Thanks to those who read through my last BookNotes, telling about three fast-paced, very well-written books about, among other things, the “fire weather” we are experiencing in our hotter planet. We are still surprised that some are surprised we can get so enthusiastic about books that are not written out of an obviously Christian perspective. Intentionally Biblically-based or not, those three titles are tremendous reads and important. Read about them here if you missed it.  And then send us an order, please. Maybe consider donating them to your public library or some roadside Little Free Library or start up a book club.

In this week’s BookNotes I’m sending out love primarily to two books, one which I’ve highlighted already, the other technically not released yet (but we have them here, now.) I am sure many of our readers will appreciate them as much as I have, and will be glad for this week’s focus on the nature of God and our interior lives. One book reminds us of the Triune God and nicely ponders how knowledge of the Trinity is good for understanding our own belovedness. It’s called Fully Beloved and is wonderfully written by author and pastor Timothy Jones. it is truly a sweet book, thoughtful, wise, captivating. I liked it so much I’m doing my second BookNotes review.

The one I will focus more on, however, is by a friend named Jeremy Sims and I am truly honored that he orders books from us, titles which, I think it is fair to say, show up in the beautiful footnotes in his brand new The Way of the Spirit: Recognizing and Responding to God’s Subtle Movements. I’ll tell you much more about that below.

CS LEWIS

Before I dive into it, though, I wanted to squeeze in an announcement about another brand new title, The Everyday Mysticism of C.S. Lewis: Spirituality for Daily Life by Gary Selby (IVP Academic) $24.95 // OUR SALE PRICE = $19.99.) Selby is the masterful writer of another Lewis book that I loved called Pursuing an Earthy Spirituality: C.S. Lewis and Incarnational Faith, also published a few years back by the great IVP Academic. This new one starts off on the back cover issuing a concern that I often have: some of the Christian mystics and great saints and teachers who have had deep encounters with the Divine are sometimes seen to be eccentric (fair enough) and not very down-to-Earth. One can get lost in the interior castles of the medieval mystics and sometimes folks come away from this sort of intense spirituality more interiorly focused than they ought. Selby — who used to direct the Center for Faith & Learning at Pepperdine — is quick to show that, in Lewis’s take, we get from the great older writers an “everyday” sort of mystical encounter. (Remember Lewis’s lovely bit about “patches of Godlight” in his book about prayer, Letters to Malcolm? That’s it!) Lewis read the classic Christian mystics and deeply respected their intense writing about their spiritual experiences and, informed by his Lewis studies, Selby invites us to live out of that kind of faith in more practical and day-to-day ways. Everyday Mysticism sort of seems like a follow up to Pursuing an Earthy Spirituality but you really don’t have to read that one first. Lewis enjoyed the mundane and in this new volume, Selby is pointing us to deeper formation and, more urgently, to union with Christ. As Bonnie Thurston (formerly of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary) puts it, the book is “erudite without being snobbish and faithful without being narrow.”

MakeYour Home in This Luminous Dark: Mysticism, Art, and the Path to Unknowing James K. A. Smith (Yale University Press) $28.00 // OUR SALE PRICE = $22.40. I’ve raved about this one already (as I do all of Jamie Smith’s books) but I’ll say again that some of you should be reading his hefty and serious new one. I want to mention it here, again, as it really is a great piece of work, remarkable in its learnedness and wonderful in its compelling invitation to grapple with “the path to unknowing.”  It is at times searing, so honest and real about his own struggles (abandoned by his father as a boy leading to some serious adult depression at the height of his writing fame) and how an unlikely encounter with the mystics like Saint John of the Cross allowed him to give us the idolatrous search for certainty. Granted, some of it is at times a bit scholarly and academic, dense, even. But well worth the careful reading experience. If you know about his must-read You Are What You Love you can see even in that book his move towards “what’s under the hood”, the need for us to have the Spirit touch the imaginations of our hearts. Nope, we can’t “think our way” out of these messes of the modern world, nor our own inner pains. By allowing the sublime to touch him deeply (whether it is from disruptive modern art and edgy contemporary literature or the deep writings of medieval mystics) Smith finds a way to let go of intellectualism and live out of God’s utter goodness and love in the midst of his calling as a philosopher and public thinker. I suppose it is not for everyone. but Make Your Home… is truly one of the most provocative and vital books of the year.

So whether it is late 20th century touchstone spirituality books like Merton’s deep New Seeds of Contemplation or the fabulous The Celebration of Discipline by Richard Foster or Ruth Haley Barton’s Sacred Rhythms or the modern masters like, say, Ronald Rolheiser or Martin Laird, or the one’s I’ve mentioned above — Gary Selby’s The Everyday Mysticism of C.S. Lewis or Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark by Jamie Smith — there are so many places to start this encounter with the contemplative ways knowing and being.

We live in an age of so many good books written to appeal to so many different sorts of readers. The following two I’m recommending to almost anyone. They are both among my favorite books of the last several years.

FULLY BELOVED

Fully Beloved: Meeting God in OurHeartaches and Our Hopes Timothy Jones (Thomas Nelson) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I wrote with a lot of enthusiasm for this recent book a few weeks ago. I was maybe two-thirds of the way through and had to get the post done, so I gave it my big thumbs up and packed it in my bag as we headed out of state to sell books for a week. In the weeks following I have savored each and every page, re-reading many sections for the sheer joy of them. Jones has won me over as a fan; he is an exceptional, splendid writer, with a lovely blend of story and theology, earnest faith and superb prose. He can be poignant but it never devolves into being sappy. He is tender, but, again, not mawkish. His restrained prose, crafted with such striking texture and pace, reminds me of the great Robert Benson. His focus on the goodness of God and the grace shown in the death of Christ reminds me of Brennan Manning. Jones is now an Anglican priest and while he has somewhat of a sacramental worldview, it isn’t about that. It’s about the Trinity which ends up being a window into the joy and beauty of the gospel, the very good news that God rescues us out of an abundance of love.

Fully Beloved verges on the edges of a contemplative sort of tone but it not about esoteric encounters, not at all. It is about real stuff like his mother and father abandoning him in his young adult years, about him wondering what it would feel like to be accepted. It is — again, without smarmy prose with TMI (“too much information” as the saying goes) or corny applications like too many Hallmark-lite writers — about the wavering of the human heart and the great need to be known and loved. Sure Henri Nouwen and Parker Palmer and so many others have written about this, but there is something about Jone’s appropriation of the Trinity and the “three personed God” (as John Donne puts) that gives this a gentle bit of heft. I wouldn’t say it is written with gravitas as it is way too charming for that descriptor, but almost. For some, it is going to be life-saving.

As I said in my first write-up, I can hardly say enough about Fully Beloved but I can say this: it keeps getting better and better as the book unfolds.  The first line is “Am I loved? Maybe no question nags at us more. Perhaps no questions matters as much.”  In the last half of the book he offers a pair of chapters on God the Father’s answer to this eternal question, and how Jesus (and his death and resurrection) contribute to the answer, and the last two chapters on the role of the Holy Spirit brings it all home. (You see what he did there, this three-fold structure?) There are some very honest stories and some really good prose and some great citations (footnotes from poets and scholars.) There is some in-depth Bible stuff and some clear-headed guidance about church and family and forgiveness and prayer and…. Well, in a way it is a very good overview of the entire Christian life. It’s an all around great book.

Want a good book about God and you, the hurts of your heart and God’s assistance? Do you yearn for rescue without the insight offered being shallow or formulaic? Do you want a bit of theological meat with your lovely lines about goodness and grace? Can you take some hard stuff, knowing how much brokenness there is in this good but fouled world?

After a lovely and helpful concluding story about Jones finding an old picture of himself playfully tossing his two-year-old son in the air, he wondered about trust and presence and joy.  After that beautiful paragraph he writes:

We’ve caught glimpses of the Trinity as a society of intimate relating and congenial collaborating. Glimmers, too, of a God who is not only personal but who overflows in love for us — for our world. I hope you have seen ways forward for ourself in all this. An invitation to greater intimacy.

After telling about his use of the famous icon by Andrei Rublev (his portrait of the Trinity with a open place at the table, it seems) he notes more of what he sees:

Mystery, yes, but also clarity. Our imaginations get stretched and our awe swells again and again. And most of all, our love for the God of great love kindles and grows more radiant day by day.

THE WAY OF THE SPIRIT

The Way of the Spirit: Recognizing and Responding to God’s Subtle Movements Jeremy Sims (IVP) $19.99 // OUR SALE PRICE = $15.99

I’m just going to say it: this is one of the very best books on the inner life and deeper spirituality that I have ever read.

“This is one of the very best books on the inner life and deeper spirituality that I have ever read.”

There, I said it. Should I just let it go at that, hoping you will trust me enough and order The Way of the Spirit right away? Or should I tell you what I so loved about this extraordinary book? It deserves a fantastic review (I’m sure others will do it better justice) and there is so much to tell, but I do not want to overdo it. I want you to order it!  As a believer and champion of this new author, I have to say just a bit. Here are three things you should know about the author — mostly what he explains in the book — and some  things about this glorious book itself.

Although we’ve never meet in the flesh, I count Jeremy as a true pal and appreciate the emails he sends (and the orders he’s placed.) We’ve chatted on the phone (and I watched his wedding a number of years back when it was streamed live.) I love this guy. And we hope to do a free webinar so you can enjoy a conversation about the book — stay tuned as plans develop.

So three things about the author:

First, Jeremy has a complex story, and has experienced a more painful portion of life than most of us. You will read how it effected his move into a quieter sort of contemplative experience of faith, but the hard death his first beloved wife (from Huntington’s Disease) rocked his world, as it would anyone. He was an upbeat and beloved youth pastor at the time and had young kids, too, and during those years his longing for a deeper experience and mode of faith was clearly (but not exclusively) driven by the tragic losses during this pivotal season. Had he even read The Dark Night of the Soul? Like most of us, probably not. But he went through a personal devastation and he writes about it with just enough pathos to help you appreciate his journey (but not too much as The Way the Spirit is not a book primarily about grief.) He eventually remarried and entering into that great gift is also part of his story.

And, truth be told, his longing for something (animated by what he calls a restlessness) began before the year their lives began to change. He tells of a pivotal retreat and discovering what became one of his favorite books, Mansions of the Heart by Thomas Ashbrook about the stages of spiritual growth, with a famous forward by Eugene Peterson. It’s amazing what a book can do, sometimes, eh?

Secondly, importantly, Jeremy was raised and remains a Southern Pentecostal. He is so cool that he had a crazy/fun video which he used to audition for the TV show The Amazing Race and he is smart and a great leader and has huge amounts of integrity. So don’t conjure any smarmy Jimmy Swaggert images. But this was and remains his faith tradition. He does teaching, spiritual direction and mentoring of future Assembly of God pastors (and others, okf course) at Southeastern University in Florida. But has a Doctorate of Ministry from Portland Seminary. And hangs out in Catholic retreat centers and knows the great medieval mystics as well as anyone I’ve ever read. More on that in a moment.

I think (and this seems both interesting and important) that Jeremy so longed for a mystical (if quiet) encounter with the Spirit of the risen Christ because he knew both passionate, real, encounters with God and, yet, because he wanted something more (not less) even if he wanted it in a gentle, sublime manner. Throughout the book he cautions about putting on airs or manufacturing sentiment or overdoing emotional expression, and while all of that is wise and helpful (some of it stemming from the early desert fathers and mothers or the monastics of the 15th century) it does seem to emerge from his concerns about the loud and visceral sort of stuff that happens in his own church tradition. For those with eyes to see, some of The Way the Spirit is a gentle plea to his own tradition to go deeper, not seeking the sensational.

Here’s how he starts the book; don’t miss a word:

I am a cradle Pentecostal, the kind who grew up under wooden-beamed ceilings with fans that spun slow above a sweaty sanctuary, where perfume and prayer mingled in the air and no one doubted that God still moved. The music was loud, the faith louder. We sang until the floorboards rattled, prayed until someone shouted, and waited until heaven seemed to lean close enough to touch. I remember the tambourine keeping time with a hallelujah, the worn pews groaning beneath the weight of saints who had learned to hope through hardship. In those moments, I learned to expect the Spirit’s power, but I didn’t yet know how to recognize the Spirit’s quiet. For a long time, I thought intimacy with God had to sound like thunder. It took years to learn that most often the Spirit moves like breath.

Beautiful, no? And then he explains:

Over the last fifteen years, the Spirit has led me on a journey I never expected. I have not walked away from my Pentecostal roots; if anything they have sunk deeper. I still believe in the God who heals bodies and breaks chains and fill sanctuaries with holy fire. But I have also learned to cherish the quiet fire that has burned for centuries in the historic church — the prayers that have been prayed long before my voice entered the chorus, the wisdom of saints who teach us how to wait when the miracle does not come quickly.

I shed tears reading that, and I was hooked.

Which leads me almost too obviously to the third thing you should know about Jeremy Sims. He is an incredible writer. If this is the only book he does (and I hope it is not) we should thank God in awe that there are such wordsmiths who craft such good paragraphs working among us. Jeremy is not only a contemplative Pentecostal, but he is also an artist, a writer of the finest order. Maybe he’s got the spirit of Bezalel from Exodus 31. I know he’s worked hard on this book and it shows.

Don’t you love where this is going, where a sobered and bereaved Pentecostal pastor takes up with a spiritual director and learned to be both fully Pentecostal in his AG tradition and at the same time “grounded in the ancient practices that have sustained the faithful through both drought and abundance.”

“I have found,” he observes, “that encounter and tradition are not rivals.”

One does not have to be a restless and then grieving Pentecostal to want a “deepening into something wider, older, and surprisingly familiar.” Don’t you, too?

Your own heart will leap, at least a bit, when he uses phrases about the “sacred rhythm of ordinary faithfulness” and how he learned as a pastor to feel “the weight of people’s questions” “but also the ache beneath them.” When he writes about coming to realize that there is “sacred ground” as we seek for God amidst our confusions I scribbled in the margins! He writes of the “slow discovery that holiness often hides inside the ordinary” and that what perhaps we most need, or what we’re really talking about, is that matter of attention.

Yes, there was great tragedy in his story, but here is the start of his journey: restlessness and yearning. He wanted to find God and trust that God was at work “even when I couldn’t locate him in the noise of my own life.”

I don’t know if you have experienced this restlessness or what some call spiritual anxiety, or if you sometimes fear exhaustion if not clinical burnout, but I bet you can relate. To hear god over the noise of our own lives?  Jeremy picks up on Brene Brown’s curious phrase emotional granularity and his rumination about that in the full-chapter introduction to the book is worth the price of whole book. It’s that good.

This book is not the first to invite us to “the slow unlearning of hurried faith” — Jamie Smith, above, talks about unlearning, as does Timothy Jones in Fully Beloved, but Jeremy’s invitation to this holy work is exceptional.

A few quick things about the structure The Way of the Spirit.

First, as I’ve said, he is on a journey to find a deeper more ancient sort of faith without leaving his Pentecostal practices or his role in his denomination. But he does push back against what he has seen as perhaps extremes or unhealthy aspects of holy-roller habits. Eugene Peterson, by the way, emerged as such a deep practitioner of the slow work of spiritual disciplines in part because he wanted something more lasting than the splashy sort of holiness shouting he heard growing up. Jeremey remains happily AG and teaches at a legendary Pentecostal school, but he has been shaped and deeply formed now, for much more than a decade, in the company of the medieval mystics and spiritual classics.

The subtitle is helpful in that he is guiding us to discern the movement of God (the sometimes subtle movements of God) and he calls these “waypoints.” The big center of the book offers seven waypoints, each by inviting us to the wisdom a particular saint or writer. This is so, so good, but I’m ahead of myself.

Before the middle “pilgrimage of the Spirit” and the waypoints on that pilgrimage, Sims offers two very important starting points, about the cultivation of attention. There are essential and consequential chapters. He offers in Part 1 two marks, which he describes as “attentive presence” and “spiritual naming.” I do not think this is utterly new but it was fresh and vivid for my heart and mind and rang so true I underlined almost every paragraph. This invitation of a “way of being in the world, a posture of open-hearted presence” is so good.

Sims insists that his book is not offering a new task, but is about unlearning — “unlearning distraction, releasing control, and recovering the ability to truly be here” as he puts it. He is offering not skills or techniques or disciplines but a new lens. It is beautifully written but sensible; it would be good to read alongside Smith’s more daunting Make Your Home In This Luminous Dark. It is an invitation to spiritual space-making. His Biblical reflections helping us see this are rich and lovely.

He says he learned much of this, not incidentally, in his appointments with his spiritual friend/ director.

During the long decade of Tiff’s illness and the grief that followed, there were many seasons when I avoided God. When Scripture felt hollow. When prayer felt impossible. But I showed up to direction, month after month. That is its quite power. It became my anchor, not because it changed my situation but because it tethered me to presence.

I do not want to summarize every section for you, but he does follow this lovely line about being “tethered to presence” with a little bit about Simon Weil and then ends up arguing that “this is the quiet tragedy of inattention: it slowly erodes our capacity for love”

Oh my. Underline that!

Have you ever felt that? Maybe just apathetic and numb? Do you ever host the insight that fast-paced inattention “dulls our hunger for what is real.” Here’s what he means: “ It slowly convinces us that silence is empty, that nothing important is happening here and that we are safest when we are guarded.”

The Spirit will use this small section of this book to help us wake up — it can help you and it  can help me. His invitation to “surrender” and then to “behold” points us to what he calls “the full arc of attentiveness” which is “softened by mercy, trained by slowness, and reformed by grace.”

And the second mark of attention in Part 1 is even better, about the role of naming. Wow – what a chapter.

SEVEN WAYPOINTS

As I said, the middle Part 2 of the book, then, is his explanation of each of seven saints, most who have written a classic text of spirituality. These are the “waypoints” along the journey that he invites to; he says “waypoints are markers on the road. They will tell you where you are and invite you to notice what’s happening in the landscape of your soul. They give shape to your movement. They orient you to when you feel disoriented.”

The first Waypoint, a chapter called “Holy Threshold” is about Mary and it is rich and good, rooted in the Biblical narrative.

The second Waypoint is in the chapter called “Desert Formation” and it is on the famous 3rd-century Egyptian desert fathers and mothers. It is perhaps the best brief explanation of them I have ever read. Geesh, now I might take back some of my old criticisms, fearing they were merely anti-cultural and nearly gnostic. Jeremy’s words resonated so much that I have read that chapter three times.

The next marker on the road is “Repentent Reordering” and while there is much these days written about Ignatius of Loyola and the Ignatian methods, it is, again, very clear, relevant, and moving. Look: he’s not Catholic and surely no Jesuit, but he explains the helpfulness of this as well as anybody. If you are interested in Ignatian spirituality, you’ve got to read this chapter.

Waypoint 4 is directly about the “Inner Journey” and, again, it is about the best summary of Teresa of Avila I have ever read. There is lots on Teresa these days and most of us need as much help as we can get entering her interior castle. Jeremy says some things about Interior Castle that I’ve not noticed or read before and I am grateful. Wow.

Waypoint 5 made me think again of Jamie Smith’s Make Your Home in This Luminous Dark and Sims’s take on Dark Night of the Soul is appropriately heavy, but, even through lament, it just sings. He tells us that John of the Cross was born in a small village in Spain in 1542 and gives you needed background about what happened when he joined the then-new order, a reformed branch of the Carmelite order (the Discalced, which simply means barefoot.) Jeremy notes that “John’s life was marked by intensity, by prayer, by suffering, and by love.” Did you know he was imprisoned and tortured by his own brothers in Christ? I didn’t realize or remember how persecuted he was (and realize now why Sims related him in passing to Catherine of Sienna and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, too.)  But here’s the thing: we use the phrase “a dark night the soul” to mean almost any depression or doubt but Sims dissects it a bit, explains what all it more specifically means and implies and how to find God in the midst of that sort of particular angst.  He walks readers through a process including “holy dissatisfaction” and “purposed wandering” which can lead to what he calls “infused contemplation.” It is excellent; a real help in taking up and appreciating the famous but often misunderstood text.

“Divine Encounter” is the next section and this 6th Waypoint is guided by Julian of Norwich. We know her line about “all shall be well” but Jeremy really needed this. We all need this. We have so much of Julia in the store (including a book written decades ago called Why Julian Now? asking why in our new postmodern times we need this ancient mystic.) She is beloved for a reason. His description of being on silent retreats and in liturgical settings (not his natural worship habitats, recall) and, like with the other chapters, weaves historical info and spiritual insight and his own story into a very sensible introduction. He has these little pointer charts, too, in each chapter, making these true Waypoints. In this chapter the flow moves from “wounded openness” to “transfigured truth” to joyful oneing” which leads to “steadfast assurance.” This is great stuff, believe me.

I loved the final Waypoint, Waypoint 7, which is on the “sacred ordinary” teaching of Brother Lawrence. Who doesn’t love the “God of pots and pans” described in his classic Practicing the Presence of God. I could say much about this chapter — I thought I knew most of what was to know about Lawrence and about putting into practice his prayerful openness of the Spirit’s presence in the mundane. But I felt like a novice, joyful and enthused to learn this afresh. I pondered Jeremy’s good teaching about liminality and about liturgy. His flow in this chapter (and in the title chart) is too good to mention — you’ll have to order the book and read how he gets from “subversive sanctification” to through several other lovely steps to “expanded wonder” and eventually to “deepening gratitude.” Again, one doesn’t have to be Pentecostal to need the advice: “In the sacred ordinary the Spirit does not dazzles with spectacle. Instead the Spirit teaches us to see again, not with naive eyes, but with renewed ones.”

None of this is about escape for the world or being overly concerned about our interior lives (always a caution when moving in these circles) but about being transformed into Christlikeness and to bearing the fruit of “cultivated attentiveness.” The book’s first part comes together in the final two chapters, among the most stunning of all. His two “Marks of Granularity” in the Part 3 are “Shared Recognition” and “Sustained Attention.” I could write a review just on these two amazing chapters and they are worth reading again and again.

Two final words. At the end of each chapter there is a one page sort of summary, take-away, and exercise. It is prayerful and experiential and a good thing to do to begin to inhabit the points along the way. As these guides and their books that Jeremy teaches about come to life, to practice their insight with these excellent experiences is good. It’s one more feature of The Way the Spirit that illustrates the author’s hope that it truly helps God’s people along the way.

Secondly, there are also discussion questions at the end, making this even more useful to process and explore, and, importantly, to consider using with a small group. If you do spiritual direction, tell your director about it. If you are a pastor, hand a few out to the spiritually hungry in you congregation. If you are a fan of spiritual classics, you’ll love this. If you are not familiar with the contemplative tradition this really is a moving and clear introduction (and more!)  Find some friends and start a book group. These questions will help it take hold. There is lots to reflect on, lots to enjoy, things to learn about “spiritual granularity.” Skip the spectacle. Read (slowly) The Way of the Spirit.

As the great A.J. Swoboda says in his foreword:

My encouragement to you: read slowly. Take in the movements that Jeremy has given voice to. Don’t rush past the burning bush that is this book. Stop. Watch. Listen. Talk. Respond. And mull.

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