turn a nominally religious false self into a fanatically religious false self." (The Deeper Journey, 48)
• "God comes to us in our false self in order to offer God's self to us to be our true life." (The Deeper Journey, 74)

In Search of Lent Songs

Unlike was the case when I was searching for Advent songs a few months ago, I don't feel like I ever have to go digging very far to find good songs for Lent. On the contrary, just about any collection of sacred music is going to have songs that fit this season, so I wasn't planning on putting together a list.

But as we're now a couple of days into Lent, I find myself wanting to be able to pull up good stuff to listen to like I did during Advent. It added something to have music readily available that helped me settle into the themes of the season. So, why not? Here's a list-always-in-progress of some of my favorites. Feel free to listen along, and add your own suggestions in the comments below.

In Search of Advent Songs

I want songs that help me wait on God during Advent. After writing Wait a few years ago, I came across some songs by Andrew Peterson that express some of the themes of Advent (which I characterize in the book as Advent past, present and future) as as well as anything I’ve ever heard, and so I want to find some more. As I suppose is fitting with the nature of the season, such songs about waiting on God are probably a bit hidden—often tucked in the corners of some Christmas CDs or other places that are less obvious.

So I’m creating a playlist on Spotify of my favorites, and I’m looking for others to add to it (because as it is right now, the playlist is too short for me to rely on to be my own one-stop-shop for all of my Advent listening needs). Anyone have suggestions? Feel free to listen along this Advent, and if you have a suggestion of a track to add, post it as a comment, por favor.

New Book Announcement

Available September 1

Discover a lifestyle in which spiritual growth happens naturally.

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PREORDER A KINDLE COPY AND ALSO RECEIVE:

• A free personalized paperback copy of Grace That Grows when it releases in September
• A free ebook copy (Kindle or pdf) of our Advent devotional, Wait: Four Weeks of Preparing the Soul for Christmas
• A free ebook copy of My Father in Me: Stories of My Dad's Life and How They've Shaped Who I Am (This is always a free download when folks join our email list.)

After preordering the Kindle edition, email your Amazon receipt to daniel [at] salvationlife.com. You will then receive links to download your copies of Wait and My Father in Me, and you'll get your personalized paperback copy of Grace That Grows in early September.

In Memory of David Strieff

A friend who came into my life through the Transforming Center passed away this week, and as I've been reflecting on my relationship with him, I wanted to write here to try to express something of why his friendship was a gift to me.

As part of the Transforming Community experience (which I describe as having saved my life), I wrote quarterly reflection papers. These weren't academic papers, and they weren't for grades. Rather, they were a space in which I could reflect on teachings and readings from the quarter and how they intersected (or sometimes, crashed into) with my life as I was experiencing it.

My two years in my initial Transforming Community experience were difficult ones, as within those two years and the months following I made drastic (and drastically needed) changes in my lifestyle and my approach to ministry, and I lost my dad to cancer.

In the context of those difficult years, I needed the space provided by those reflection papers to wrestle with things. I needed to reflect honestly on my life as I had been living it, why I was not on the road to becoming the kind of person I wanted to be, and how I might be able to reorient my lifestyle around my desire to live a more genuine life with God.

Each person in a Transforming Community who writes those reflection papers is matched with a reader who shares their journey through the two years, asks a few questions to deepen the reflection, and offers encouragement along the way. My reader was David Strieff.

David was reading my reflections before I began to discover spiritual direction, and he accompanied me well. As I wrestled, he was there alongside me. He was encouraging to me in those years, and in the years afterward whenever we would see one another or exchange emails.

Because he accompanied me well, I felt it to be such an honor when I later had the opportunity to be a reader for others going through their Transforming Community experiences. Accompanying others through those reflection papers was a major factor that led me to want to pursue spiritual direction training. And now, as a spiritual director, I'm constantly trying to be attentive to ways that incorporating some written reflection into spiritual direction can help to deepen our attentiveness to God.

And with David's death this week, I've realized how much of the richness of my journey during the past eight years can be traced back to those papers. I am glad that I still have my copies of them with David's handwritten responses. I am glad to have memories of his deep voice, warm smile, and strong hugs. And I am glad that Transforming Community gave us the space to share our journeys and become friends.

“O God of grace and glory, we remember before you this day our brother David. We thank you for giving him to us, his family and friends, to know and to love as a companion on our earthly pilgrimage. In your boundless compassion, console us who mourn. Give us faith to see in death the gate of eternal life, so that in quiet confidence we may continue our course on earth, until, by your call, we are reunited with those who have gone before; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Amen.”

— The Book of Common Prayer