Mansions of the Heart E-Book

R. Thomas Ashbrook

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 509

Beschreibung

A practical program for developing a deeper, more authenticrelationship with God Written for anyone who wants to develop a deeper more meaningfulrelationship with God, Mansions of the Heart offers astep-by-step guide through a spiritual formation road map based onTeresa of Avila's Seven Mansions. The book includes a Mapping Toolthat will help you discern your place on your spiritual journey andoffers church leaders a process for helping church members to growinto spiritual maturity. * Contains a spiritual program based on the writings of Teresa ofAvila, one of Christianity's most profound and beloved mysticalteachers Offers a complete, step-by-step program for spiritualgrowth * Includes information for leading others in their spiritualjourneys * Appropriate for all kinds of Christians

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Foreword

PREFACE

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER 1 - Is This All There Is?

Really Knowing God

The Call to Follow Jesus Specifically

Spiritual Formation and Traditional Views of Discipleship

What Is the Goal of Spiritual Formation?

A Roadmap for Ongoing Spiritual Transformation

CHAPTER 2 - Common Myths That Lead Down Dead-End Roads

Myths of the Dead-End Roads

The True Road to Living in the Love of God

All Goals Come out of the “One”

Is Loving God Really Enough?

Priorities of God’s Calling

Is Spiritual Formation Only an Inward Journey?

Spiritual Formation

How Does It Happen?

CHAPTER 3 - Your Journey into the Love of God

Teresa of Avila

John of the Cross

A Faith Shared by All Christians

Our Effort and God’s Grace in Growth

Cautions About Using a Spiritual Formation Roadmap

Comparing the Mansions

Rooms Within Each Mansion

The Wonder of Discovery

CHAPTER 4 - New Beginnings: The First Mansion

The First Mansion

“Your Heart’s Desire” in Relationship with God

“Key Activities” in Response to God

“Changing Patterns of Prayer” in Communication with God

“Jesus’ Initiatives” to Draw Us to a Deeper Intimacy with God

“Schemes of the Enemy” to Try to Destroy Our Growth in God

“Keys for Growth” That Help Us Cooperate with God

Spiritual Coaching

CHAPTER 5 - Between a Rock and a Hard Place: The Second Mansion

The Second Mansion

“Your Heart’s Desire” in Relationship with God

“Key Activities” in Response to God

“Changing Patterns of Prayer” in Communication with God

“Jesus’ Initiatives” to Draw Us into Deeper Intimacy with God

“Schemes of the Enemy” to Try to Destroy Our Growth in God

“Keys for Growth” That Help Us Cooperate with God

CHAPTER 6 - Following Jesus: The Third Mansion

The Third Mansion

“Your Heart’s Desire” in Relationship with God

“Key Activities” in Response to God

“Changing Patterns of Prayer” in Communication with God

“Jesus’ Initiatives” to Draw Us into a Deeper Intimacy with God

“Schemes of the Enemy” to Try to Destroy Our Growth in God

“Keys for Growth” That Help Us Cooperate with God

CHAPTER 7 - Discovering the Love of Jesus: The Fourth Mansion

The Fourth Mansion

“Your Heart’s Desire” in Relationship with God

“Key Activities” in Response to God

Changing Ministry Focus

“Changing Patterns of Prayer” in Communication with God

“Jesus’ Initiatives” to Draw Us into a Deeper Intimacy with God

“Schemes of the Enemy” to Try to Destroy Our Growth in God

“Keys for Growth” That Help Us Cooperate with God

CHAPTER 8 - Longing for Oneness with God: The Fifth Mansion

The Fifth Mansion

“Your Heart’s Desire” in Relationship with God

“Key Activities” in Response to God

Ministry

“Changing Patterns of Prayer” in Communication with God

“Jesus’ Initiatives” to Draw Us into a Deeper Intimacy with God

“Schemes of the Enemy” to Try to Destroy Our Growth in God

“Keys for Growth” That Help Us Cooperate with God

CHAPTER 9 - The Long Dark Corridor: The Dark Nights of the Soul

Why the Dark Nights?

Dark Night of the Senses

The Dark Night of the Spirit

CHAPTER 10 - The Passion of God’s Love: The Sixth Mansion

The Sixth Mansion

“Your Heart’s Desire” in Relationship with God

“Key Activities” in Response to God

“Changing Patterns of Prayer” in Communication with God

“Jesus’ Initiatives” to Draw Us into a Deeper Intimacy with God

“Schemes of the Enemy” to Try to Destroy Our Growth in God

“Keys for Growth” That Help Us Cooperate with God

CHAPTER 11 - A Life of Love in the Trinity: The Seventh Mansion

The Seventh Mansion

“Your Heart’s Desire” in Relationship with God

“Key Activities” in Response to God

“Changing Patterns of Prayer” in Communication with God

“Jesus’ Initiatives” to Draw Us into a Deeper Intimacy with God

“Schemes of the Enemy” to Try to Destroy Our Growth in God

“Keys for Growth” That Help Us Cooperate with God

Transforming Union: The Goal of Spiritual Formation

CHAPTER 12 - Your Unique Journey

We’re Unique in Our Mental and Emotional Development and Health

Human Development and Faith

Unique in Our Need for Healing and Spiritual Formation

Unique in Our Personality and Spiritual Formation

Knowing Our Uniqueness

The Process of Discovery

CHAPTER 13 - Spiritual Formation and the Church

Discipleship and Spiritual Formation

Transformation of the Church

A Spiritually Forming Church

CHAPTER 14 - Our Call to Action

Remembering Where We’ve Been

Spiritual Formation Is Not an Option for the Christian Community

A New Vision for the Future

NOTES

THE AUTHOR

INDEX

CRM EMPOWERIND LOADERS

Copyright © 2009 by R. Thomas Ashbrook. All rights reserved.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ashbrook, R. Thomas, date

Mansions of the heart : exploring the seven stages of spiritual growth / R. Thomas Ashbrook. p. cm.

Includes index.

eISBN : 978-0-470-53005-4

1. Spiritual formation. 2. Teresa, of Avila, Saint, 1515-1582. Moradas. I. Title. BV4511.A.4—dc22

2009026349

HB Printing

FOREWORD

Eugene H. Peterson

WHILE I WAS IN SEMINARY IN TRAINING TO BE A PASTOR, I was immersed in the Bible (a good thing), provided with an extensive familiarity in the theological thinking of Luther, Calvin, and others (also a good thing), but learned virtually nothing regarding the on-the-ground living of the Christian life and what was actually involved in following Jesus over a lifetime in the cultural conditions of America.

When I became a pastor, I was grateful for the training I had received in the Bible, the authoritative text for the Christian life. And I appreciated the careful instruction in theology, right thinking about the Christian life. But it wasn’t long before I realized that my professors had left me pretty much on my own when it came to matters of the soul, caring for the unique and eternal souls that were entrusted to me.

I felt adequately prepared to teach the truth of God, what to believe. I was well schooled in guiding people in moral and ethical matters, how to behave before God. But when it came to relationship with God, being with God, listening to and answering God, I found that I was reduced to what I had learned rather piecemeal on my own, supplemented by a few slogans and anecdotes I had picked up from others. It wasn’t enough. I knew I needed help.

Help came through a friend who introduced me to Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, two masters of the spiritual life, masters in understanding the soul and the nature of prayer. I had never heard of either one. They lived in Spain in the same century in which my theological masters, Martin Luther and John Calvin, were doing their work a thousand or so miles to the north in Germany and Switzerland.

Tom Ashbrook wrote this book that you hold in your hands to do for you what my friend did for me fifty years ago—to introduce you to these two companions who knew, practiced and wrote on the spiritual life with insight and passion. I am so glad that he wrote this book. His work could not be more timely. There is an enormous interest in spiritual formation these days, interest in growing up in Christ, living up to the “measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.” All of us need all the help we can get. Tom Ashbrook’s Mansions of the Heart immerses us in this old but wonderfully contemporary holy wisdom. It is a gift to the Christian community. Take and read.

There is far more to the Christian life than getting it right. There is living it right. Learning the truth of God, the gospel, the Scriptures involves understanding words, concepts, history. But living it means working and praying ourselves through a world of deception, of doubt and suffering, a world of rejections and betrayal and idolatry.

Listening to sermons, reading books, and participating in a worshiping community prepare the altar. Spiritual transformation takes place when we gather the stuff of our ordinary lives—our parents and children, our spouses and friends, our workplaces and fellow workers, our dreams and fantasies, our attachments, our easily accessible gratifications, our habit of depersonalizing intimate relations, and our commodification of living truths into idolatries—take all of this and place it on the altar of refining fire—our God is a consuming fire!—and finding it all redeemed for a life of holiness.

Many of us (most of us?) know more about Scripture and truth than we do about souls and prayer. But souls and prayer require an equivalent demand on our attention as do Scripture and truth. And not just in bits and pieces—something comprehensive. Ashbrook leads us carefully and patiently into the rich praying company of Teresa and John.

Teresa and John are theologians every bit as “theological” as Luther and Calvin. But they use a very different language. Teresa told stories; her Interior Castle, the basic text of this book, is one of her best. John wrote poems; many consider him Spain’s major poet. They are saturated in the same Scriptures as their contemporaries to the north of Spain and as theologically astute. But they, instead of arguing and defining and interpreting, express and witness and insist on the presence of God no matter how we feel about it, or if we feel anything at all. Luther and Calvin try to make the truth clear, which they do wonderfully. Teresa and John try to deal honestly and discerningly with the experience of God when it isn’t plain, insisting that there are necessary obscurities and shadows to be embraced if we are to grow into mature holiness. We cannot have God on our terms, domesticated to our requirements, reduced to our ideas of what we think God should be doing. Prayer is an immersion in the way God is present with us whether we understand or like it or not. This, they are saying, is what it is like to live a life of faith and love, to pray, to be detached from a life of self, and become souls free for God and one another.

My learning of the Christian life, along with that of most of my friends, had pivoted on Martin Luther and John Calvin, brilliant and comprehensive thinkers, writers, and exegetes of Scripture. They taught me to think largely and passionately about God and the Scriptures. For them, reforming the Christian life was primarily (but not entirely) a matter of recovering right thinking, understanding doctrine, interpreting Scripture. Teresa and John worked from the other end. They took up matters of the soul, reforming Christian living by taking seriously the life of prayer and recovering the ways of prayer. They gave themselves to discerning the illusions and pitfalls that interfere with receiving what God is giving and reducing prayer to a self-help project with little concern for relationship and love, adoration and mystery.

I have come to visualize Luther and Calvin as mountain people, scaling the heights, taking in the horizon. And I have come to appreciate Teresa and John as valley people, tilling the soil, going to the market, cooking meals. They draw me into honoring the dignity of souls at work and play, returning me daily to the sweet mysteries of prayer.

PREFACE

MANSIONS OF THE HEART EMERGED OUT OF CONFUSION and frustration, mine and maybe yours. As a pastor, and then a spiritual formation teacher, coach, church consultant, and spiritual director, I have seen two converging movements that God means for good but that are giving many of us real headaches. A lot of us are recognizing that we need to pay much more attention to our own spiritual growth and that of maturing Christians. We look at the amazing lives of followers of Jesus in the Gospels and Epistles, and then we look at our own lives and churches and wonder what’s going wrong. We know there has to be more. Although many of us have been hot after the discipleship of new Christians, the tendency of our church programming has been to stop there and leave the ongoing discipleship of maturing Christians to hit-or-miss circumstance. Sometimes we realize our lack of spiritual growth through our unfulfilled longings, and sometimes only because our spiritual immaturity gets us into trouble. Either way, we end up frustrated and confused.

Another movement has to do with our growing realization that the church has to become outwardly focused. Many of us are reclaiming our missional responsibility to move into the culture around us with the love of Jesus, but we are also realizing that it takes increasing spiritual maturity for followers of Jesus to really be salt and light in our neighborhoods and the dark places of the world. So, even though we sense what Jesus would have us do, we are frustrated by our inability, personally and as a community, to follow Him in spiritual authority and power.

As we try to address this need for greater spiritual maturity, again we find ourselves confused. There seems to be a lot of stumbling about as we try to pursue spiritual growth personally, and in our churches. Many of us don’t seem to have a real handle on the goal of our spiritual journey or how to cooperate with God in the process. We continue to crank out spiritual practices that might once have helped us but now seem empty. In an effort to move forward in our relationship with God, we may try to add a few spiritual disciplines for our hurried lives, stir in a conference or two on prayer or spiritual formation, and sprinkle with a few readings from the latest self-help books. Confusion and frustration often result, however, as we realize that not much is changing. What should we expect to happen, and how do we connect with God in the process? Many maturing Christians, feeling this frustration and confusion, either give up on their own spiritual growth or give up on their church for not meeting their needs, or both.

Mansions of the Heart begins with my personal story of frustration and confusion and the discovery that there is more to the Christian life than building a successful church. Although I fully confessed that Jesus is head of the church and I wanted to follow His leading, I came face to face with the realization that my love for God was mostly about my needs and what I could get out of Him. In prayer, I presumptuously tried to tell God what to do, when to do it, and how to fix my church (and the universe, for that matter). I realized that if Jesus were to really lead my life and church, then I would have to move beyond trying to figure out “What would Jesus do?” and start really listening and responding to God. That would take a whole new kind of relationship. In the following years, Jesus took this first-born, Type A engineer-turned-pastor on a wondrous and sometimes terrifying adventure of discovery.

I found that this generation is not the first to experience this frustration and confusion. Our Christian ancestors studied Scripture and their own experiences and provided a roadmap for our journey of spiritual growth that can help us understand where God is taking us, where we are in the process, and how to cooperate with rather than frustrate what God is doing in our hearts. Early in my spiritual formation journey, I discovered Teresa of Avila and found that her Interior Castle provided an amazing description of our journey with Jesus into the heart of the Father, through the work of the Holy Spirit. Her seven phases of growth described how God desires to move us into deeper relationship with the Trinity and cooperation with His mission to the world. Her insights brought wonderful clarity to my own journey as it has done for others through the centuries. Mansions of the Heat attempts to address our difficulties in spiritual growth, describe this roadmap, and suggest how we can move forward in our personal and corporate spiritual journey. It describes seven wonderful phases of spiritual growth through which the Holy Spirit leads us toward an amazing and loving intimacy with God. The tragic fact is, however, that most of our churches disciple people less than half the way.

It is my prayer that Mansions of the Heart will speak to followers of Jesus who want more in their relationship with their Lord and Savior, people who are longing for a new intimacy with God and want to discover how to walk with Jesus, hand in hand, rather than stumble along some distance behind. I am also writing for those who God has called to shepherd His people, leaders who are responsible to foster an environment in the church community that encourages the spiritual formation of its members. It is not easy to make course corrections in churches with longstanding traditions, so Mansions of the Heart makes some suggestions about how we might proceed to help the church become all that the Lord has called her to be: the very loving presence of Jesus in a lost and dying world.

It is my prayer that Mansions of the Heart will be an opportunity for Jesus to meet you in new ways, enable you to live in His love more profoundly, and follow Him more closely into the wonderful destiny God has for you. The “mansions” you will read about have many doors within them, doors to a new and wonderful life with our Lord. Jesus is inviting you to open the one before you and explore the rooms of love beyond.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me. He who overcomes, I will grant to him to sit down with Me on My throne, as I also overcame and sat down with My Father on His throne. He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches

—REVELATION 3:20-22

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A HOST OF FELLOW TRAVELERS WEAVE A TAPESTRY THAT SERVES as the context and the resource out of which any author is able to speak. In my case, the foundational fabric was woven by a man who met me in my darkest place of despair, hopelessness, and blindness. This man has walked with me ever since and led me, through the inner working of the Holy Spirit, into the loving and forgiving arms of my Heavenly Father. This man, my dearest friend, bears the scars of my sin and stupidity, and His sacrifice still permeates every fiber of my being. Jesus.

For Mansions of the Heart to emerge, Jesus wove into the tapestry the beauty and color of more people than I can possibly mention here. The influence of a few, however, has been profound. My wife, Charlotte, has lived out the loving presence of Jesus in ways that have always encouraged and supported my spiritual journey. Many times she has left the safe and familiar to join me in His sometimes scary invitations. Her bright colors and designs shine through any page of this work that truly honors Jesus.

For the three-dimensional depth of this tapestry, God used a monk named Brother Boniface. Bon taught me to “be still and know God,” then simply to “be still,” and finally to just “be,” in the loving intimacy of God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Bon not only introduced me to Teresa of Avila but showed me what the seventh mansion looks like. Our friendship was always an experience of Jesus, and I will be eternally grateful to him for calling out the monk within me.

I speak a lot in Mansions of the Heart about community. It is truly the community that God has built around me over the years that has enabled me to follow Jesus and complete this manuscript. Dr. Chuck Conniry, vice president and dean of George Fox Evangelical Seminary, encouraged and supported me as I tried to “systematize” the mystical writings of Teresa of Avila into a paradigm for spiritual formation. Chris Lyons lovingly badgered me to convert my doctor of ministry dissertation into something more readable and available to a wider audience. Imago Christi helped me field-test its premises and truths as together we prayed for and discovered deeper intimacy with the Trinity, and then attempted to encourage others into that same discovery. My brothers and sisters in Imago Christi provided the consistent pattern of love, forgiveness, and commitment within this emerging tapestry.

As Mansions of the Heart began to take shape, Mike Klassen, Chris Lyons, Bill O’Byrne, Jeremy Stefano, LaVahn Ferré, and Arlene Kampe read, edited, and reread endless versions, helping me discover how to communicate better what God had laid upon my heart. The advice and coaching of Greg Johnson, my literary agent, and the staff at Jossey-Bass have added joy as well as expertise to the emerging image of this woven work of God.

For you all, I am so grateful that you followed Jesus’ lead and touched my life in transforming ways. May the fabric of our lives forever honor and love the One who calls us onward into the mansions of His love.

CHAPTER 1

Is This All There Is?

But now, O LORD, You are our Father, We are the clay, and You our potter; and all of us are the work of Your hand.

—ISAIAH 64:8

THE JOURNEY WITH JESUS: MY JOURNEY QUESTIONS SURFACED in the most unlikely way—in a Quonset hut and a chicken coop, with a tall thin monk who talked about listening to God. It happened during the years when I pastored a Lutheran church in the Salt Lake City area. Not aware of any spiritual growth questions in me, I visited this Trappist monastery only because I heard they had quiet guest rooms where I could get away to study and work. Holy Trinity Abbey lies in a beautiful mountain valley, with eighteen hundred acres of prime farm and pasture land that the monks work to support themselves. The lush green fields are surrounded with high, snow-capped mountain peaks. The vistas were breathtaking, but I was a little disappointed with the facility: simple Quonset hut buildings, with foam insulation on the outside, placed in a quadrangle. The simplicity, silence, and smell of cows were later to become a hint of the kinds of transformations that the Lord had planned for me. But at this point, I just wanted to be alone and work.