The God of Intimacy and Action

Reconnecting Ancient Spiritual Practices, Evangelism, and Justice

Mary Albert Darling

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781506454917
• eBook ISBN: 9781506454924
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Acclaimed evangelical speaker and writer Tony Campolo teams up with spiritual director and teacher Mary Albert Darling to reveal some gems from the liturgical Christian tradition to Protestants who may be ready for a refreshing change. While steeped in their own evangelical tradition, the authors are not afraid to venture back into Christian history and reclaim practices that have long been considered exclusively Catholic--including Centering Prayer, along with works by Ignatius Loyola and Catherine of Siena--as excellent spiritual tools to help evangelicals grow in faith and love for the poor. A vital theme in Campolo and Darling's work is that spirituality is not solely an individualistic practice but must lead Christians to love and help the oppressed. True Christian mysticism, they posit, is not an either/or proposition. That's because the nexus between evangelism and justice is to be found in Christian mysticism.

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FUELING INTIMACY

THE MYSTICAL PATH

Mary Albert Darling

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AWAKENING TO MYSTICISM AND A HOLISTIC GOSPEL (EVEN IF YOU'RE NOT A MONK)

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

—II Corinthians 3:17

Although I have been a Christian for a long time, I did not realize the importance of a serious commitment to evangelistic or justice work as early as Tony did. I was much more interested in cultivating my own personal relationship with Christ. I loved reading stories and writings of monks and nuns who had deep intimacy with Christ and through those readings felt inspired to deepen my own relationship with Christ. But as time went on, I realized I was reading selectively. I was focusing more on a particular saint’s mystical intimacy with Jesus than on the service that inevitably arose in conjunction with that intimacy.

My readings did not lead me to the more formal life of a monk or a nun—although it was tempting when I realized that nuns like Teresa of Avila and monks like Francis of Assisi and Thomas Merton grasped something that for many years I caught only in glimpses. They seemed to have something deeply mysterious and freeing in their daily relationships with Christ, something that fueled them with relentless desires to share that relationship through their words and their work. Although their lives greatly inspired me to want that kind of relationship, with those kinds of outpourings, I had the mistaken notion that the realm of “mystical” in which they lived was reserved for others—those supersaints I loved to read about but who seemed so far beyond my own daily life.

I was wrong. I now realize that to be in an intimate relationship with Jesus means I am a mystic. It means that I can—and should—cultivate the kind of mystical intimacy with Jesus that empowers me to do Jesus’ work: sharing my relationship with Jesus with others in ways that help God’s Kingdom to come and God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. In fact, I now realize that I cannot really be a Christian without being a mystic. A person becomes a Christian by entering into a personal, intimate, transforming relationship with Jesus Christ who is ever-present, living in us—now that’s mystical!

I now realize that I cannot really be a Christian without being a mystic.

We Don’t Know What We Don’t Know

My students at Spring Arbor University sometimes tell me they want certain assignments to be optional so that they can decide what they need to read and learn. I usually respond to this request by telling them, “We don’t know what we don’t know.” At first they stare at me, thinking that this is the stupidest thing they have ever heard. But then I add that if we don’t know what we don’t know, we have more to learn than we realize. Even so, as we mature, we tend to believe that we know the limits of what we need to learn. We might even think we have all the knowledge and resources we need for living. Except instead of really living, we stagnate and hit a false ceiling. In addition, we can get stuck thinking that life is about defending what we know, instead of being open to something more. A relationship with Jesus, however, should be anything but stagnant or stuck. It is not enough to live with what we think is sufficient in our walk with Christ if that means we have settled for less.

It is not enough to live with what we think is sufficient . . . if that means we have settled for less.

The summer after I graduated from high school I dated a really nice Christian guy. After a few dates we started to talk more about our faith. I told him that I did not want to “settle” in my Christian life—I wanted my whole life to be about following Jesus. I will never forget his response: “Why can’t two people just be Christians, have a nice house, and live a normal life?” When he said that, my heart sank. That was not what I wanted. To me that was settling for something less than Jesus wants for me and for all of us. I wanted the abundant life that Jesus promised in John 10:10 and that Irenaeus, one of the early church bishops, expressed by claiming that “man fully alive is the glory of God.” (And so is woman.) And although I did not know what that abundant life was, I wanted to find it. I knew in my heart that it is about more than personal happiness and self-gratification. I knew it is about loving God and loving others in radical, life-transforming ways. I sensed that spiritual vitality is meant to enliven and empower us to share the gospel of Jesus Christ and to work effectively for change and healing, so that we all can experience a full life in Christ. And although I was a Christian, I was sensing that I was not living that radically abundant life Jesus calls us to live. I didn’t seem to know how to develop what I wanted—the kind of spirituality that led me away from my own disordered desires to the true desires of my heart—the ones that involve deep inward and outward transformation.

In the following chapters I tell you about my journey toward an awareness that I had to be in a mystically intimate, “Spirit-led” relationship with Jesus if I wanted to love and live for God more freely, boldly, and consistently. I tell you my story in the hope that no matter where you are on your journey, you too might recognize the wonder of the intimate love of Christ in deeply transforming ways that will not only mystically change you, but motivate you to help change the world.

My Journey as a Theological Mutt

My spiritual development has been anything but consistent. Instead, it has involved a mix of several theological influences. I had what I consider my first “evangelical” experience with Christianity when I was around age eleven. Our neighbor down the street, Mrs. Ulmer, asked if I would come to her backyard once a week in the afternoon for what was called the “Good News Club.” Many of my friends in the neighborhood attended this club, where we played games and then talked about Jesus and the Bible. One day Mrs. Ulmer asked my friend Sue and me to stay after club so she could talk to us more about Jesus. I can still picture the two of us sitting on the bottom step of her stairs as she told us that Jesus came to save people from their sins so they could live for God and have eternal life. She then asked us if we wanted to pray to God for forgiveness of our sins and for Jesus to come into our hearts and be Lord of our lives. Even though at that point in my life I didn’t think I had done anything so terrible as to send Jesus to the cross for my sins, still I prayed the prayer. Sue prayed it too. Mrs. Ulmer said we were now Christians. At the time, Sue and I hardly understood any of the implications involved in being Christian. And although from that moment on I identified myself as a Christian, we walked away from Mrs. Ulmer’s house not quite sure what we were supposed to do now that we had prayed that prayer.

Right around this same time, my mom wanted our family to find a different church, because she felt that our minister was preaching too much “social gospel” and not enough “personal salvation.” To her, preaching personal salvation—that is, giving a direct invitation to accept Jesus into our lives—was the crux of Christianity. But what my young heart and mind also heard, although I do not believe this was her intention, was that preaching about social and legal reforms was not a mandatory part of the gospel of Jesus. Because of these two early experiences, the stage was set for me to understand conversion to Jesus Christ very narrowly. My mom’s theological opinion was truth for me, so I concluded that the personal side of my relationship with Christ and traditional evangelism—trying to get others to “pray the prayer”—were essential (even though the evangelism part didn’t appeal much to me). And although my mom had a compassionate heart for the poor and oppressed, no matter who they were, as well as a gift for connecting with God’s creation, especially animals, I viewed intentionally working for justice issues as at best second-rate to personal conversion.

This narrow view worked well for me because I was a very insecure, scared-of-almost-everything child. My sister remembers (all too often) not being able to get to her elementary class on time because I wouldn’t let go of her hand to go into my kindergarten class. I wish I could say that was just first-day jitters, but some of those “jitters” stayed with me for too many years and in too many situations. So my personal relationship with Christ became personally focused on me more than on others. Christ became my friend over the next several years through prayer, Bible study, and the “Youth for Christ” organization. But my fears and insecurities caused the friendship to be fairly one-sided. Although I would venture out at times and nervously witness or do a one-hour service project, my relationship with Christ was still too much about me and my issues, preventing me from trusting Jesus enough to live more wholeheartedly for God’s reign. I did not yet have enough resources at my disposal to understand that the holistic message of Jesus included sharing Jesus with the lost and needy as the norm of my daily life. Certain spiritual writings would draw me into times of intimacy with Jesus, and although these writings included talk about loving and serving others, much of the time my own relationship with Jesus involved just Jesus and me.

A devotional book that my mom gave me, God Calling,^[1] helped me begin to experience Jesus in even more intimate ways—I felt so connected and close to Jesus when I read that book. The same thing happened when I read Hannah Hurnard’s Hinds’ Feet on High Places,^[2] a powerful allegory about our intimate journey and surrender to God. The book featured a main character named “Much Afraid.” I could definitely relate to that name, so her journey to a new name, “Grace and Glory,” was very appealing. But the closeness I felt during those times of reading was not enough. When I stopped reading Hinds’ Feet, I was still “Much Afraid.” I hungered for a depth of relationship that made a difference in all of my life, one that would get me out of my own self-centered story and into God’s other-centered story.

During my final semester in college, I was required to read a book that was unlike any other book I had ever read—Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.^[3] Although I was sympathetic to the poor and oppressed, I had never taken Jesus’ words about working for justice much beyond giving away some clothes, giving a little money, helping out in a homeless shelter for an hour, or volunteering an afternoon at a recycling center. As necessary as those things are, they are not enough. But I didn’t know that at the time. I thought that working for the needs of the poor and oppressed was a more life-altering call that was only for some Christians. The message I thought I received earlier in life, that a social gospel was optional, had taken hold. But now Ron Sider was telling me something very different. He was telling me that if I truly loved Jesus, I must be committed to the poor and oppressed. More than that, Sider said those were not his own ideas and words, they were the words of Jesus. They were in the Bible.

So I looked up those words, and found out that he was right. My discovery was similar to that of Rick Warren, a leading evangelical pastor and author of The Purpose-Driven Life, who after being sensitized to the AIDS pandemic, reread scripture with different eyes. He said, “I found those 2,000 verses on the poor. How did I miss that? I went to Bible college, two seminaries, and I got a doctorate. How did I miss God’s compassion for the poor? I was not seeing all the purposes of God.”^[4]

Neither was I. I was still lacking in the kind of daily, intentional mystical intimacy with Christ that could empower me to live a more holistic gospel. I was still too insecure and too self-focused to do much more than sponsor a Third World child. As important as that kind of sponsorship is, it eased my guilty conscience too much and too soon.

Looking back, I know that being sensitized to child sponsorship was one of the many ways the Holy Spirit was tugging at my heart, but I continued to be a very slow learner. I believe this was partly because I did not have many of the resource...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for The God of Intimacy and Action
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraphs
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface to The God of Intimacy and Action’s Tenth-Anniversary Edition
• Acknowledgments
• An Introduction to Mystical Christianity
• Knowing God Intimately
• Fueling Intimacy
• Taking Intimacy with God into the World
• Tenth-Anniversary Epilogue
• Postscript
• Notes
• Discussion/Reflection Guide
• The Authors
• Index