Reflections on Spiritual Formation

By Ray Pickett, Rector

Spiritual formation is one of the most important aspects of what a seminary does. It’s not just one element of seminary but encompasses worship, classes, and community life. At PLTS, one of the distinctive ways we do spiritual formation is through a Spiritual Care Team that leads spiritual formation groups and meets with students one-to-one to do spiritual direction and talk with them about their lives. There are three local pastors and a spiritual director who work together as a team to attend to the spiritual wellbeing of our students. I had the privilege of joining them in their retreat this past week. We were all asked to bring, for our spiritual reflection time, an icon or image that speaks to how God is meeting us right now as a way to check in and to make space for our own spiritual growth before diving into our work. This is one of the ways that spiritual formation happens. By paying attention to the ways we experience God’s presence or absence in our lives and sharing that with each other.

The first orienting perspective in the new curriculum is “Nurturing a life-giving relationship with God.” An important aspect of this perspective is attending to our interior life and our own personal relationship with God. Spirituality seems to be the preferred way of talking about faith and values these days, and as I listen to people, I hear people using the word spirituality to refer primarily to their own personal spiritual journey. However, as the new orienting perspective indicates, nurturing a life-giving relationship with God also includes embracing and sharing the life-changing power of God’s love through Jesus Christ and cultivating spiritual practices and skills for building a community that creates spiritual strength in us.

This past week I had two conversations that highlighted this aspect of spiritual formation in ways that pose a challenge to the notion that spirituality is only a personal or private matter. On Wednesday I met with john a. powell, director of the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley. I have been reading his book, Racing To Justice: Transforming Our Conceptions of Self and Other to Build an Inclusive Society, in which he talks about racism in terms of the lack of membership in the imagined space of society. His approach to addressing racism, or what he prefers to call radicalization, entails moving beyond a view of the self as separate and unconnected. In his view, this profoundly spiritual project has to do with deep levels of being and identity. For powell, this spiritual project is about “bridging and belonging” as a response to what he calls “Othering.”

On Friday, I had a conversation with a young woman who is a community organizer for the Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment and who is working on issues of rent control in the Bay Area. Anya’s mother is a deaconess in the ELCA, whom I have known for a long time, and her dad is pastor. Anya is passionate about her work and about racial equity and economic justice. She got very animated in talking about how she organizes out of her spiritual values, but she no longer has any connection to or interest in the church. In her words, she left the church because “it didn’t walk the talk.” She resonates with the teachings of Jesus, practices mediation, and understands her work in spiritual terms, but doesn’t see much correlation between her spirituality and the church.

As we talk to others about their lives, especially the “nones” and those who consider themselves spiritual, but not religious, we would do well to listen for the spiritual yearnings in the stories they tell about themselves. If our deepest longings as human beings are for connection and sense of belonging, then what kind of spiritual practices could we do together as a church to cultivate spaces and processes where this can happen? This is at least one way of thinking about a spiritual formation that would include everyone, especially those who feel excluded.