The Reading List

While we were home for Christmas break several people requested my reading list for school. Since I am not in class right now, I have the time to oblige you. Happy reading! My annotations are in red.

Fall Semester

Intro to Spiritual Formation

Invitation to a Journey: A Road Map for Spiritual Formation by M. Robert Mulholland Jr. (InterVarsity Press) This is a great introduction to the subject. A good place to start.

The Deeper Journey: The Spirituality of Discovering Your True Self by M. Robert Mulholland Jr. (InterVarsity Press) His follow up book to further discuss the importance of the dual knowledge in Spiritual Formation, which is to say that it is equally important to increase in knowledge of one's self along with the knowledge of God and vice versa. John Calvin said, "True and sound wisdom consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and ourselves."

Opening to God by Thomas Green (Ave Marie Press) A primer on opening our hearts to God in prayer and offers techniques that ready the soul to encounter God.

Weeds Among the Wheat by Thomas Green (Ave Maria Press) A fantastic book on the practice of discernment. I don't think I have begun to apprehend the richness here. It is a discussion on Ignatius' formula for discerning. I plan to read it again.

The Way of the Heart by Henri Nouwen (Ballantine Press) His discussion on the practices of Solitude, Silence, and Prayer and their importance for us today.

Neurosis and Human Growth by Karen Horney (Norton) Not an easy read. Written by a well-respected researcher and therapist to her fellow therapists. If I might oversimplify, she is discussing the dual nature of a person, how we all have our own Dr. Jekel and Mr. Hyde inside of ourselves. The book focuses mostly on treatment concerns.


History and Theory of SoulCare

The Study of Spirituality by Cheslyn Jones et al (Oxford Press) Honestly, this book was drudgery to read but it does give a thorough survey of the history of spirituality.

Spiritual Direction and the Care of Souls ed by Gary Moon & David Benner (InterVarsity Press) This presents you with a survey of how Spiritual Direction is used in the major denominations. It also provides you with a helpful discussion on the similarities and differences of the Spiritual Director, the Counselor/Therapist, and the Pastoral Counselor, which was very helpful to me.

Spiritual Direction: Beyond the Beginnings by Janet Ruffing (Paulist Press) Probably written more for the Spiritual Director with instruction on things to watch for in doing direction with others.

Praying With Martin Luther by Peter Bastien (St. Mary’s Press) This book as well as the next three were the choice presented to us for use in a prayer project. I heard from my classmates that they enjoyed this book but thought that it tried to pack too much in at a time, so if you choose to go through this book feel free to break up the exercises into more manageable pieces.

The Divine Hours: Prayers for Autumn and Wintertime by Phyllis Tickle (Doubleday) One of a three book series encompassing all of the seasons. I chose this book for my prayer project. It is designed to echo the monastic practice of praying at certain times of the day every day and using prewritten prayers. As a newlywed, I was a little naive about my new living situation and the time and discipline this practice takes. I learned the importance of doing disciplines that fit in your life at the time.

Celtic Daily Prayer by the Northumbria Community (Harper Collins) This book is also designed to help you engage in praying the hours as it is called. There is also a cd that accompanies the book that really blessed some of my classmates.

A Do-It-At-Home Retreat by Adre Ravier (Ignatius Press) My classmates said this one was intense. If you are familiar with the four week Ignatian Retreat, you know what I am talking about. The author is trying to give the experience of the Ignatian Retreat in more manageable pieces to fit into daily life as most people can't take four weeks off to receive this retreat at a monastery.


Personal Foundations of Spirituality & Retreat

Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ by Dallas Willard (NavPress) You can't get far in any modern reading on Spiritual Formation without running into references to this book. So if you are interested in the subject, this is an important one to read. Willard promotes his model of the whole person and how it's different parts interact with each other, e.g. how does the mind interact with the spirit? He addresses how he conceptualizes transformation happening in each of a person's parts.

For our 48 hour retreat we had the option of using any of the following books:

A Seven Day Journey with Thomas Merton by Esther De Waal (Servant Publications)

Practicing Your Path: A book of Retreats for an Intentional Life by Holly Whitcomb (Innisfree Press Inc)

A Vacation with the Lord by Thomas Green (Ave Maria Press)

The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius trans by Louis Puhl (Vintage Books/Random House)

Wilderness Time by Emelie Griffin (Harper Collins)

Spring Semester

Developmental Spirituality/ Contemplative Prayer

Collected Works of St. John of the Cross (rev) trans by Kavanaugh & Rodriguez (ICS Publishing)

When the Well Runs Dry by Thomas Green (Ave Maria Press)

Fire Within by Thomas Dubay (Ignatius Press)

Ascent to Truth by Thomas Merton (Harcourt Brace)

St. John of the Cross: Doctor of Light and Love by Kieran Kavanaugh (Crossroad)

Drinking from a Dry Well by Thomas Green (Ave Maria Press)



Intensive Journey Inward & Retreat

Wilderness Time by Emelie Griffin (Harper Collins)

Going on Retreat by Margaret Silf (Loyola Press)

Letting God Come Close by William Barry (Loyola Press)

Weeds Among the Wheat by Thomas Green (Ave Maria Press)



Personality Development and Psychopathology

Reclaiming Your Story by Merle Jordan (Knox Press)

Object Relations Theories & Psychopathology by Frank Summers (Analytic Press)

Fundamentals of Abnormal Psychology by Ronald Comer (Worth)

Thanksgiving

It's high time I sat down and wrote our Thanksgiving adventure. It's been high time for a while, and I'm glad to finally be writing it. Some pretty fantastic things happened, and I have pictures to prove it.

This year was the first year that both Dez and I were away from our families on Thanksgiving. We were together though, and as we start a new family, I think it was good to experience alternative ways of celebration before we settle in on particular traditions.

Now, on with the adventure....Desiree has a professor who has a husband who operates a retreat center up in the mountains. This professor, along with her husband, invited all the students that were unable to return home for the holiday to the retreat center to celebrate Thanksgiving together.

We were quite excited about this invitation; and, along with a car full of new student-type friends, (who, I might add, were quite entertaining on the 2+ hour trip) traveled high into the mountains. We traveled up from sea level to over 6000 feet if the road signs were to be trusted. Our ears played games with us, but our lungs leaped at the presence of the fresh air.

It was dark upon our arrival Wednesday night. We ate a late dinner of fantastic gourmet pizza, and proceeded to have a very encouraging conversation with the other students. To be more accurate, there was one man, the husband of one of the students, who was telling his story, and the rest of us were listening. There were maybe a dozen of us or so. Though I shan't do his story justice attempting it's retelling, I will try to summarize it:

His story was about how God called him to become honest with his life, and to go on a deeper journey with God using that honesty as a starting point, and his heart as a destination. I shall write about two things that stood out to me, though there were more. 1) How much faith we can have that God will finish his work in us, and how this faith overrules all our fruitless efforts at self-improvement. 2) How often (and how much) the church (specifically, the evangelical church) gets in the way of our growth process. With it's spiritually guised message of self-improvement and it's confusion and lack of experience with the actions of the Holy Spirit in our hearts, the church cannot help but hinder our spiritual formation. Of these two things, the first I found very encouraging, and the second very validating.

After the large group discussion broke for the night, we sat in the hot tub for a while. The water was a little too cold and the seats were a little too high, such that your chest was well above water. The mountain air was clear and clean, but chilled, and the effect of the hot tub was a blend of relaxation gone askew into frustration. What indeed is worse than a good thing gone slightly afoul? But I digress with exaggeration, perhaps, for it was not so unpleasant that we boycotted its pleasures.



Our room for the night contained two twin-sized beds. Me and Dez tried sleeping together in the same bed cuddled very closely together, but it was not working as well as we would have liked. We switched to separate beds, but after an hour or two we missed each other such that we couldn't sleep and we climbed back together in the same bed again. Then once more we would grow crowded, and separate, but then come together again, and so on and so on throughout the night. We didn't sleep as soundly as we had hoped for, but our antics amused us such that it didn't bother us as much as one would think.



The next morning we ate a marvelous breakfast, and then proceeded to hike about out in the woods. We had forgotten the elevation we were at, with the air thinner and such, but our excitement was great being atop mountains and surrounded by trees and rocks and other such things. We saw a deer. We saw a little lizard. We saw many songbirds that, though similar to those in the Midwest, were still quite different. I won't tell of all our adventures in the woods, but one discovery simply cannot be silenced! The pine cones were enormous! As big as our heads! It was perhaps the most surprising thing I have seen in California thus far.



Upon our return from the hike we ate the Thanksgiving meal, and then proceeded to have a little service. We packed our things and said our goodbyes and began the journey home. It was our first Thanksgiving together, and it was a good one.

Opening to God

Never have I had a class that has been such an integrated part of my life. The subject matter given in my Introduction to Spiritual Formation class is part of the ongoing dialogue with my husband. We cannot have a conversation without it in someway coming back to the course material, in particular this concept of opening to God. I am so grateful for the opportunity we have had to learn about this as a couple, especially now as we are just learning about oneness.

Opening to God was a practice we were experimenting with even in our courtship, but we did not understand exactly what it was we were doing. All we knew was that we wanted the Lord to be a welcome and active member of our life together. We didn’t understand about our hidden hearts and their need to be peeled. We didn’t yet understand how the Lord would use us to help each other in the process. The lectures I have been hearing on how God changes the heart have served to validate our experience.

Brandon is certainly my soul friend as I am his. God has changed us through our experience of finding each other a safe and secure place. I first modeled to Brandon the concepts of active listening and extending unconditional positive regard to the speaker. He was quick to pick up on these skills. Through that process of reflecting back what is heard, you give the speaker the gift of mirroring what appears to be going on in the heart. Brandon was the one to teach me about being loved in my mess. He took it beyond non-judgment to love, even in my dark, ugly, broken places. Prior to this I had no concept of God’s ability or desire to love me in those places. Brandon has been reparenting me in a sense, which is opening up my ability to attach more securely to him and to the Lord.

What is it to open to God?
I know that this may sound ridiculously elementary, but I promise that it is profoundly deep:

The idea is that we are disconnected from our hearts and how the Spirit is ALWAYS working in us. As the master soul surgeon, He knows the inner weavings of our heart and will carefully use circumstances, situations, other people to open our hearts. We want to begin to pay attention to what is bubbling up in our hearts, so that we can better cooperate with Him. We want to consciously and increasingly more often ask, "Lord what are You doing in this." What are You trying to show me about my hidden heart. What is going on in my heart that has me so, e.g., angry right now? Lord what are You doing here? In this ongoing exercise one begins to learn how to attend to the Spirit.

dez

The Vice of Curiositas

This semester I have become more aware of my motivations for studying. The Lord has used some of my coursework to bubble up things in my heart that He wants me to look at with Him. The following is another excerpt from my aforementioned final (see my previous post):

My experience of the midterm in one of my classes was a real trip. I have pages and pages written in my journal about all of the fear and anxiety it caused to boil up in me. Admittedly I had to revisit the prayer project nearly every time I studied because I would just freak out. From the beginning of the semester, the Lord was very clear about what my priorities were to be: open in relationship to Him and my new husband and the homework would fall into place after that. I have been rather easy going about my homework throughout the course of this semester until this test popped up. I was blindsided by the feelings it raised. Just looking at the study guide would cause anxiety to begin to boil up in me. The temptation to shift into the “just get it done” gear was very powerful and yet there was a sense that I should not be relying on my own fortitude to plow through it. So I had to let it sit for several days.

A few days before the test was due, I asked the Lord to help me look at my paralysis surrounding this issue. I didn’t know how to approach this test without employing my old neurotic faculties. My only experience of motivating myself was to tap into the fear of facing the wrath of imperfection (which includes loss of identity, loss of esteem in other’s eyes, and perhaps loss of love). In college, this fear would inspire incredible amounts of fortitude, which always produced the results of neurotic perfection. But in a very real sense I am not that person anymore, as the Lord has been addressing those deep needs and beliefs in my heart over the years since college. Just because that drive was being lessened, did not mean I automatically knew how to study rightly.

Thankfully Dr. Coe had addressed this issue in some of his lectures. The right and true end in study should be the love of God and greater transformation into Christlikeness. Failure to study without the proper attitude is to engage in the vice of curiositas (seeking to know something for the wrong reasons, e.g. pride or seeking to know something that should not be known,e.g. pornography). Wow—have I ever spent my entire education in the execution of that vice! Anyway, back to that conversation with the Lord. What came out of that was a glimmer of understanding about loving God in my studies. It was like something switched on inside of me and studying made sense. Of course it is an opportunity to open to God. I am studying Him and His things. Why should attention to His presence in me be left out of the equation?

dez

The Hidden Heart

Well, I've finished my first semester at the Institute for Spiritual Formation. I have such a mixture of feelings. On one hand there is the relief from the work involved with school, but on the other hand, there is sadness because I really enjoy my classes and my classmates. Some of them have become very dear to me already. During my last final on Monday, I had the opportunity to write for 2 1/2 hours about how this semester has impacted me. I have decided that I will post some of those thoughts in an attempt to share more of my, and sometime our, movement into the deeper life:

God has been actively working in us through the trials we have faced over the last year and even the circumstances we have been dealing with over the last several months. Our situation of unemployment since being here has done wonders for stirring up my hidden heart. The desire to control the situation and hurry up and move through it was extremely powerful in me. Since I had spent my whole life living in the power of my self (often in the name of the Holy Spirit), my mind was going crazy trying to figure out ways to fix the situation including how to manipulate Brandon to that end.

Fear and anxiety ruled me, but then we began to discuss the nature of the heart in my classes. It’s fallen, self-deceiving, layered ad infinitem, immense, and there is no amount of fortitude in the world that can fix it. Dr. Coe said we had to despair of fixing ourselves that our first move should be opening to God. That was a paradigm shift to be sure, one that is still in process. But as I began to take in the material and internalize it, it resonated within me. The Holy Spirit is always working in me and my job is to simply open to what He is doing. I began to pay more attention to what was bubbling up in my heart with regard to our circumstance and I began dialoguing with Brandon about it and he too joined me in the process.

As we began to share the hell boiling up in our souls with each other, I noticed the fingers that I was clenching onto Brandon with began to relax. The Lord began to show us how He was taking us on another path than what we had laid out for ourselves. Though it was more painful, it lacked nothing in terms of the Lord’s care and concern for us. Had Brandon landed a great job right away, it would have only served to confirm our beliefs in the sufficiency of the flesh and the power of our autonomy. Instead, the Lord cracked our hearts wide open and we had to get honest with ourselves. I came face to face with my need to control and to provide for myself and the underlying mistrust I was harboring against my husband and the Lord. And even as I was up to my eyeballs in this mess and expecting all the condemnation that hell could muster, the Lord treated me so kindly. He looked at me with such compassion and love. It is a wondrous thing to experience yourself as loved by God even when you're bad.

dez