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- Herausgeber: IVP Formatio
- Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
- Serie: Transforming Resources
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
As you journey deeper in the Christian pilgrimage, you come to realize that the Christian life is more than merely replicating particular spiritual disciplines or practices. You begin to understand that at the core of Christian faith is the transformation of your very identity. M. Robert Mulholland Jr. exposes the false selves that you may be tempted to hide behind and helps you to instead discover the true self that comes from being hidden with Christ in God. If the goal of the Christian journey is Christlikeness, then you must reckon with the unhealthy ways that you root your sense of being in things other than God. Along the way, you will discover a growing sense of intimacy and abandonment to God. Not only will you encounter the joy of discovering your own self, you will also find a greater love for others and compassion for the world.The expanded edition includes a study guide for individual reflection or group discussion.
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THE DEEPERJOURNEY
The Spirituality ofDiscovering Your True Self
NOW WITH STUDY GUIDE
For Lynn,
beloved companion on the journey
Contents
FOREWORD
by Ruth Haley Barton
“The core of our being is drawn like a stone to the quiet depths of each moment where God waits for us with eternal longing. But to those depths the false self will not let us travel. Like stones skipped across the surface of the water we are kept skimming along the peripheral, one-dimensional fringes of life. To sink is to vanish. To sink into the unknown depths of God’s call to union with himself is to lose all that the false self knows and cherishes.” – JAMES FINLEY
For many of us the writings of Thomas Merton published in the 1950s and 60s were perhaps our first exposure to the idea of the true self and the false self—or at least exposure to those terms. For others it was Bob Mulholland and The Deeper Journey that first exposed us to these terms, picking up where Merton left off, writing overtly and unapologetically as a New Testament theologian and Greek scholar.
Mulholland gives careful attention to New Testament texts in their original languages and in so doing locates teachings about the true self and false self solidly within a New Testament context and orthodox Christianity to our great benefit. While using the fresh language of the true and false self, he makes it clear he is actually referring to something very old—the new man and old man, the new creation and old creation, the sin nature and the Christ-in-you nature that is addressed over and over again in Scripture. In a feat that is really quite thrilling, he weaves together in one seamless garment solid biblical exegesis with references to a wide range of Christian sources, such as the desert mothers and fathers, John of the Cross, Henri Nouwen, Thomas Kelly, and Thomas Merton himself. Mulholland’s personal and contemporary illustrations add just the right amount of practical application to make this work utterly relevant, helpful, and hopeful for those who are seeking to move beyond merely imitating Christ to a more mature understanding and experience of the Christian life as loving union with God in the depths of our being. He makes the case that the goal of the Christian life is loving union with God and the outcome of the goal is Christlikeness. This is a subtle but profound shift.
Another significant offering in this work is Mulholland’s description of the religious false self in all its manifestations. While I am not going to give it all away here (you will need to read the book!), this facet of the journey should be of interest to all of us who are Christians and presume that because we are religious everything is fine in our relationship with God. Turns out nothing could be further from the truth and after things get pretty uncomfortable Bob leads us to consider an encouraging and hope-filled vision for discovering our true life hidden with Christ in God. In his words, “This is a life of radical abandonment to God in love and equally radical availability to God for others so that in all circumstances and relationships our life becomes one in whom God is present for others” (139).
For those who have read and loved Bob’s first book, Invitation to a Journey, this is the perfect next step as he further develops some of the themes he barely introduced in that work. His final chapter on the principles of the deeper journey and the practices that go along with it will offer valuable means of entering into the journey we are all longing for.
2
INTO THE JUNGLE
The False Self
Gracious and loving God, I give you praise and thanks for the ways in which you have met me and touched me and nurtured me through the years of my life. I thank you for weaving this book into my life. As I ponder these things, help me to offer myself to you that you may be in me all that you want to be. Help me to keep myself abandoned to you in love that you may have your way with me. I ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.
One of the things I suspect you may have discovered on your pilgrimage is that consciously or unconsciously you bring to a book the current context of your spiritual journey. We open the book with some pretty clear ideas of what we want, what we hope to experience, what we expect to receive. We bring our own agenda to the table, so to speak.
I hope, however, at this point in your spiritual journey you’ve discovered there is always a deeper agenda at work in your life. God has an agenda for you. God’s agenda catches up the threads of your agenda, weaving these together in ways radically different than you expected.
So I would urge you as we share this book together to make yourself available to God and give God permission to do whatever God wants to do in your life through this book.
TWO WAYS OF BEING IN THE WORLD
Jeremiah writes:
Thus says the LORD:
Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals
and make mere flesh their strength,
whose hearts turn away from the LORD.
They shall be like a shrub in the desert,
and shall not see when relief comes.
They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness,
in an uninhabited salt land.
Blessed are those who trust in the LORD,
whose trust is the LORD.
They shall be like a tree planted by water,
sending out its roots by the stream.
It shall not fear when heat comes,
and its leaves shall stay green;
in the year of drought it is not anxious,
and it does not cease to bear fruit.
The heart is devious above all else;
it is perverse—
who can understand it?
I the LORD test the mind
and search the heart. (Jer 17:5-10NRSV)
In a very focused way Jeremiah illuminates a reality that threads its way from Genesis through Revelation. He reveals 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 cannot be grasped by or sustained in the deeper life in God—being like Jesus—until you are awakened at the deep levels of your being to this essential reality. You might describe these two ways of being in the world as the “false self” and the “true self.”1
I will never forget the experience that awakened me to this reality. As a fairly young Christian I thought of repentance for my sins in terms of being sorry for things I had done. I was really, sincerely sorry, yet kept doing the same things over and over again. You may have been there yourself. Then 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.” With that I began the disturbing discovery of my false self. I began to realize that underneath the thin veneer of my religiosity lived a pervasive and deeply entrenched self-referenced being which was driven by its own agendas, its own desires, its own purposes,2 and that no amount of superficial tinkering with the religious façade made any appreciable difference.
Then I happened to read those familiar words: “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just so that he might forgive us our sins and might cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 Jn 1:9). This time the words exploded in my mind and heart. I realized for the first time that God’s purpose for us was not simply to forgive sins but to transform our false self—to cleanse all its unrighteousness, to make us righteous, to restore us to our true self in loving relationship with God and in being Christlike in the world. I realized that the false self I was stood in the way of becoming the true self for which I had been created. I was a mud pie with a thin layer of Christian frosting trying to pass myself off as an angel food cake, but the mud kept seeping through! I needed God to take that mud and breathe into it the breath of life.
Unless you are aware of these two selves, these two ways of being in the world, you will have great difficulty allowing God to lead you into a deeper life of wholeness in Christ. Let’s first unpack together some of the crucial dynamics of the false self. Then we’ll unpack the dynamics of the true self. Once we have done this, we can then begin to explore the dynamics of the deeper life in God.
THE FALSE SELF
Let us begin to get our minds and our hearts around an understanding of the false self.3 Perhaps a rather embarrassing personal example will help to set the stage for our thinking.
A personal example. Have you ever had a Romans 7 moment, one similar to what Paul describes when he says, “The good I want to do, I don’t do; the evil I don’t want to do, is what I do” (Rom 7:19)? I suspect you have had some of those moments. I had such a moment recently.
Now, my false self, like most false selves, is a control freak that manipulates people and situations to protect it from disturbances to its status quo. I had returned to my office one Tuesday morning after being away for a day and found a note indicating that the first leg of my Sunday flight from Lexington, Kentucky, to Dubuque, Iowa, for an upcoming speaking engagement had been canceled. What a great way to start the day! I called the airline and, sure enough, they had canceled the flight. When I asked why, I was told, “No equipment.” Hey, wait a minute folks. This was Tuesday. No equipment five days from now? I mean, shift something around, get a plane there!
Well, we finally worked it out. At first they tried to fly me to Charlotte, North Carolina, then to Chicago and on to Dubuque. I said, “You can do better than that.” They finally got me on another airline from Lexington to Detroit to Chicago and then put me back with the original airline for the flight to Dubuque. I called my travel agent, he printed out the tickets, and my wife picked them up.
My agent told me, “I checked it through and everything’s in order. All you need to do is take the tickets to the desk of the airline you are flying.”
When I arrived at the airport on Sunday, I took my tickets to the desk of the airline I was flying.
The agent looked at my tickets and said, “You have to go down to the original airline with these.”
“Well, that’s not what I was told,” I retorted.
My false self was beginning to exercise itself. It didn’t want to be out of control. After all, I had taken great steps to make sure that this wasn’t going to happen! So I stormed down to the original airline (well, I wasn’t quite “storming” yet, but I was certainly building up a head of steam!). I told the agent that he needed to put some notification on my ticket indicating the change from his airline to the other. The agent proceeded to write on the first ticket—the original but now-canceled flight to Chicago—and then he began to write on the ticket from Chicago to Dubuque.
Exasperated, I said, “No, no, no; I’m still on that one. That’s my flight from Chicago to Dubuque on your airline. It’s just from here to Chicago that I need the help.”
The agent got on the computer, typed a while and then said, “No, we don’t have you going from Chicago to Dubuque, not on our airline. You must be on the other airline.”
Well, the other agent had already told me they only had me to Chicago. So now I could get to Chicago, but not to Dubuque, in spite of all my carefully controlled plans.
I told the agent, even more forcefully, “No, wait a minute, I’m supposed to be on your flight to Dubuque.”
“Well,” he said, “You’re not listed here.”
Now I was really getting steamed. I went storming back to the first airline and after much heated dialogue with the agent, we finally got it all settled and I got my flight from Chicago to Dubuque on the original airline.
These, however, were only the preliminaries. When I got to the security check they had a sign: “If you have a computer take it out and put it on the belt.” Now I carry my computer, in its case, in my larger carry-on case. So I set my carry-on case down and, as I have done every time for years, opened it up, pulled out my computer in its computer case and put it on the conveyer, and then put my carry-on case on the conveyer and went through the metal detector.
When I got to the other side of the conveyer, the lady asked me, “Is this a computer?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, you have to take it out of the case,” she replied.
With that, I just lost it. That was the end. I snarled, “What do you mean I have to take it out of the case?”
She retorted firmly, “You have to take it out of the case and put it through separately. The sign says so.”
