Discovering the Depths: Guidance in Personal Spiritual Growth

By William Clemmons

Discovering the Depths is a book rich in the wisdom of the centuries tellingly related to our present cultural situation in America. In it you will meet some of the worlds sagest spiritual guidesthe psalmists, the prophets, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Benedict of Nursia, Bernard of Clairvaux, Teresa of Avil, John of the Cross, Thomas Kelly, Douglas Steere, Thomas Merton, Carl Jung, Elie Wiesel. Under Dr. Clemmons skillful guidance you will begin to discover how their wisdom can illumine your path.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: May 24, 2006
• ISBN: 9781466956148

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© Copyright 2006 William Clemmons

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Note for Librarians: A cataloguing record for this book is available from Library and Archives Canada at www.collectionscanada.ca/amicus/index-e.html ISBN 1-4120-7994-2

Cover art by Patricia Mayberry

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1 THE INNER WORK OF GOD

CHAPTER 2 AS A FLOWER OPENS TO THE SUN

CHAPTER 3 LETTING GO MY ISAACS

CHAPTER 4 GOD ALONE

CHAPTER 5 WASTING TIME FOR GOD

CHAPTER 6 SEEING THINGS AS THEY REALLY ARE

CHAPTER 7 LIKE A GLASS EMPTIED OF WATER

CHAPTER 8 THE GIFT OF COMMUNITY

CHAPTER 9 ENGAGED IN BROKENNESS

CHAPTER 10 YOU DON’T HAVE TO DIE ON EVERY CROSS

CHAPTER 11 EMPOWERED

CHAPTER 12 LIVING OUT OF THE DEPTHS

NOTES

To

James Preston and Sallie Baker Clemmons,parents, who in a Christian home ignited within me the first sparks of the depths of God

Foreword

I’m delighted to see Bill Clemmons’ Discovering the Depths: Guidance in Person Spiritual Growth come out in a revised and updated version. I say that knowing there is a veritable deluge of literature on spirituality, spiritual direction, and spiritual formation, much of which is informed and worthy. Why, then, should the Advent Spirituality Center go to the trouble of producing a new version of Discovering the Depths? My answer: Because it’s one of the best—wise, clear, informed, and practical. If you will make it your text for a spiritual self-improvement course over the next ten weeks or so, you will confirm what I’m saying.

Discovering the Depths is a book rich in the wisdom of the centuries tellingly related to our present cultural situation in America. In it you will meet some of the world’s sagest spiritual guides—the psalmists, the prophets, Jesus, Paul, Augustine, Benedict of Nursia, Bernard of Clairvaux, Teresa of Avila, John of the Cross, Thomas Kelly, Douglas Steere, Thomas Merton, Carl Jung, Elie Wiesel. Under Dr. Clemmons’ skillful guidance you will begin to discover how their wisdom can illumine your path.

With Discovering the Depths in hand you won’t find yourself confused in today’s supermarket of spiritual methods and ideas, all too many of which will be tried and found wanting. Dr. Clemmons will remind you from start to finish that your quest is to respond to God’s seeking. As the great Quaker philosopher Rufus Jones said, just as surely as our homing instinct heads us godward, so too does God’s very nature keep God, the Hound of heaven, on our trail. Our challenge is to be available, to open to the besieging love of God like a flower to the morning sun.

Each chapter of this fine guidebook concludes with some exercises which will help you catch on, but Discovering the Depths doesn’t get you caught up in methods, something my mentors, both Thomas Merton and Douglas Steere, warned against. No, Dr. Clemmons hands us three tools for the cultivation of our spiritual lives—abandonment, prayer, and daily quiet time—and directs us to three gifts of grace which will keep us growing in grace: discernment, disciplines, and community. Abandonment, you will learn, is not Quietism, passivity from the word go, as Thomas Merton once defined that movement. In the wisdom of Thomas Kelly it is learning to live in the passive voice, letting life be willed through you. Prayer, attentiveness to God, is the key to all spiritual life. Like every great spiritual guide through the centuries, Dr. Clemmons offers a challenge to fulfill Paul’s injunction to the Thessalonians, Pray without ceasing (1 Th 5:17). Yet he knows, as you and I do, that our noisy, fast-paced culture will not make it easy to attune ourselves to God. We will also need to draw apart just as Jesus did so often in order consciously to pay attention to the Beyond in our midst.

We should all be thankful that our spiritual growth does not depend wholly or even chiefly on us; if it did, we should throw up our hands in despair. I planted. Apollos watered. God caused the growth, Paul told the Corinthians. One gift God gives those serious about their relationship with God is the ability to see not just the external but the eternal internal. We may look on glass and stay the eye, the great Anglican pastor and poet George Herbert declared, or, if we please, through it pass, and thus the heaven espy. Seeing like that will not happen automatically. Dr. Clemmons makes very clear that we will need some askesis, discipline. Contrary to what many may believe, such discipline frees in the way an athlete’s persistent training does. We should not imagine, however, that we are lonely long distance runners outside anyone else’s notice. We can belong to communities which keep tabs on us, run along beside us, and cheer us on to the prize of God’s upward call in Jesus Christ.

For many years now, I’ve evaluated spiritualities by the extent to which they balance four dimensions: experiential, intellectual, social, and institutional. Discovering the Depths does that beautifully. In early chapters Dr. Clemmons fixes our attention on the experiential, intellectual, and institutional. In Chapter 9 he urges us to be world citizens, accepting responsibility for a needy orb. Wisely, however, he follows with a warning drawn from Thomas Kelly that we don’t have to die on every Cross. The magnitude of the task may overwhelm us if we do not have vision and pay attention to spiritual gifts and calling. How rightly he directs us to God’s empowerment which is not like the world’s. As the Apostle Paul discovered, God’s power works through human weakness (2 Cor 12:9). In the final analysis, living out of the depths means waiting on God, letting God work through us.

E. Glenn Hinson Louisville, Kentucky

Introduction

When I wrote Discovering the Depths some years ago I wrote it for a generation of people who were seeking serious guidance in their personal spiritual growth. Spirituality began emerging from a long dormancy with the publication of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain in 1948. Then there followed in the next several decades books by E. Glenn Hinson in 1968 and Henri Nouwen as well as a growing group of women writers.

There is a real hunger in society among persons who are looking for help with their inner lives. This area has not been adequately dealt with in academic or church school Christian education. Today many voices are seeking to correct that situation.

This book in no way seeks to be exhaustive or conclusive in spiritual guidance. All I have attempted to do is to set down some of the areas of a formative process of spiritual growth which have been valuable to Christians over the centuries. Interest in my own spiritual growth prompted my writing this book in the first place.

My first formal explorations in spirituality were guided by Father Augustine Wulff, OCSO (1899-1985), and Fr. Gregory, two monks of the Abbey of Gethsemani (Trappist) in Kentucky. Many others have followed as I have worked with the unfolding of my life in Christ: Gordon and Mary Cosby, who pioneered a church based on prayer and social justice; Douglas Steere, who with his gentle questioning awakened in me the thirst for prayer; Mickey Evans and the Staff and Men of Dunklin Memorial Church/Camp in Okeechobee, FL, who have taught me much about prayer; Wanda Baker and Rich Boggs, my colleagues in the Dunklin School of Prayer; Reid and Phyllis Hardin who encouraged a group of us to meet each January at Dunklin and explore prayer; as well as three spiritual mentors, Fr. Paul Wessinger, SSJE, Fr. Robert Macfarlane, and Fr. Al Kirk; and finally countless students and participants in classes and workshops.

I had the chance to explore this area in a more systematic fashion at the Institute of Formative Spirituality, Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of the many places that has sought to develop a comprehensive theory of Christian spirituality.¹ And, since 1979 I have offered courses in spirituality at two Baptist seminaries, Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina, and Northern Baptist Seminary in Chicago, and served as an Instructor and Project Advisor at Columbia

Theological Seminary in Georgia, in its Certificate in Spiritual Formation Program.

Spiritual formation is not a reduction of human life to the spiritual, but an integration of all dimensions of human personality around the most fundamental dimension, that of being made in the image and likeness of God (imago dei). This fundamental dimension of human personality is most characteristically experienced as the potential of being godwardly drawn. However, one often experiences life as less than when life is not integrated around that transcendent dimension of human personality. Because life is experienced as a quest for the more than, and as illusive when not grounded in this foundational aspect of self, one seeks to go beyond, to be whole, to know the true self. These are all expressions of this drawing of persons to that deepest center within, which is fulfilled only as it acknowledges and yields all of life to this deepest integration around the foundational form of life.

Therefore, spiritual formation is not seeking to make one conform to a predetermined mold in which all followers of Christ must be pressed into some divine cookie cutter process. It is more a journey into deeper and deeper dimensions of what it means individually and collectively to be God’s people in a world like ours. Each brings his or her own preformation dispositions to the task. And each one uniquely expresses the form that God wishes that one to work with in the diversity that makes up the pluralism of gifts in the church.

This work of spiritual formation is a costly work of daily recognizing illusions about ourselves and responding to the call of God to discipleship in a world like ours. It is a call to a co-creative relationship with God in being fully alive in Christ. It is a call to live life at the deepest level of our potentiality in Christ. And it is a call to join God in a work of ministry and witness at the deepest level of our co-creativity with Him.

Spiritual formation is a living of the Christian life as an adventure of faith, never quite sure of tomorrow, but knowing Him who will direct us in that step into tomorrow. It is a journey of both giving and receiving a form for our lives that is compatible with who God is calling us to be. One is called to receive formative life directives from transcendent sources, from inward dialogue with all dimensions of life, from life lived in relationships, from daily living, from the current world setting, from our faith traditions, and especially from Scripture. One then seeks to give form to life that is inharmony with each of these areas of life.

It is a journey that often understands the work of God that occurred yesterday—as distance and formative reflection begin to make their own patchwork quilt out of our daily pilgrimage. It is a journey that lives into the depths of today with the fullest consciousness of our being attuned, aware, and responsive to what God is doing now.

Spiritual formation is thus a call into an inward journey—a journey where the inner work of God is done in such a depth that the results of this deep encounter are experienced in a changed self, a commitment to deal with irrelevant structures of the church and society, and to a ministry and witness to the brokenness of society. The roots of a genuine renewal of the life of any person or congregation are more than externals (re-formation) for it is based on that which only God can do (trans-formation) with us. Both are necessary, but God’s work is foundational.

This book is directed, therefore, toward helping you explore your unique-self-in-Christ through a process of being opened up to new levels of your journey in Christ. It will seek to help you examine at a deeper level what it means to be the People of God today. By discovering the depths of God and the depths of yourself, you may find the point where these two converge into a new and more dynamic self-in-Christ.

My hope for you as you read each chapter and engage in the accompanying meditation assignment is that this can be for you a twelve-week spiritual-growth experience. I hope that it will help you develop with God a more adequate response to who you are in Christ and how this is lived out in your relationships with others, in daily living, and in the context of the current world setting. My larger hope is that as you experience the transforming work of God in you, it will become the basis of a radical renewal of God’s people that is equal to the needs of the society in which we live. This can be a twelve-week journey into new and mysterious depths of Christian growth and maturity by which God can release you in a powerful ministry and witness to the brokenness of the world.

Each chapter examines an element of an ever-deepening life in Christ. It first describes that dimension and is followed by a meditative experience that is to be done for thirty (30) minutes each day for that week. Each element and meditative assignment forms part of what could be for you the basis of a continuing personal, daily meditative life at the end of the twelve weeks.

This book is not intended to be a book of devotional ideas which seek only to inspire and be a morning pep pill, which by afternoon has worn off. Serious spiritual growth is costly and gradual. It is the work of a lifetime. It is the work of just the right amount of personal effort, awaiting God’s response of grace. There are many times when we just wait until God is ready for us to make the next step.

Therefore, this book is intended for slow, careful meditative reflection. It is not to be read or digested in two or three sittings. It is designed to lead you slowly along a journey into increasingly deeper dimensions of yourself, your relationship with God and others. Therefore, I would suggest that you not plan to read more than a chapter