The Great Unveiling,
Exploring the Gradual Discovery of Purpose, Pt. 2
The Spiritual Journey
More than forty years ago, Eugene Peterson wrote his book, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. His book tells us that personal formation happens over a long time. We don’t want to hear this message; we’d rather have quick fixes to our formation. The most purpose-forming times of life happen in the long hall of the ordinary, not the extraordinary.
Crucible Moments
Part one of this conversation discussed how a crucible pot must withstand the extreme heat required to smelt and purify gold. The word crucible is also used to refer to a “severe test” or a “trial by fire.” Marines end boot camp with a culminating fifty-four-hour crucible event. The SEALs place a crucible “hell week” in the early phase of their underwater demolition training to help trainees understand if they are willing to continue pushing through the rigorous training required before they earn their trident.
In the early part of my career, I spent a few years pastoring in a drug and alcohol recovery program. The men I served stayed with us for a minimum of thirteen months. They endured the hardship of living communally with fellow recovering addicts. They lived with strict rules, regular evaluations of their progress, and strong accountability. Unless they were with us due to a court order, the men were in the program voluntarily and could withdraw at will. Most chose to stay and remain in the crucible of our environment and found a life of freedom from addiction and ongoing recovery.
In their book Transforming Spirituality, Steve Sandage and LeRon Shults helpfully summarize the classic stages of spirituality:
Confrontation (purgative way)
Self-Soothing (illuminative way)
Trust (unitive way)
The authors use these steps of spiritual formation to describe what happens during a marriage relationship. Sandage and Shults remind us that the marriage relationship is a crucible. Marriage is a formative experience. Along with the good times, severe tests will arise (job loss, chronic illness, conflict with your spouse or in-laws, difficulty getting pregnant, loss or rebellion of a child).
In this post, I appropriate the Three Ways to help us think more deeply about how the “ordinary” journey of spiritual growth can inform the idea that the formation of purpose happens over a long period.
These three stages come from the Ladder of Perfection, first presented in the work of Pseudo-Dionysius and developed by Christian mystics like Teresa of Άvila. Each way presents a unique insight into my concept of purposeful leadership. We begin with the purgative way.
The Purgative Way
Purgation is counter-intuitive in our modern culture. Ken Boa tells us that the purgative way involves breaking the dominion of our ego and moving away from “self-reliance to reliance on Christ alone for the soul’s well-being.” Solitude and silence, self-examination, confession, and journaling are spiritual practices that help us pursue the purgative way.
We considered the false and true selves in a previous post and a series of videos. The false self is the self we have lived with for most of our lives. It is living a lie that blocks us from purposeful living. Phileena Heuertz tells us that the false self uses circumstances and other people to find identity.
This misappropriation of identity makes it insecure and attached to the things of this world. It is resistant to the purpose God has for us. Purgation is the beginning of a transfer of trust in ourselves to trust in God and a stripping away of hindrances to our pursuit of Christ. It is first on the path to finding our true self and purpose.
The Illuminative Way
The illuminative way is the second step on the ladder to perfection. I like how Roger Ray puts it in his book Christian Wisdom for Today,
The Illuminative way is not simply rote learning. It is more about putting into practice the insights of a Christian life. The illuminative way involves learning about the Christian faith and the practice of meditation and prayer, leading to the practice of contemplation.
This step involves learning to see ourselves in light of how God sees us. Lectio Divina, spiritual direction, contemplative prayer, and the study of Christian theology are helpful disciplines as we walk in the illuminative way.
I once heard a preacher talk about the practices of the spiritual disciplines (i.e., Bible reading, prayer, journaling) as habits he formed early in his journey as a Christian walk. This preacher talked about being a competitive, driven person. He always had to be the best at his tasks.
The spiritual practices were on his to-do list – they were what he was supposed to do and remained there until several years later. He was sitting in a favorite chair doing his morning reflection time. Later, he realized he had, for perhaps the first time, enjoyed the disciplines. He no longer saw them as tasks. Instead, he enjoyed the disciplines as a time of relationship with God. This pastor had experienced the illuminative way.
Kenneth Boa tells us that there is an increased awareness of God's presence and a deepening consecration to God. “In this stage, prayer is less an activity or an appendage and more a vital reality that flows out of one’s being.” This phase characterizes the love of and service to others through acts of love and service to others.
The illuminative way is detaching from gratifying false self-desires and living in deeper alignment with our true selves. We don’t live with the masks of the false self; instead, we live into the true self, making us more loving, generous, and compassionate, as we considered in chapter two. We fully identify with the purpose for which God created us.
The Unitive Way
The unitive way is the move to contemplation. It is an infusion of divine presence, an intimate union with the divine. Our relationship with God is uninterrupted.
Think of a close friendship. We don’t need to review. We pick up where we left off when we were last together. Our desire is purified, and we crave God's will.
The Christian mystics of old referred to this as spiritual marriage. There is a union of all desire and complete harmony and oneness with God, as described in John 20:21,
I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one – as you are in me, Father, and I am in you.
Centering prayer, service to others, and spiritual retreats are unitive way practices.
Part of living in the unitive way is living in harmony with who you are and aligning your core values, passions, and long-term goals. You understand at a deep level who God called you to be.
You effortlessly make choices that align with your authentic self. This harmony is a touchstone, helping you focus on what truly matters. When you have this clarity, you can evaluate opportunities and requests, asking yourself, "Does this align with who I am, who I am, and what God called me to be?"
When you are confident in your decision-making process, saying 'no' becomes an empowering act of self-care.
When we are purposeful in our leadership, what you see is what you get. We lead from the truth of who we are. We understand our areas of weakness, and we have worked hard to become the best version of ourselves. Our work aligns with our inner wiring. We spend most of our time working in our strengths, abilities, and passions zone. – without thinking about it. There is harmony in our lives.
Considerations
Purpose results from living the ordinary extraordinarily well, not from the extraordinary experiences in our lives. As I have been writing about what soul-driven success means, I have been more attuned to our “attention culture.”
Being soul-driven is about something other than being noticed. It is about doing our best to live into God’s calling. We live the ordinary life of showing up daily. We love those around us and do the work that is our calling.
Each of us has a purpose; each of us has a calling.
Finding purpose is like any other hard thing in life. It takes time; it takes a lot of work. Eugene Peterson wrote,
One aspect of world [which Peterson describes as a mood] that I have identified as harmful to Christians is the assumption that anything worthwhile can be acquired at once. We assume that if something can be done at all, it can be done quickly and efficiently.
There are better ways forward than the quick approach. Finding purpose takes hard work and time (sometimes longer than we want). Navigating our way toward purpose is a long obedience in the same direction.
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