Week 1: Rooted in the Streams
This past week, my children and I returned to school. My oldest two don uniforms and lunch boxes, and I carry seminary textbooks to doctor appointments and the school pick-up line of minivans and frenzied parents, sneaking in a few pages of reading throughout the day before the real work begins after their bedtime.
Life is indeed full.
In this change of seasons, I am reminded once again of all of life’s incessant demands: clean polos and signed homework forms alongside Chicago formatting and discussion board posts, dinner and broken dryers and the toddler who has been asking to do a puzzle together for the last three hours. Life is overflowing with demands, and they do in fact matter. Clean socks, a well written essay, and a nice bowl of vegetable curry can really bring us life!
However, I’ve found that for myself and many followers of Jesus in my church community, it is quite tempting to see discipleship as another demand: Read the Bible and pray for thirty minutes a day! Share your faith with your neighbor! Feed the widow and orphan! Invite your neighbors over for dinner! And goodness, quit that nasty habit you keep doing!
Somehow we’ve traded the Good News—life with God— for a demanding list of spiritual requirements spurred by shame and guilt. We’ve usurped the end for the means. Instead of seeking life with God, we’ve sought a functional spirituality that is easily quantifiable and yet also lacking dimension, vitality, and resilience.
Perhaps this is why Dallas Willard’s words have been haunting to me–in a good way– during this shift of seasons. Willard, a teacher and committed member of his small church community, reminds us of how discipleship relates to/with the demands of our given lives:
“The greatest issue facing the world today, with all of our heartbreaking needs, is whether those who… are identified as “christians” will become disciples– students, apprentices, practitioners– of Jesus Christ, steadily learning from him how to live the life of the Kingdom of the Heavens into every corner of human existence.”[1]
Here, Willard reminds us that there is indeed Good News of life with God. We are invited to live with and through Christ, an abundant life beginning now and continuing for eternity! This life is not added to-do, but rather a communion that extends into “every corner” of lives, enlivening the demands, rhythms, and happenings of our lives. Francis de Sales poetically echoes Willard, describing a life with God where “every vocation becomes more agreeably united with devotion…[as if] dipped in honey.” [2] The deep goodness of Kingdom life extends to all the corners, to wherever we are.
However, we cannot neglect the urgency of Willard’s words. The question of discipleship is whether we will apprentice Jesus or not. Will we be disciples? Will we live with God? Will we imitate Christ?
And if we say “yes” or want to say “yes,” then we must ask– “how?”
This week, I've meditated on Psalm 1 alongside Foster’s work, the writings of Willard, and devotions of the saints, and I’ve come back to the image of a tree by steady, flowing water: roots spread wide and deep; lush, green leaves, dark and large like the fiddle leaf fig; branches full gifting peaceful shade and yet swaying freely in the wind, open wide.[3] Discipleship is becoming our truest self– whole, alive, vibrant, fruitful– by rooting ourselves deeply in the living water of God’s Spirit. These streams that serve as our “how” or our primary access to this work of God include deep intimacy with God through intimate prayer (contemplative), virtuous habits (holiness), openness to God’s active Spirit (charismatic), communal work toward wholeness and justice (social justice), renewal of our personal and collective narrative (evangelical), and an embodied life with God (sacramental). I imagine that, like trees with roots spread as wide underground as its foliage above ground, followers of Jesus find incredible nourishment, delight, and renewal with God as we sink deeply into each of these streams.[4]
To put it simply, God redeems the imago dei in us as we grow rooted in the way of Christ, imitatio christi.
As organic creatures, our discipleship must have dimensions, affecting us deeply at the various levels and aspects or our being and at the unique seasons of our lives, in order to truly “draw us into Christ” wholly and completely.[5] Thus, these unique streams together indeed affect us at our deepest parts over time, leading to whole life change.[6] The ancient shema of the Old Testament and the Greatest Commandment in the Gospels have always included the affection of our whole being: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength… And love your neighbor as yourself.” Formation of the whole person as well as the enter community came from roots deep in the streams of living water.
Perhaps the depth of this transformation drove Lewis to frequently turn to fiction in his exploration and expression of rooted humanity in light of Christ. The beauty and reality within myth takes one far beyond the prescriptive and utilitarian language of much theological prose, cutting deep into the truest truths of the human soul. My children often ask “Is it real?” while reading aloud about the devastating betrayal of Edward in Narnia or the desire embedded in the hallows in the final Harry Potter book. They ask, I suppose, because while they know these items or people never actually live existed in the way they exist embodied here and now and tucked into bed, there is a reality to them still, a deep truth about what it means to long, to fail, to endure shame, to avoid pain, and to prevail. Stories allow for all the dimensions of our lives to be affected, to be rooted in truth. As one follows Christ for any length of time, one realizes the need for these dimensions, the rich and wide and multifaceted means in which we live the “with God life.” As we are rooted, even through fiction like Lewis, we find our souls quenched.
If discipleship is the redemption and flourishing of our very being, one can recognize the very stakes of refusing such a weighty yet essential call. Dallas Willard is fervently urgent in his call to the church, echoing the necessity for rootedness and the cost of life without:
““Non-discipleship costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees everything in the light of God’s overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil. In short, it costs exactly that abundance of life Jesus said he came to bring (John 10:10).”[7]
If our lives flourish when deeply rooted in the life-giving streams of God’s grace, then the opposite is also true: a human life far from the streams of God’s Spirit lead to a withered existence, a dull expression of our true design, fragility in the face of life’s storms, and perhaps even malnourishment to the point of death. Like Willard, C.S. Lewis also insists that one cannot simply stay in the shallows, still “keeping personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be ‘good’...[God] meant that we must go in for the full treatment.”[8] Only when one truly roots one’s self in the living water, surrendering all other sources that claim to lead to life, can one experience the abundant life with God. Discipleship is a radical call of uprooting the self from shallow pools or tainted wells, and sinking deep into true life with God.
However, digging in one’s roots is not without struggle. In the life of St. Augustine, we see conflicting wills and failure! Even with the fervent prayer of his mother, Saint Monica, Augustine claims constant refusals to the call of discipleship, often “held back from the step by which I should die to death and become alive to life.”[9] As the scriptures came alive to Augustine however, he describes his spiritual renewal in terms of water: “the light of confidence flooded into my heart.”[10] Perhaps it was the convergence of streams– of Word and Spirit– that broke the dam of rebellion that blockaded Augustine’s heart and filled him with the brightness of God’s grace, Light that will undoubtedly lead to the flourishing of Augustine’s life. As Francis Fenelon echos this freedom: “Happy are those who give themselves to God!”[11]
I’ve written out and carried Willard’s quote on the cost of non-discipleship with me, pondering both my deep longing for peace, love, hope, and power and also the possible reasons why abundant life has yet to nourish various aspects of my life.[12] As anxiety and control shrink the roots of my soul, pulling them inward into a tangle, the stream of contemplation beckons to simply be with God, and I find a settling peace fill the arid spaces of my heart. Similarly, the evangelical stream also echoes, calling out that the rooted ones “delight in the law of the Lord.”[13] And I find the story of God washes over me, enlivening my own story as part of the greater story of God and His people. The streams of living water nourish the various dimensions of my soul, inviting us into the “with God” life as true disciples of Jesus.
[1] Dallas Willard, The Great Omission: Reclaiming Jesus’ Essential Teachings on Discipleship (New York: HarperOne, 2007), 89.
[2] Francis de Sales, “One True Devotion,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 30.
[3] This action was a practice listed under “Suggested Exercises,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 39.
Meditating on Psalm 1 was an act of patience and trust in the Lord, rooting me in his living water.
[4] Consider Jesus’ own words in John 4.
[5] C. S. Lewis, “Giving All to Christ,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 10.
[6] Jonathan Edwards, “Engagement of the Heart,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 21.
[7] Dallas Willard, “The Cost of Nondiscipleship,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 15.
[8] [5] C. S. Lewis, “Giving All to Christ,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 9.
[ 9] St. Agustine, “Complete Surrender,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 57.
[ 10] St. Agustine, “Complete Surrender,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 59.
[11 ] Francius Fenelon, “I Will No Longer Divided,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 49.
[12 ] This action was a practice listed under “Suggested Exercises,” from Foster, Richard J., and James Bryan Smith, Devotional Classics: Selected Readings for Individuals and Groups ( San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), 16.
[13] Psalm 1:2