It's like a gym for your soul
Your Life with God is Christian Spiritual Exercises
As we were thinking about a framework for Your Life with God, we were thinking about the essence of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.
How to take basically everything about the Christian faith and distill into a comprehensive way to follow. A way that reaches back to the ancient Christian traditions, and forward through all denominations and sects. What are the basics, and how do we share them with those who are seeking a deeper walk with God?
We didn’t want to call it a course - everybody has a course. We’re inundated with courses these days. This feels too important.
We didn’t want to call it a program. We think ‘program’ is a word that belongs to a 20th century church structure that is disappearing.
We wanted to connect ourselves and others with the church that is being reborn.
We decided to call what we’re doing ‘spiritual exercises’.
Invoking the ancient monastic tradition, and something fully modern: the gym.
We’re using the analogy of the gym to describe Your Life with God, because ‘spiritual exercises’ brings physical exercise to mind, and because we can all imagine what a gym for physical exercise is.
Your Life with God is Spiritual Exercise - a gym for your soul.
Your Life with God is the ‘equipment’ and the ‘activity’ to stretch and strengthen your spiritual life.
Your Life with God is a way to challenge our soul.
It’s a way to grow in faith.
It’s a way experience transcendence within the Christian tradition.
Drawing on centuries of tradition, as well as the things most followers of Jesus have in common today, we’re calling the steps to ‘spiritual fitness’: Presence, Calling, and Ritual.
Presence = God reaching out to us (Scripture, sacrament, revelation, nature, creation).
Calling = Our response to God’s presence and power in our lives (vocation, gifts, creativity, discovery).
Ritual = How we order our lives to make space for this holy relationship (prayer, worship, rest, good works, discipline).
This is how it works:
Monthly community:
Join us through ‘chat’ on Substack to craft a Rule of Life. The first Wednesday of every month, we’ll share on the chat - available all day - how we’re creating and following our ‘Rule’. You’ll receive an email notifying you about the chat. [we encourage YLWG ‘chapters’ to also meet in person].
Weekly reflection:
Every Monday you’ll receive an email post with reflections on Presence and Calling.
Daily Practice:
Each week’s reflection will also reference Ritual - and encourage you to Practice or explore it.
We’re excited about the ‘gym’ analogy as a way to describe the spiritual exercises.
Why do we go to the gym?
We want to get fit.
We want to be stronger.
We want to be our best selves.
Ultimately, we want to find our limits. We want to push ourselves.
Why? Because we want to find the edge. We want to find out what we’re made of, what’s inside of us. And when we find it, we see what’s beyond us, and is beautiful. We want to find transcendence. Joy.
This is the very first weekly reflection. It’s a little more explanatory than they will be in the future, but we do want to start you with some basic stretches…
This post grounds us all in the very first attempts to consolidate Christian belief - the Creeds. The earliest Christian creeds were how the community drew together to define belief - based on Scripture and practice.
We invite you to spend some time with this post, which includes the earliest Creeds - embedded with the Scripture each line was taken from.
Use any part of this as Presence - experiencing God reaching out to you.
Consider your own Calling - how do respond to these statements as you say ‘I believe…’? What does this evoke in you?
Your Ritual this week is saying the Nicene Creed itself each day.
This post - and all its links - are free this week as we begin.
We invite and encourage you to subscribe become a ‘gym’ member - subscribe to the ‘spiritual exercises’ experience the transforming power of Love in the world, and live a life of wonder and joy.