A Spirituality of the Road

Ek lees onlangs weer hierdie stuk van David Bosch uit sy boek: A Spirituality of the Road. Op sy besondere manier herinner hy ons aan wat dit beteken om die dissipelpad te loop. Nie onttrekking uit hierdie wêreld nie, maar juis gestuur na die wêreld toe.

 

“Spirituality or devotional life seems to mean withdrawal from the world, charging my battery, and then going out into the world. The image is of an automobile which runs on batteries only. The batteries are charged for so many hours during the night and then the automobile runs so many miles during the day until the batteries become too weak to pull the car. For more mileage one would have to charge the batteries for a longer period of time. Transferred to the spiritual sphere, this means: so many minutes of spiritual exercise will give me so much mileage for the day that follows.

And if I find that I am run down before evening, this simply means that I have to spend more time in the morning charging my spiritual battery. In this view, then, my "true" Christian life consists of those so-called spiritual moments, away from the hustle and bustle of ordinary life. To be sure, all that hubbub is actually anti-spiritual, because it taps my stored-up spiritual resources, it drains my spiritual power away, it is a threat to my spirituality. I would, therefore, much rather live on angels' food only and have as little as possi­ble to do with the things of this world…

Lesslie Newbigin has called this view the "Pilgrim's Progress Model": the emphasis is on a decisive break with the world and a flight from the "wicked city." In this model the world is primarily seen as a threat, as a source of contagion from which the Christian must keep himself free. To be saved means, in essence, to be saved from this world; spirituality means otherworldliness. The basic problem with this view of spirituality is that it is docetic. It is based on the idea that matter is essentially evil. We could also call it monophysite be­cause the Christ of this spirituality has only one nature, the divine…

Fundamental to any definition of spirituality is that it can never be something that can be isolated from the rest of our existence, as the battery-operated car metaphor suggests. "Flesh" and" spirit" in the Bible do not refer to two segments of our lives, the one outward and worldly, the other inward and otherworldly, as though we are spiritual when we pray and worldly when we work. No, flesh and spirit refer to two modes of existence, two life orientations. Being spiritual means being in Christ, whether we pray or walk or work. Spirituality is not con­templation over against action. It is not a flight from the world over against involvement in the world. The "Pilgrim's Progress Model" therefore does not adequately describe what spirituality means because its point of departure is non-involvement, escape from the world. It has to be supplemented by what Newbigin has called the "Jonah Model": not fleeing from the city but being sent by God into the heart of the city and its turmoil…More precisely, it is not a case of one model supple­menting the other, for the two are absolutely indivisible. The involvement in this world should lead to a deepening of our relationship with, and dependence on God, and the deepening of this relationship should lead to increas­ing involvement in the world.” (David J. Bosch, A Spirituality of the Road (IMER 2004), p. 3-11)