Exploring promises as a tool of growth

Part 8: You anoint my soul, take your place in my heart, and surround me with blessings

Now there is just the rest of the world to attend to! But, of course, we have already been doing this. We do not live in a hermetically sealed bubble, and we have recognised that the hurts of the world invade our personal space; they can even over-power or corrupt us and take up their dominion over us, so that not even the inmost space of our own souls is one in which we are in charge. That was the point of creating an arena in which we have retaken the initiative by making and keeping a promise – and then expanding the area of God’s sovereignty – which becomes also the area of our own spiritual integrity and peace. So, the task of walking closely with God entails facing up to all the challenges that the world throws at us. The difference is simply that within the arena of our own souls we do have the opportunity to live by our own will, whereas we have to accept the limits of our ability to influence others – because, of course, they are also masters of their own soul – unless they have themselves been mastered by forces which dominate them.

We should also acknowledge and rejoice that it is not just the pain and corruption of the world that has the ability to pass through the boundaries of our souls, but also the love, support and friendship of those blessed ones who make our lives delightful by their company, who bind up our wounds, who lift up our hearts, and who heal us and lead us to wholeness by their kindness, patience and faithfulness. In all our brokenness, compromise, disappointment and failed intentions, they have stood by us and so enabled us to carry on. So, in all our talk of creating an arena in which God is honoured, we are not saying he is not already honoured, or that his love is not known, or that the love of these others who make our lives worth living is not truly precious and already making us whole. What we are trying to do is to say: All these things being true, and rejoicing in God’s grace, known directly from him and through others, I would like to increase the sway that God has in my life by clearing out the clutter, the mess, the inadequate or the incomplete from one area of my soul. Thus, I will make a space into which God can pour more of his grace so that I can grow in this grace. And the way I will do this is by making a promise and doing all that I can to keep it.

Exploring promises as a tool of growth

Part 7: Make your soul the space in which God is honoured

As we expand the arena in which God is honoured, we will come up against the will of other people and organisations, some friendly to God and some hostile. We will have to recognise when we have no jurisdiction over what other people do, or have no influence to change their ways. That becomes our new mission front. However, in respect to our own lives, the value of the promise is that it becomes a powerful tool to reclaim the whole of our own lives for God. Maybe in some areas we have gone astray and need to repent – turn around and go in a new direction. Other areas will simply be those which we had not realised should be under God’s direction – perhaps we recognised some areas as “obviously to do with God” but it is only as we grow spiritually that we realise that all areas can be liberated and be made joyful by following God’s way. Perhaps there are some areas that are perfectly acceptable in God’s sight in the normal way of judging things, but we realise that God is calling us to a particular mission that requires new spiritual growth.

So, especially if you feel you are floundering, if you lack direction, or energy, if you feel you have gone astray, or if you are distressed at failure, if you simply want to live a different sort of life, if you are asking, “Where is God in my life?”, or, “What’s the point of it all?” then make a promise. Think carefully, and pray, and offer it to God, and home in on one thing. It becomes something that you can keep your eye on to gauge how well you’re doing, and a practical programme to take steps on how to do better if you find yourself still struggling to keep it. We’ve already said that it’s not the test of whether you are right with God or not, but it is what you’re working on at the moment, because you are taking specific steps to walk more closely with God. Make a place in your life where you are exerting yourself to remain true to God, and to dwell in his presence. And as that becomes for you a spiritual sanctuary in which you share the joy and peace of his presence, then stretch out your faith to expand the boundary within which he is honoured. Your aim is to walk the bounds of your own soul and to discover that within this space the love of God is all in all.

Exploring promises as a tool of growth

Part 6: A promise creates an arena in which God is honoured

The promise concentrates our mind wonderfully. We have already acknowledged that it’s not the be all and end all of our spiritual lives, but it is the thing that we are concentrating on at the moment in response to the question, “What will you do to show that you love God?”. Well, out of the many things that we could do, let’s choose something that is of particular concern to us, and make a promise about it. This becomes a rallying call in times of trial and temptation, and a test of our spiritual integrity and commitment that will most probably improve our life in other areas too, but on this specific promise it becomes the place where we have drawn a line in the sand: “I love God, and for love of him, I will do this”.

When we succeed – and succeed we will increasingly do – instead of that repetitive cycle of despair and disappointment, we will gain spiritual energy and pleasure, and all the gifts that come from walking closely with God and not grieving his Spirit. We will, at last, grow in grace and in spiritual maturity, and be ready to expand the areas which our promise covers. I think this may be a particularly fruitful aspect of making and keeping promises: although it may appear that we are confining our spiritual lives to one tiny area and assessing our progress on just this one point, we are, instead, lifting ourselves out of a morass or mist of spiritual turmoil and gaining grip and focus by defining an area in which we will honour God. As keeping our promise becomes an engine of spiritual growth, we can use the new energy generated to expand the arena in our life in which God’s will holds sway. Having used our promise to say, “This little bit of my life belongs to God and I will not surrender it” then, as we keep our promise, we are able to press forward the boundaries to reclaim other areas of our lives, until, one day, by God’s grace, we may be able to say that our whole lives have come under the sway of God’s loving care and his will is honoured in all we do. So, what may have seemed like a surrender to just focus our spiritual life on this one promise, was, in fact, a gathering of our resources to burst out to reclaim the whole of our life for God.

Exploring promises as a tool of growth

Part 5: Fashion your promise carefully

Yes, our promise might be only addressing one area of our lives, but we are making a start. And one promise can lead to another – especially if we actually achieve success on one point. Rather than aiming for perfection overnight – a great ideal, but one in which we will certainly fail – we are committing to an incremental growth. We can still have perfection as our goal, but initially, we are trying to keep this one promise. Certainly, I have been so distressed and dismayed by my failure to keep to those spiritual goals which I truly do desire, but which remain out of reach. It would be good to have at least one thing where I can say, “I said I’d do this, and I have”. Not that I will boast, but I will rejoice that I have found one thing in which I wanted to please God by doing something, and I showed that I could do it. And very importantly, I did it because I had clearly identified this as something that would honour God, that would be a way in which I can show that I can do something because I love God, and because it is something that was undermining my peace with God – but now it does not.

The promise can be anything you wish. You will know, and be able to work out, what it is that is spoiling your relationship with God and undermining your spiritual integrity. Many of these things will be sexual matters, and I must leave it to you to consider what they might be. However, we mustn’t underestimate the very wide range of challenges which people face. Our personalities are deeply intertwined with the desire for self-esteem, which is good in itself, but it comes with all sorts of temptations to dominate, control or exploit others. We react so negatively to hurts and slights, real or imagined, and fall prey to bitterness, anger, jealousy. And this is even before the terrible challenges imposed on us by the injustice that is all around us in the world. As people who love God, we are called to follow a path of righteousness and compassion through an obstacle course of violence, suffering and injustice. There is nothing, no matter how intrinsically good in itself, that cannot be twisted into something harmful. So, miserable sinners that we are, let’s show a little gentleness towards ourselves, and a little humility too, and simply make a promise that we are going to do our utmost to keep.

Exploring promises as a tool of growth

Part 4: A promise is a practical programme of spiritual growth

Nevertheless, having just given dire health warnings against promises, I am going to suggest the promise as a powerful tool for spiritual growth.

The first benefit of making a promise is that you have to compose what it is you are going to promise to do. This requires you to identify what is going on in your life and home in on those things that are impeding or spoiling your spiritual life. Rather than blindly going on, or being trapped in a repetitive circle of failure and then trying again – hoping that things will be different this time, you clarify what is spoiling your relationship with God. The more specific you can be the better. This enables you to make a very specific promise.

Of course, promises can easily be forgotten in the heat of the moment, or simply because the routines of our natural ways of life are so deeply ingrained that the promise we held clearly in our minds in our moment of prayerful reflection is easily lost as we continue “business as usual”, and it is only afterwards that we recall that we had said we were going to try and act differently in future. So, as well as making a promise, we can commit ourselves to bearing it in mind. This in itself makes our spiritual life more of a consciously adopted thing which we are striving to live up to, rather than something that we just remember now and then in our spiritual moments of the week. It also means that when we are drawn into the spiritual struggle, as temptation besets us, that we can consciously bring our promise to mind as a tool to help us to win. Of course, sometimes we will lose, but we have already addressed that possibility, and, rather than abandon our promise in shame and defeat, we take it up with renewed commitment: I will use this promise to help me to get to where I want to be in my spiritual life. Each time I fail, I will refine my understanding of what it is that is catching me out, what it is I want to achieve, and the practical methods of how to succeed in keeping my promise.

I think the main value of making a promise is that we are doing something specific in response to something that we don’t like in our spiritual lives. Rather than simply being confounded by our own weakness, or wondering when God will miraculously change the reality of our human nature, we commit ourselves to a practical course of action. Remember, we are not trying to earn our own salvation here, but we are taking practical steps to co-operate with God’s grace to put into effect his will, which is also the outcome that we desire but in which we are currently being frustrated by our weakness.

Exploring promises as a tool of growth

Part 3: Some pitfalls to avoid!

One answer to this problem is to not make promises! If you don’t make any promises, you can’t feel guilty when you break them! But this, of course, is to surrender the spiritual life altogether. So, painful as it is, it is still better to make promises and face the reality of failure and the need to confess, repent and try again, than not even to try. Another false answer is to make promises that are deliberately vague and open, such that you can never accuse yourself of ever actually breaking them, or at such a low threshold that even you can keep them. A further mistake is to make one promise and then think that if you keep just that one then you are alright with God – even though you offend him in lots of other ways. Finally, we must beware that we don’t think that our rightness with God depends on keeping our promises – as though if we could find a promise that we can keep then that must mean that we are a good person and can regard ourselves as righteous. This is the common mistake of people who are genuinely trying to live in a way that honours God, but who fall into self-righteousness. Our relationship with God always depends on his mercy and grace.

Exploring promises as a tool of growth

Part 2: In a fight, we need a weapon, so make a promise

The inner battle is not completely dependent on a conflict between our conscious mind and more instinctive impulses. There will also be battles within the conscious reasoning part of our minds. This is often the battle of distinguishing between real and apparent goods – or, perhaps, we might want to say, between good things but of lesser importance and good things of substantial or even ultimate importance. So, once again, we must not be forlorn when we trip up again in our spiritual battles; we need real perseverance to recognise what our biggest goals in life truly are, and then to steer towards them through thick and thin.

With all this in mind, I am exploring the use of promises as a tool for spiritual growth. I have often been dismayed and distressed throughout my life by my inability to keep my promises to God. I am often uplifted by God’s presence, and in those moments it feels as though it will be easy to keep promises to live a spiritual life that honours God in every aspect. But, of course, the moment fades, our human nature reasserts itself against our spiritual goals, the external world imposes its pressures upon us, and inner temptations lure us away into a way of life that is outwardly OK, may even be morally commendable according to general standards, but which is not true to the quality of life that we experienced when we were conscious of God’s presence, and which we wanted to dwell in permanently. And, of course, our fall from grace may be worse than this!

Exploring promises as a tool of growth

(A theological reflection in 8 parts)

Exploring promises as a tool of growth

Part 1: Face up to reality: this is a severe struggle

One of the greatest difficulties in living a spiritual life is the problem of the divided mind. That is, the inner struggle between your desire to live the life that you approve of, according to your faith, and the life that you feel pulled towards, through your human nature.

Much of this is the problem bequeathed to us by evolution. Evolution is a ruthlessly efficient survival mechanism that is entirely focussed on your self-interest. It stands to reason that pursuing your own self-interest is likely to lead us into selfish behaviour, which is the essence of immorality. Evolution is, of course, an amoral mechanism – that is, it has no interest in morality, it just does whatever works in terms of survival. At one point in our evolutionary development, our brains were not capable of reflecting on our own behaviour, we just did what came instinctively. As our brains developed into the wonderful thing they are today, we did not replace our “old brain” with a new improved “new brain”, we just added the new onto the old. Hence, much of our behaviour comes from the struggle between the older instinctive impulses and our new moral ability to reflect on and judge our own behaviour. Where our judgement falls will depend on whether we are able to overcome our selfish impulses and so do those things that we approve of according to our moral principles, or will those insistent voices of self-interest over-power our best intentions?

This inner battle is one which we all understand – though some individuals will have a very well-developed moral sense while others have barely begun to question their selfish impulses. It raises the question of what is it that we really want to do? Is it that we really do want to indulge in our primeval impulses for sex, power, domination, revenge, popularity etc but will not allow ourselves to do this? Or is it that we really do want to live up to our highest ideals and are unwillingly being dragged down by desires that we really do wish we could leave behind? Understanding this inner struggle is certainly of some help in winning it – if we really do want our high ideals to win. We are often confused and humiliated by our own weaknesses – we really did want to do the right thing, but somehow we ended giving in to behaviour that we really don’t approve of. How could this happen when we were so intent on doing the right thing? Well, it’s because the primeval “old brain” impulses just don’t ever go away, and when our reasoned, moral mind tries to tell the old brain what to do, it’s like telling a toddler in the middle of a tantrum that, no, they can’t have an ice-cream now. This insight doesn’t remove the need to win this argument, but it might give a little more mental space and energy when we are confounded by the sheer persistence of that inner voice to please yourself regardless of the consequences. This also gives us an indication that the way to win this battle is rarely going to be through a one-off telling ourselves that we’re going to do the right thing in future; we are likely going to have to train ourselves through repeated endeavour in order to reach the goals that we ultimately approve of.