This term, our One Year Diploma students at the Institute Of Contemporary & Emerging Worship Studies are engaging with the riches of spiritual formation literature throughout the ages of the Church. We are also engaging together in a Spiritual Formation Group, based on Richard Foster and Renovare’s model, and participating with resident SSU Spiritual Director Lorna Jones in Ignatian Prayer activities.
To become present to God, to His activity in history, to His word, to ourselves and to one another inside and outside of community – this is a primary goal for this course.
Anyone is welcome to join in these InReflection blog posts on spiritual formation, which will be for our course participants to reflect on ideas they have been reading about and applying from historic spiritual formation literature.
Our first reading, done today in class and due on each Tuesday, is focused on Bernard Of Clairvaux’s Four Degrees Of Love.
INRESPONSE QUESTION:
Reflect on the key ideas presented in this writing, and reflect on how do they personally apply to your life as a follower of Jesus, as a spiritual influencer and as a creative leader. (300-500 words).
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Well as I read over this piece again, I start to see closer where I lie. I started to see that I’m loving God for Gods sake, that I’m also loving self for self sake and occasionally I find myself loving God for self sake but the one that I’ve never experienced and I struggle with the concept of the most, if loving self for God’s sake.
The thought of loving God so much that you love yourself and only because he loves you, is mind blowing! I think that if I ever got to this stage, I would soon realise that loving self is really quite good and then I would slip back into loving self for self sake. The idea of going to bed early and eating healthily and looking after my body, not for my own sake but God’s sake, seems like a hard task.
Just simply the mental battle that would take place between the temptation of my human selfish instinct and hearing God’s words, I could easily suggest that I felt that God wanted me to do something and I would be again loving self for self sake.
While reflecting on the class I tried practicing loving myself for God’s sake and to do this I decided that I would find an element of my life that I wouldn’t personally gain/ benefit from and I in that area sacrifice what God would have me sacrifice.
Let see how it works out!
Dan
The first time we talked about these four degrees (last term) my initial reaction was, “Not another formula!” As we walked through them, though, I could hear in them, and in the way they affected some of the group at they commented on them, that there was more to them than my first reaction, and that I should find out what that might be.
I can agree with Bernard and what he says in the introduction, “The reason for loving God is God himself”, but I don’t know why I believe this. Ever since I was a young boy, I have felt a relationship with God. I know that feeling a relationship doesn’t sound right, but I don’t know how else to explain it. This emotional attachment has influenced many of the choices I have made, and induced most of the guilt I have experienced when I made the wrong ones. Although it might be easiest to chalk that up to “Catholic Guilt”, I don’t think that has everything to do with it. From as far back as I can remember, I have felt a similar emotional attachment to God as I have had to my parents, along with a similar desire to please Him and similar feeling of letting Him down.
The first degree seems like a no-brainer to me. I think that I have been very good at being selfish for most of my life (that is how I read loving self fro self’s sake). I have also gotten very good at manipulating circumstances and people so that I could get what I want without it looking like that was what I was doing (at least I think I’m good at it). While this caused little ethical guilt for me as a child, I find myself less likely to enjoy the fruits of those labors, as I get older, wiser, or more aware of my desire to control.
I would have to say that the second degree is where I have spent most of my “official Christian life” (the time since I said the prayer). I like what Bernard says, “This is how we who only love ourselves first begin to love God.” I just wish that it didn’t feel so disappointing to admit that I haven’t gotten very far from this place of asking what God can do for me. I know there have been times when I have actually sought His kingdom first, but those have been too rare and too far between to make be feel that great about them.
Because of my lack of experience in degrees three and four, it is hard to read them without regret. Yet, the way in which Bernard develops them, and how he explains how they develop in us, gives me hope. Yes, “those moments” do happen, and my prayer is that they happen less and less through effort, and more and more as result of the relationship that I still feel inside.
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