Being Truly Human: The Desert Way of Spiritual Formation

By Mark Mah

Our busy exterior may be a cover-up for an undernourished interior soul. Modern life is so packed with things to do that we have not learned to be truly human. It is difficult to nurture the spiritual life in a media-saturated world filled with relentless information, ongoing activities, material wants, worrisome uncertainties, and seductive addictions. Being Truly Human challenges readers to give space in their busy life for God to do the work of transformation in the inner self. It takes inspiration from the Desert Fathers of the fourth and fifth centuries whose directness, simplicity, and concreteness to life's struggles provide a fresh perspective for modern saints. Like the desert saints, modern Christians are challenged to begin a spiritual odyssey, in the wilderness of their soul, to become their true selves. To be truly human means the freedom to love in concrete acts of humility and hospitality, acts which are truly lacking in our world today. The practice of solitude and silence will lead us to be indifferent to the crying needs of our false selves and to give God our undivided attention, which is necessary for the spiritual formation of our true selves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Release date: Oct 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9781621899549

Mark Mah

Mark Mah graduated from Regent College in Vancouver, BC. He teaches Church History and Spiritual Formation at Malaysia Baptist Theological Seminary and is the author of Being Human: The Desert Way of Spiritual Formation. He lives in Penang, Malaysia, with his wife, Joy.

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Being Truly Human

The Desert Way of Spiritual Formation

Mark Mah

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Being Truly Human

The Desert Way of Spiritual Formation

Copyright © 2012 Mark Mah. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

Resource Publications

An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3

Eugene, OR 97401

www.wipfandstock.com

ISBN 13: 978-1-62032-493-6

EISBN 13: 978-1-62189-954-9

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the New International Version of the Bible.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Homeless Self

Chapter 2: Entering the Emptiness

Chapter 3: Solitude and Silence

Chapter 4: Being Truly Human

Appendix A: Silent Retreat: Making Space for God in Our Busy Lives

Appendix B: The Practice of Lectio Divina

Bibliography for Further Reading

To Joy, and our children:

Sarah, Matthew, and Michael.

Acknowledgments

This book was birthed after I taught a course on Desert Spirituality in 2004. The following year, I took the opportunity to write my first draft when I had my sabbatical. At that time, I had no intention to publish. I wrote basically for my own personal edification and reflection on my journey with God. At the same time, I began practicing the discipline of solitude and silence. Since then I had organized silent retreats for my students who found the retreats refreshing and helpful to their spiritual life. Their positive input was an encouragement and a challenge for me to continue with this journey. I seriously decided to rewrite and make major revisions to my original draft at the end of 2011. I am grateful to my students who have inspired and surprised me on many occasions. My thanks go to the Malaysia Baptist Theological Seminary for giving me the opportunity and freedom to teach the course on Spiritual Formation. I also want to thank Lian Kee for her kind consent to proofread the manuscript. Last, but not least, I want to thank my wife, Joy, for being a friend and faithful companion all these years.

Introduction

Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in

a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path.

—Dante Alighieri¹

There is a story of a man who having lost a key to his house began searching for it in his garden. His neighbors saw his problem and helped him with the search. They went down on their hands and knees searching for the lost key. They could not find the missing key. Finally they asked him where he thought he might have lost the key. I lost the key inside the house, he replied. Then why are you searching for it outside in the garden? the neighbors asked out of curiosity. Without a moment’s hesitation, he replied, Because there is light out here!

The story is hilarious, but it brings home a fundamental truth: we tend to seek truth in the wrong places. The key is inside the house and not outside in the garden. The key that unlocks the door to our spirituality is within the depths of our soul and not outside of us. I was taught to believe that doing is all it takes to develop my spirituality. Involvement is the key to grow my spiritual life. We gauge our spirituality based on how busy and active we are in the Lord’s work. I wince when Christians remark to me how busy they are. Our busy exterior may be a cover-up for an undernourished interior soul. Jesus reminds us that God’s kingdom is within us, and the kingdom of God will not come to us unless we spend time cultivating our inner life by making room for him in our hearts. The advice of Thomas a Kempis, who wrote The Imitation of Christ in the fifteenth century, is still valid for us today. He gives this advice: Learn indifference to all that lies outside of you and devote yourself to the life within, and you will see the kingdom of God coming to you.²

We need to be awakened to the desire that God has planted in our hearts in order to begin the inward journey in the wilderness of our soul. David Benner, a psychologist and spiritual coach, points out that this desire is at the center of our spiritual life and indispensable for our journey to being truly human. Guilt may motivate us to behave christianly, or obligation may lead us to spend time and money in God’s work, but only desire can get us to begin the inward journey and lead us along the way.³ This desire, if not properly identified and appropriated, can cause us to become restless and lead us astray. Like the man in the story, our restlessness can lead us to find the key in the wrong places. It can lead us on the wrong path. Dante Alighieri, a fourteenth century Italian poet and philosopher, in the opening words of his Divine Comedy, describes the common predicament of getting lost and trapped by life. The poem depicts a journey Dante has to make to reach his true home in paradise. In the middle of his life, Dante awakes to the reality that he has lost his way in a dark wood. He discovers that he has wandered off the straight path without knowing about it. Like Dante, most of us sleep through life and have lost the way.

I was awakened from my slumber by the lingering dissatisfaction I had with my brand of Christianity that thrived on doing and very little on being. Activity was a gauge of spirituality. The degree of my commitment in God’s work was a measure of my spirituality. I had reached a point in my spiritual life that I needed to do something in order to grow. This desire, aroused by a lingering disappointment with formal Christianity, led me to seek inspiration outside and beyond my tradition. I realize that mine is not an isolated case. William Hendricks did a research based on interviews with believers who stopped attending church. In his book, Exit Interviews, he concludes that spiritually starved Christians failed to find God in the maze of church programs. Disillusioned and discouraged, they left to search for God outside its walls.⁴ I was attracted to the Desert Fathers because they too were reacting to a Christianity weakened by worldly and powerful interests. In order to free themselves from the shackles of a corrupted, decadent society and a worldly Church, they entered the desert to recover the ideals of Christianity.

Pilgrims do not travel alone. They need each other’s company to make the journey meaningful and less monotonous. The exchange and interaction between travelers will clear the vision, ease the conscience, and strengthen the resolve to continue on the journey. Past and present saints have travelled the path that I am treading now. They are my fellow pilgrims. We share a common passion for God though we come from different backgrounds, traditions, and theological persuasions. Each traveler has a story to tell, an experience to share, and an adventure to talk about. They encourage, refresh, and inspire each other when the journey gets tough and threatening. I am acquainted with these saints through the books they write. Many of them lived in the past, but there are contemporaries as well.

It was Henri Nouwen’s book, The Way of the Heart, which first introduced me to the Desert Fathers. While commenting on how tough it is for ministers to serve numbed congregations at the end of the twentieth century, he looks to a more primitive source of inspiration: the Desert Fathers who lived in the Egyptian desert during the fourth and fifth centuries. He feels that the Desert Fathers’ directness, simplicity, and concreteness to life’s struggles provide a fresh perspective for his contemporaries. Belden Lane’s book, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, opened my eyes to the virtues and practice of desert spirituality. He explains why seekers of God are drawn to the silence and solitude of harsh terrains. Fierce landscapes, like the desert, can abandon and also offer solace and healing to the broken soul. The indifference of wilderness will help me shed my false self and free me from the neurotic need for attention in order to become more human.

From Craig Barnes’ book, Searching for Home, I learned that the nomadic soul was homesick and always yearning for home. He writes, The most enduring trace of God in our lives is our longing for home that wells up in our soul.⁵ Unless the soul awakes to the fact that God is calling him to his true home within the depths of his soul, his homesickness will lead him down to many different paths. Jean Vanier’s