On the disciplines

At some point in my developmental years, I was convinced that to do anything with rellentless regularity was to strip it of worth. If I were to spend the same amount of time in scripture at the same time every day, then it wouldn’t be truly valuable. I would be legalistic, working my way across Jordan. There would be no way for me to do this and gain anything from it. After the second or third time it would be mindless, rote. So for the Christian, every action one takes in terms of actively mortifying the flesh must be purely spontaneous, spur of the moment, whimsical. I guess this attitude is part of a general culture which has despised and rejected tradition. Tradition has no value, so actions that begin to become traditional are worthless.

In my case, I am so reticent to dispose myself to a system of discipline. Yet I look at my forebears in the faith who prayed unceasingly, saturated themselves with the Word, and defined their lives with service to others. And then, of course, there is my Lord, who spent his youth until His thirties in hard labor and stodying the Word and ways of God.

So I’ve finally had a conversation with myself and determined that routine is not a sin. Doing anything mindlessly is certainly not a good thing, but that doesn’t mean that we punish ourselves by not doing the thing at all. We eat on average three times a day, seven days a week, etc. I’m sure any honest person would admit that they are not properly thankful for their meal, that they eat mindlessly and out of habit. Should we starve ourselves because of the great risk? Certainly not. The problem lies not with the action, but with our thinking. So we must constantly inform ourselves. If we tend to not correctly understand the reason and worth of the Lord’s table, it doesn’t mean we should take it less, it means we should explain it more. If we have trouble treating Confession of Sin with the weight it deserves, it doesn’t mean we should include it in our liturgies less, it means we should explain it more.

I’ve begun to spend some time studying the subject of the Spiritual Disciplines. I’ve started using M’Cheyne’s calendar for daily scriptural reading. It is excellent. I’ve committed to being up before the sun. There are probably a thousand other little matters of discipline which I need to nail down, and I hope to. We’ll see how it goes.

~ by Jeremy Goodwyne on 19 November 2008.