This is the third article in a series I’m writing about 7 Essential Spiritual Formation questions. My friend and colleague, David Kludt, and I are developing a three-year doctoral cohort in spiritual formation at Fuller Seminary. We are using these 7 questions to guide our exploration.

In a previous article, I explored the question: What is our shared reality?: Facing the complexity of the human condition.

A second essential spiritual formation question is:

How do we know what is real? What are the sources of information and intelligence available to us that can help us survive and thrive?

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with this question. You don’t have to be a philosopher to appreciate its relevance to our everyday lives. In a time of fake news and distorted perceptions, it’s hard to figure out how to get along, let alone make the world better, when we struggle to find common ground about what is real. A lack of shared understanding of what is real is at the heart of our present conflicts, alienation, and social fragmentation. It’s poignant to remember that the word religion comes from the Latin word ligare, which means to link, bind, or bond. As a species, we are in search of connections and a shared understanding of what is real.

When I was growing up, I was taught to trust certain sources of information, namely the Bible and authority figures, and to doubt or reject other sources of information, including my own instincts, logic, experiences, and bodily sensations. I heard things like, “You aren’t sick. Go to school” and “Believe the facts, don’t trust your feelings.” I lived in a perpetual state of cognitive dissonance, where, in order to hold onto certain beliefs and relational connections, I sometimes had to deny or explain away what was right in front of me.

Ian McGilchrist’s work, The Master and His Emissary (2009), suggests that this dissonance is related to the two-hemisphere structure of our brains. The left brain creates mental maps and is 100% convinced of what it already knows. It tends to discount the expansive and embodied knowing of our right brains, which arises from experience. To live in the real, we have to find a way to value multiple ways of knowing and search for consilience and cohesion between multiple sources of intelligence and information.

Jesus said, “The eye is the lamp of the body. If your eyes are healthy, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are unhealthy, your whole body will be full of darkness.” (Matthew 6:22-23). If we look at spiritual formation through the lens of epistemology, we might view it as a progressive journey of seeing clearly and acting from a more accurate understanding of who God is, who we are, and how life works. Perhaps Jesus was able to live in the remarkable way that he did, expressing radical love and uncompromising resistance to the “machine” of empire because he was so deeply in touch with what is real.

If you’ve ever been to a therapist or studied psychology, you know that our way of seeing is often clouded by predictable cognitive distortions, which include black-and-white thinking, overgeneralizations, and mental filtering. Most of us have the experience of believing that certain things are real and true, but behaving in contradiction to those stated beliefs and commitments. What we say we believe is real and what we actually believe is real can be different. We often make decisions based on gut instincts and then later justify those decisions using logic and selective evidence.

So, what are the sources of information and intelligence that we can use to apprehend what is real?

On a basic level, the information we get from our five senses helps us know what is real. What can I taste, see, hear, smell, and touch? We also have intuition and the ability to introspect, noticing the inner workings of our thinking, feeling, behaving, and relating.

We rely heavily on inherited knowledge—information and assumptions passed down to us by upbringing and culture. We attribute authority and wisdom to certain people, institutions, traditions, and authoritative texts. We sometimes rely on second-hand information from people we trust, but often, it’s better to seek out first-hand experiences to determine what is real and true. Myths, metaphors, and metanarratives help us organize structures of meaning and interpretations of our experiences.

Humans have three main sources of intelligence that help us survive and thrive. We use mental intelligence and logic to anticipate the future and predict danger. We use our body or gut intelligence to exercise agency and control over our surroundings and within ourselves. And we use our heart intelligence to gauge our interpersonal safety and attachments.

Many of our personal struggles and interpersonal conflicts are related to distortions and doubts related to mind, body, and heart intelligence: Am I safe? Am I powerful? Am I loved and connected?

As a spiritual director and coach, I often invite people to consider what sources of information and intelligence they most easily access, and which they tend to ignore. Some of us get stuck in our heads, and we would benefit from learning to pay more attention to what our bodies are trying to tell us. Get out for a walk. Do a body scan. Focus on breath. Rest when you feel tired. Some of us get stuck in our feelings, and it might help to think and reason more clearly. Research and get more information. Write or talk out the logic of a decision. And for some of us, paying more attention to feelings and our attachments to others can unlock growth. Attune to people you love. Ask questions and listen actively. Monitor your emotions.

What sources of intelligence and information have you most relied on to determine what is real— and what have been the consequences of that practice?

What sources of intelligence and information have you ignored or neglected, and what gifts might they bring you?

This is the second in a series of articles I’m writing about 7 essential spiritual formation questions. These questions provide the structure for a Doctor of Ministry cohort that I’m designing with my friend and colleague, Dave Kludt.

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About a year ago, my friend Dave Kludt and I were invited to develop a doctoral cohort in spiritual formation for Fuller Seminary. We’ve titled the cohort:

Spiritual Formation: Embodied and Integral Leadership for the 21st Century.

When people hear me say the title, they often say, “Wow, that’s a mouthful! What the heck does that mean?

In the Christian context, spiritual formation is another word for discipleship, the process of becoming a fully formed apprentice to Jesus— knowing him, becoming like him, and being able to do what he did.

We use the term embodied because we want to clarify that spiritual formation isn’t just about information. It’s a reality we are meant to inhabit.

We use the term integral because we think it’s important to consider how apprenticeship to Jesus impacts every aspect of our lives, including our shared ecological, social, economic, political, and technological reality.

Here’s a definition of spiritual formation that I believe accounts for the complex, embodied, and holistic nature of our existence:

Spiritual formation, or apprenticeship to Jesus, is a progressive journey of becoming like Christ by learning to see and act as Jesus did, from a more accurate understanding of who God is, who we are, and how life works.

What this assumes is that Jesus was fully in touch with reality, or what he called “the kingdom of God.” We start our journey of formation with distorted perceptions of reality and an insecure attachment to our ultimate source.

It goes without saying that a person can identify as Christian and continue to act from distorted perceptions and a lack of secure attachment— and fail to experience significant transformation. Although it is widely assumed that the main purpose of the church is to help people become disciples of Jesus, most leaders will admit that the church often fails to do this, and efforts to make it a priority are often met with resistance.

I came of age in faith leadership in an era when there was a lot of focus on what could be quantified and measured: conversions and baptisms, increasing church attendance, biblical literacy, liturgical or theological fidelity, ecstatic experiences, personal moral reform, social engagement; the list goes on and on.

A frustration with external measures led many of us on an inner journey of soul renovation. Currently, the term spiritual formation is often associated with activities like contemplative prayer, silent retreats, classic historical spiritual disciplines, the study of earlier traditions and mystics, and meeting with a spiritual director. As meaningful and helpful as any of these activities might be, they don’t account for the whole picture. By themselves, these activities don’t produce what we might think of as a well-formed disciple of Jesus— a person who manifests God’s love in the world and embodies Christ’s presence, ethics, and character.

We’ve tended to, inadvertently, take a view of spiritual formation that focuses on the parts rather than the whole, reducing formation to a small set of practices or measurable results. What we need is an expansive understanding of spiritual formation that faces the whole of our shared reality, acknowledges the complexity of the human condition, and invites us to respond with every capacity of our being.

There is something in us that craves simple formulas. If I do a, b, c, I will get x, y, c results. A lot of focus in the contemporary spiritual formation movement has been on specific strategies, practices, and/or subjective states of experience. We end up feeling discouraged and frustrated if we don’t get the results we wanted. Or we assume it’s working for other people and wonder if there is something wrong with us. (There is also the factor of neuro styles— more on this later). If spiritual formation is about getting in touch with reality, then it must acknowledge the whole of our lives and the integral nature of our shared reality.

What if instead of reducing spiritual formation to a formula or set of practices, we let our journey be shaped by critical questions for ongoing discernment?

Here are seven questions that I propose can guide us towards a holistic and integral path of spiritual formation:

1. What is your experience and understanding of our shared reality? What is our world like? What does it mean to be human? What challenges do we face as a species? What is the cluster of interrelated crises that arise from the human condition? How does the disorder in the world mirror the disorder of our inner lives?

2. How do we know what is real? What are the sources of intelligence that we can utilize to guide how we understand and navigate the world? Which sources of intelligence are you accessing and which are you ignoring to your detriment?

3. What is most real and true? What is preferred and possible? What vision of flourishing can guide us in the work of formation? What specific vocabulary and criteria of flourishing does the Jesus tradition suggest?

4. Who am I? What are my patterns of thinking, feeling, behaving and relating? In what dimensions of life and categories of flourishing do I have the most need and longing for growth or change?

5. How does change happen, and how can I change? What life circumstances and pain points are inviting me to change? What are the postures, practices, and relationships that can move me towards flourishing and participation in the common good?

6. How can I effectively accompany and guide others into growth and change? Who am I meant to walk with and support? What is the social contract and shared activities that can help us mutually grow?

7. How can we participate in and guide our communities, systems, and social structures towards growth and change? What are the social structures that I am meant to be part of? How can I effectively be an agent of change in those communities, systems, and structures?

In future posts, I’ll unpack each of these seven critical questions, and invite my colleague Dave Kludt to chime in.

In his Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke writes, “Be patient towards all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

So here’s to living the questions!

Here I am posting for the first time on Substack. I feel a little late to the party. I’ve been largely silent online for the past several years, prioritizing in-person connections and conversations. But I’ve decided it’s time to reemerge and share some of my life with people I love that I rarely get to see in person.

As I write, we are enjoying the low slung light of autumn in San Francisco, when the days grow shorter and our coastal weather is strangely warmer.

This morning I took a quick walk around the square near our house, past the empty bottles and chip bags strewn on the ground from last nights dice and card games. In the gated area by the soccer field, people bring their dogs to run off leash. A man sitting in a wheelchair watches T.V., taking advantage of the park building’s wifi signal.

Last night, our daughter Hailey and I took her dog, Masie, on a walk. As we often do, we found discarded clothes that Hailey will wash and resell online. It gives her a little spending money and keeps these items from the landfill.

A neighbor, who often sits on our front steps, invited me to share a burrito and talk. When I told him that I’d been sick he said, “I’ll pray for you.” He put his hand on my shoulder and vociferously cried out for my healing with the cadence of an old time preacher. Then we had some good laughs. He said he wanted to talk about the gospel, so as we ate our burrito, we discussed the crucifixion of Christ, and details about King Herod, Pontius Pilate and Roman occupation. He knows the Gospels about as well as I do, and has his own theory about what it all means, which veers towards conspiracies and apocalypse. He listens but doesn’t have much time for what I say about Jesus being an exemplar and expression of Divine love.

I continue to meet with spiritual direction and coaching clients. People from many walks of life— farmers, trades people, pastors, poets and musicians, CEO’s, and parents raising teenagers. It’s an honor to be a companion to people in the questions and longings of their inner lives and relationships. Sometimes I get to witness amazing breakthroughs. Often I sit patiently with people as they sift through the ambiguities, contradictions and unsolved mysteries of their lives. The direction and coaching I provide is holistic, so in one session we might talk about their concept of God, relationship challenges, neurodiversity, sleep, current events and finances. I hold stories, remind people of their dignity and belovedness, and help them listen for God’s whispers.

We spent the first half of this year supporting a project called Serenity Collective, a group of friends in recovery who I helped white board and pilot a 15 week group journey through the 12 steps. It was an attempt to rediscover how the 12 steps are rooted in the teachings of Jesus as well as evidence-based psychology, and an experiment in working through the 12 steps in a structured lab format. We learned and shared a lot together and the group is now editing the workbook we created to make it available to others.

I have continued to teach Mental Health First Aid in hospitals and with military and court personnel, through a government grant administered by Kaiser Permanente. In our trainings, many of the participants share pain about what their family or church taught them about mental health. With leftover funds from the grant, we have been able to to offer free Mental Health First Aid training to faith leaders and volunteers. Faith leaders and faith communities are often the first point of contact when individuals and families face mental health problems or traumatic events, and can serve serve as a vital link between a person experiencing a mental health challenge and appropriate professional support. The grant also paid for a Latin American friend, who is a pastor and community leader, to get certified as a trainer. We are working together to bring Mental Health First Aid training to faith communities and non-profits in the Bay Area and beyond. Since the grant has concluded, we are looking for creative ways to fund this work.

My friend Dave Kludt and I are preparing to teach a three year Doctor of Ministry cohort at Fuller (Dave is also on ReIMAGINE’s Board of Directors). I’ve taught courses at Fuller for a dozen years. Fuller gave us an opportunity to design an entire Doctorate, titled, Spiritual Formation: Embodied and Integral Leadership for the 21st Century. It’s giving me an opportunity to synthesize and share what I’ve learned about spiritual formation over the past 25 years of research and practice. This fall, to prepare to lead the cohort, we are doing an online pilot group oriented around 7 essential spiritual formation questions:

1. What is our shared experience of reality and the meta crisis we face together?

2. How do we know what is real, and what sources of information and intelligence are we using to guide us?

3. What is most real and true? What does the life and message of Jesus tell us about what is preferred and possible for our lives?

4. Who am I and what are my patterns of thinking, feeling behaving and relating? What are my deepest longings for growth and change?

5. How does change happen, and how can I grow and change?

6. How can I journey with and guide others in their growth and formation?

7. How can we work together to see change happen in whole communities, systems and structures?

I realize these questions are rather philosophical. A lot of what we’ve offered through labs, retreats and workshops in the past have been intensely practical. We’ve given out recipes and taught people how to cook. With this Doctoral cohort, we are inviting learners to consider the ingredients and principles of spiritual formation, so they can create their own delicious recipes. For their doctoral project, each student will design and pilot a spiritual formation process for their local context.

Lisa and I have been able to travel a bit this year and pursue some of our interests. We’ve also had two close friends die. My beloved friend and mentor, Tom Sine, author of The Mustard Seed Conspiracy, died in July. And another good friend with a Celtic soul and warrior’s heart, Rob Lewin, passed away in August. I was privileged to be involved in both their celebrations of life.

ReIMAGINE recently celebrated 25 years as a faith based non-profit. We continue to be funded by a small group of ardent donors and through program fees, consulting and speaking honorariums.

Here are a couple of ways you can engage with our work:

• Consider signing up for spiritual direction/coaching, or refer a friend.

• Invite us to provide certified Mental Health First Aid training to your faith community, non-profit or company.