Practicing Spiritual Disciplines as an Act of Resistance
Episode Stats
Summary
In this episode, Pastor John Mark Comer offers an introduction to the spiritual disciplines and the way that can be an act of resistance, a way for us to form our own values and rhythms in life, instead of allowing our lives to be formed by the defaults and external forces of our age.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast.
00:00:11.160
To train the body, strengthening its muscles, increasing its cardiovascular health, and
00:00:15.420
improving its agility, you need to do exercises like stretching, running, and lifting weights.
00:00:20.720
To train the soul, expanding its capacity, you likewise need to perform exercises, in
00:00:25.720
this case, what are called spiritual disciplines, practices like fasting, silence, self-examination,
00:00:34.320
As a pastor, John Mark Comer approaches the spiritual disciplines from a Christian perspective,
00:00:38.880
as the habits and practices from the way of Jesus that allow individuals to make deeper
00:00:42.660
layers of themselves available to grace, and access the transforming power that's necessary
00:00:46.480
to become what John Mark calls a person of love.
00:00:49.260
But the practices that are considered spiritual disciplines can be found across different
00:00:52.260
religions and even philosophies like Stoicism, and can be utilized by people from varied
00:00:56.400
backgrounds to deepen their inner life and strength, center themselves in chaos, find
00:01:00.500
greater purpose, and subdue baser desires to reach for higher ideals.
00:01:04.720
Today on the show, John Mark offers an introduction to the spiritual disciplines, and the way that
00:01:08.600
can be an act of resistance, a way for us to form our own values and rhythms in life, instead
00:01:13.100
of allowing our lives to be formed by the defaults and external forces of our age.
00:01:17.140
After the show's over, check out our show notes at awim.is slash spiritualdisciplines.
00:01:22.260
All right, John Mark Comer, welcome to the show.
00:01:39.000
So something that you've written about in your books, the ruthless elimination of hurry
00:01:42.400
and practicing the way, is the idea of spiritual disciplines, which are habits and practices
00:01:48.940
that help us train our souls and access the more transcendent parts of life.
00:01:58.560
Like, to become spiritual, can't you decide, well, I'm going to be spiritual?
00:02:02.620
You know, people say, I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious.
00:02:05.120
They don't have any set practices around their spirituality.
00:02:08.320
So what's the case for practicing the spiritual disciplines?
00:02:12.400
Like, what is it about them that actually makes a difference?
00:02:15.860
Well, I mean, first off, there's a whole rabbit's trail there of, you know, spiritual is one of
00:02:21.960
In our kind of modern, pluralistic, you know, post-secular age, spiritual is a word that
00:02:27.020
everybody uses, but people mean wildly different things by spiritual.
00:02:31.560
So what spiritual means in the Christian tradition is in relationship with a spirit, whether that
00:02:40.160
be the spirit that we understand to be the spirit of God himself, the maker of all things, or
00:02:46.760
another spirit that in, you know, kind of crass language, we would call an angel or a demon
00:02:52.380
or a, you know, dark energy in LA language where I live now or whatever, whatever it may
00:02:58.500
And if you think about relationships, I know you're a, you're a family man, all relationships
00:03:04.280
require disciplined intentions to make connection.
00:03:09.460
And so my wife and I have a weekly date night, which means, you know, about every other week
00:03:17.060
There are times when I feel it, times when I am busy, times when I really want to go,
00:03:22.000
times when I'd rather, you know, do something else, watch TV or catch up on work.
00:03:25.700
But we discipline ourselves to go out and share a meal and look each other in the eyes and
00:03:32.220
offer appreciation to each other and talk over hard stuff and have shoulder to shoulder
00:03:36.960
time to, to build our connection in order to have a relationship.
00:03:41.640
And so the reason we need spiritual disciplines is I can say all I want, I'm a romantic, I'm
00:03:47.000
a lover of my wife T, but if I never spend any time with her, if I never put down my phone,
00:03:51.940
if I never, we never go, we, we don't have this, you know, small repertoire of disciplines,
00:04:04.420
If we don't have these touch points for connection that are at some level scheduled into our lives
00:04:11.320
or at least built into our kind of just natural responses to the stimuli of life or both, then
00:04:16.640
I can say whatever I want, but you know, you gotta, you gotta put your money where your mouth
00:04:23.140
And so in a sense, we need spiritual disciplines because the world that we are in is adamantly
00:04:33.380
It wants, because spirituality tends to not make money.
00:04:36.960
In fact, people that become deeply spiritual seem to find great happiness.
00:04:42.160
And this is true, not just in the Christian faith, but particular Buddhism and other traditions
00:04:46.300
seem to find great happiness, living lives that are increasingly free of consumption and
00:04:58.260
And so there are powerful forces at work to constantly distract us.
00:05:03.100
And we collude in our own self-sabotage because we use these forces to attempt to numb the pain
00:05:10.160
And spiritual disciplines often put us more in touch with the pain of life.
00:05:14.200
And over time, they can shape us into people of great happiness and joy, but often short
00:05:22.520
And so powerful forces outside of us and inside of us resist a spiritual life.
00:05:28.840
And so we need spiritual disciplines to form an intelligent, thoughtful, intentional, you
00:05:36.640
know, counteraction, counter-formational work to the kind of powerful currents of our day.
00:05:42.480
So you're coming at spiritual disciplines from a Christian perspective.
00:05:47.060
But as you mentioned, if you look at other faiths or even philosophies, they have their
00:05:57.640
And then like, you know, Stoicism has had its own sort of set of spiritual disciplines.
00:06:01.660
They have these practices where you would, you know, maybe sleep on the floor and wear
00:06:05.600
this raggedy toga, maybe, you know, sleep out in the cold.
00:06:16.800
And I think it's interesting, kind of the intersection between Christianity and Stoicism.
00:06:20.420
You can kind of see that in Paul's writing a bit where, you know, the Stoics thought
00:06:24.680
about you had to train the soul, kind of liken themselves to wrestlers or Olympic athletes.
00:06:32.180
And so you had to do these exercises to, you know, shape your soul.
00:06:39.260
And so he probably knew, he probably, he knew about the Stoics.
00:06:41.960
And you see that in the New Testament writing, like you want to, you know, finish the race,
00:06:48.720
That one of the most fascinating things to do with the New Testament, because I've spent
00:06:52.640
so many years as a pastor and teaching the Bible, you know, the Bible was written thousands
00:06:59.800
And so, you know, you end up immersing yourself in the world of the Greco-Roman Mediterranean
00:07:06.840
And one of the most fascinating things to do with the Bible is to see where, what the
00:07:11.720
writers like Paul are saying is similar and where they are radically different.
00:07:16.960
I mean, I think Paul and the biblical writers, they celebrate truth wherever they find it.
00:07:21.660
And I attempt to follow that example, whether it be in meditation from the Buddhist tradition
00:07:26.260
and some of the wisdom they have about detachment or imagining your death from the Stoic tradition
00:07:31.780
or, you know, there's so much wisdom now to be had in the cumulative effect of human history.
00:07:38.060
And I think what Paul and the other writers do for us is they show us to just celebrate
00:07:42.540
that wisdom wherever we find it and subvert the aspects or the ideas that live in every
00:07:50.760
So one insight I've gotten from your writing that I was particularly useful in thinking
00:07:56.180
about Christianity, I think a lot of people in America, particularly when they think of
00:08:00.420
Christianity, they just think of it as just doctrines.
00:08:04.320
I mean, it is like there are, you know, that there's been wars fought about what we're supposed
00:08:08.320
to believe in, but you talk about how, you know, if you look closer, there's, there's
00:08:14.960
There's like a way of life and this idea of the yoke, right?
00:08:19.360
I'm sure everyone's heard that Bible verse, you know, where Jesus says, take upon you my
00:08:27.420
She did some historical background, like what that, the idea of a yoke means.
00:08:30.840
Can you walk us through that and how it's connected to spiritual disciplines or spiritual
00:08:37.340
Jesus said, I am the way, the truth, and the life.
00:08:40.280
And, you know, one way to think about Christian spirituality is through that three-part lens
00:08:50.780
That's kind of a goofy word that's been, you know, capitalized, but a way of life, a way
00:09:02.640
It is a meta-narrative about what is good and beautiful and true, about where we come from,
00:09:08.100
where we're going, what's wrong with the world, and how to fix it, and what the real
00:09:12.500
true meaning and purpose of life actually is, and where true happiness is to be found.
00:09:18.340
It is a living, breathing, relational experience with the relationship that we believe to be
00:09:25.320
at the center of the universe that Christians call Trinity or Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
00:09:30.400
And so this idea of yoke and the teachings of Jesus, which sounds a little esoteric or like
00:09:35.200
kind of an odd word picture to us today, but if you can imagine a yoke, it's an agrarian
00:09:39.180
world behind two oxen or something and a farmer plowing a field with a plowshare.
00:09:45.160
A yoke was actually a common metaphor that the rabbis used in the first century for kind
00:09:50.000
of their set of teachings, their summary of what they would have called the Torah or
00:09:54.180
the part of the Bible that was written and central in their day.
00:09:57.360
And their kind of way, it was more than just their way of reading the Bible.
00:10:03.540
It was their kind of way of naming, this is how you shoulder the weight of life.
00:10:09.080
And we learn Jesus' yoke partially through his teachings that come to us through these
00:10:14.320
four biographies in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and through the kind of
00:10:18.940
corpus of writings that make up the New Testament of his earliest followers that were working out
00:10:23.560
his teachings and ideas in different parts of the Greco-Roman world and the empire, but
00:10:29.080
also through just looking at and watching his life, paying close attention to how he spent
00:10:33.700
his time, how he organized his relational world, what he did, what he did not do, how he used
00:10:39.660
money, how he interacted with the political powers of the time, how he, you know, all of
00:10:45.700
And so, yes, a yoke is just a way of reading what life is all about, what Christian spirituality
00:10:52.500
in this case is all about, and how to shoulder the weight of life with peace and with grace.
00:10:59.560
There's just no way, there's no version of life that is easy.
00:11:02.200
Anybody that tells you that is, I think, selling you something or naive.
00:11:05.560
But there is a way to shoulder the weight of life.
00:11:08.940
There's not an easy life, but there is an easy yoke, as I like to say it.
00:11:12.780
There's a way to shoulder the weight of life with peace and with a relational strength that
00:11:18.340
comes from living deeply in connection to God and to other people.
00:11:23.740
This idea of spiritual disciplines is also connected to this idea from monks, from monasteries.
00:11:34.760
So, the first followers of Jesus, the ones that were the most serious, which eventually
00:11:39.780
kind of began what we would now call the monastic tradition, which, you know, kind of grew up
00:11:45.040
over many hundreds of years and took different shapes at different moments in church history
00:11:51.820
But the most serious, the earliest serious followers of Jesus all said, all right, Jesus
00:11:58.860
has some, if you read the Sermon on the Mount, some extraordinary ideas.
00:12:04.520
Because good information in your brain and willpower is simply not enough.
00:12:07.840
And that's, you know, the Achilles heel of Western culture.
00:12:11.040
We think that insight and willpower are enough to change, whether it's through therapy or
00:12:17.800
reading a great book or listening to a killer podcast.
00:12:20.100
If I can just get the right insight, match it to some, you know, good heart intentions,
00:12:27.360
And then we tend to, that only works on very, very, very small changes in our life and character.
00:12:33.200
It simply is powerless against the deeper stuff.
00:12:36.880
If you become a husband or a father or you mature much in life or you end up in a leadership
00:12:40.880
position or you have any kind of public scrutiny on you, the weak foundation of your life will
00:12:46.060
be quickly exposed and you will realize that what you need most to become the person you
00:12:51.160
were destined to be is beyond the power of insight and willpower.
00:12:55.960
And so much of this goes to how do we actually create a workable plan to become the kinds of
00:13:03.680
people that Jesus invites us to become, the kind of people who naturally live his ideas
00:13:09.140
on the Sermon on the Mount, which is loving your enemy and living with that anxiety and
00:13:12.900
being free of the worship of money and people of our word where what we say, when we say
00:13:22.000
People that do not use what some call condemnation engineering, where we try to manipulate people
00:13:27.200
through our judgment and our contempt and our criticism, which the world has just reached
00:13:32.560
All these beautiful ideas in the Sermon on the Mount.
00:13:36.160
So the answer that the first followers of Jesus came up with is a beautiful one.
00:13:41.240
And that is a bit tricky to get it into English today because this word rule is really hard
00:13:48.820
It's very important to say it's rule of life, singular, not rules for life, plural.
00:13:53.660
So a rule of life is not a list of rules, though you may have some rules in your rule of life.
00:14:02.920
And a lot of scholars who's debate over this, but believe it was the word used in the ancient
00:14:07.940
Mediterranean for the trellis underneath a vineyard or a winery.
00:14:13.320
And in one of Jesus' most famous teachings, he has this beautiful line, you know, it's a
00:14:19.780
And he says, you know, abide in me and you will bear much fruit.
00:14:24.380
Meaning if you live in deep relational connection to God through Jesus, then it will produce
00:14:34.400
It will bring goodness out of your life, which is later codified in the New Testament as this
00:14:39.720
list of love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and gentleness and so on.
00:14:45.700
And so early followers of Jesus took this word picture of a vineyard to its logical conclusion
00:14:50.180
and said, listen, a vine doesn't just grow wild on the ground and you don't just like
00:14:55.100
wait for the rain to come and hope for the best.
00:14:59.040
A vine has this trellis, this straight piece of wood underneath it that is a support structure
00:15:03.980
designed to lift it up off the ground, to guard it from predators, disease, you know,
00:15:10.700
trampling by humans, and to index its growth in the right direction, to move it toward maximum
00:15:15.300
sun exposure, to make sure it's well hydrated so it can bear the maximum amount of fruit.
00:15:20.180
And in the same way, if we want to follow Jesus' teaching, to abide in him and bear much fruit,
00:15:26.180
and again, this is very first century Jesus rabbinic language for those of you not familiar
00:15:30.860
with the Bible or the writings of the New Testament.
00:15:34.100
If we want to become these kind of people that naturally bear the byproduct of goodness in
00:15:40.260
our life, then we have to, in the same way, organize our life.
00:15:44.780
We need some kind of a support structure, some kind of a regula, a rule, a straight piece
00:15:49.380
of wood to kind of lift our lives up from, to guard our lives from all that would sabotage
00:15:56.400
our deepest desires of our heart, and to guide our lives into becoming, we would say, people
00:16:05.460
And so, you know, imagine similar work being done by James Clear and others around kind of
00:16:13.000
I mean, there's so much that will, if you don't organize your life, somebody else will
00:16:20.620
You know, if you don't, if you don't set the agenda for your life, somebody else will.
00:16:24.500
And so a rule of life is a way to set the agenda for your life.
00:16:27.900
I think Stephen Covey once said something to the effect of we achieve inner peace when our
00:16:33.500
So very simply, and forgive my over-speaking here, I define a rule of life as a schedule
00:16:38.920
and a set of practices and relational rhythms that organize our life around God and allow
00:16:46.720
us to live in alignment with the deepest desires of our heart.
00:16:53.280
Well, it sounds like you could have a rule of life even if you weren't intentional about
00:16:58.920
Because you kind of default to something like you, we all default to some sort of rhythm
00:17:02.960
of life or practices that we do throughout our day, how we relate to other people.
00:17:12.480
Yes, that is exactly the point I make in my last book that even if you've never heard of
00:17:17.740
the language of rule of life until five minutes ago, even if you hate this idea, even if you're
00:17:22.340
an Antonobian kind of, I hate rules, I'm a free spirit, I'm a spontaneous, I like to go with
00:17:26.900
the flow kind of person. You already have a rule of life. You just don't call it. We all
00:17:31.360
have. We likely have a way that we begin our day. We likely either choose to sleep with
00:17:36.260
our phone as our alarm plugged in next to our bed or something else. We have a morning
00:17:41.600
routine. We maybe have an exercise routine or not. We have a work day. We have activities
00:17:46.580
that make up our time. We have apps on our phone. We have relationships. We have a way of
00:17:52.080
life, a way that we have organized, even if it's incredibly chaotic and reactionary, that
00:17:58.400
in itself is a way of living. All of us have this rule. We all have this way of life. And
00:18:04.700
so the question isn't, do you have a rule of life? The question is, do you know what your
00:18:09.700
rule of life is? And is it working for you or is it actually working against you? Is the
00:18:17.000
way that you're living, is it actually enabling you to live the life that you want? Is it giving
00:18:21.560
you the life that you most deeply desire? Or is it actually sabotaging your best intentions?
00:18:27.440
And many of us, we actually have good heart desires. We have good intentions. And we even
00:18:32.160
know what we want out of life. But yet the way we have structured our life, organized our
00:18:38.280
life, the way we have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by our phones and all that stands
00:18:45.040
behind them, the way we have been manipulated by social media, by the way modern news organizations
00:18:50.960
work, by modern politics, the way we've let them hijack our autotomic nervous system and
00:18:56.660
lead us into anxiety groupthink and so many other things, it often is sabotaging the deepest
00:19:02.120
desires of our heart. And so I'm a firm believer that the only way we can live a flourishing life
00:19:07.360
in the modern era, whether you're a Christian or absolutely agnostic about such things or more,
00:19:12.660
I think is a very intentional, disciplined form of resistance that you do that, you know, somewhere
00:19:20.640
there exists a piece of paper or a document that names the schedules, the practices, the relationships
00:19:26.860
by which you will form resistance. And this has to be done in community, we simply all resistance
00:19:31.900
cells to all empires down through history, we're never individuals alone, they were always small kind
00:19:37.500
of guerrilla bands trying to fight from the margins for what they believe to be good. And I think
00:19:43.580
that's the only way that we will survive this kind of a moment. Yeah, so the takeaway there, you're
00:19:48.340
being formed by something, the spiritual practices can help you, like, I'm going to take control of
00:19:52.700
this. There's that Flannery O'Connor quote, you got to push back against the age. Yes, I love that quote.
00:19:58.200
Yeah, push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you. Yeah, and so that's the key idea of my
00:20:03.260
last book is you are being spiritually formed. And what I'm that's going to be weird language to people
00:20:08.300
that aren't Christians. What I mean by spiritually formed is your your spirit, your inner woman or
00:20:13.420
man, your inner person, the web and the nature of who you are, call it character in your older old
00:20:19.260
school language, that it is being formed where human beings are dynamic, we're not static, like none of us
00:20:25.080
are the same person we were 20 years ago, none of us are the same person we were 20 minutes ago,
00:20:29.680
it's just so incremental, we don't see it. And over time, we see these broad stroking changes,
00:20:35.880
we are being formed into a particular kind of person, you may becoming more joyful and happy and
00:20:42.580
relaxed and kind and patient, or you may becoming more selfish and agitated and angry and freaked out
00:20:49.200
about the world. The point is, you're becoming a type of person, who are you becoming? Is it the kind of
00:20:55.540
person you want to become? And is your rule of life, your way of life? Is it helping you become
00:21:01.220
that person? Or is it hindering you from becoming that person?
00:21:05.520
Well, let's talk about some of these spiritual disciplines that you advocate for. And one is
00:21:09.160
solitude and silence. And you talk about the idea of Eremos in the Bible. Is that I pronounced that
00:21:17.240
Yeah, I mean, I'm not going to correct your Greek pronunciation, bro. It's I think it's Eremos.
00:21:21.540
At the end of the day, we're just doing our best here.
00:21:26.560
Yeah, tell us about the Eremos. That was really interesting and how it's connected to solitude
00:21:31.180
Yeah, so it's interesting. So again, I'm just obsessed with the life and the person of Jesus.
00:21:37.160
And when you look at his life, there are so many remarkable things about him. So many things that
00:21:42.760
just cut straight across the bow of kind of our intuitions and certainly how we've organized the
00:21:48.520
world today and how you would imagine a celebrity today. But one of the things that Jesus did a lot
00:21:53.680
is he was deeply engaged with the world, deeply engaged with people. He spent many years in
00:21:57.940
obscurity. But then once he kind of began to engage as a rabbi, I mean, it was extraordinary,
00:22:02.640
the things he did and the crowds he was a part of, the deep relational life that he lived with his
00:22:07.360
disciples. But he would regularly disappear into this place that the Greek word is Eremos.
00:22:13.820
And it can be translated all sorts of and is translated. If you have an English translation
00:22:19.440
of the Bible, that Greek word, same word is translated all sorts of different ways as the
00:22:24.820
desert or the wilderness or the solitary place or the quiet place or the lonely place. These are all
00:22:31.960
legitimate translations of this Greek idea. And it's a very different world. It was much less
00:22:36.980
populated. But Jesus basically would just disappear out into the middle of nowhere, into nature, up a
00:22:41.800
mountain or out into the desert. It's not quite the right translation because much of it was up in
00:22:46.580
the Galilee and such. But he would just go out and he would be alone with himself and with God.
00:22:52.600
And you'd see him living in this rhythm of what I call retreat and return, where you would kind of,
00:22:58.380
he wasn't a monk. Jesus was not a monk. He did not disappear from the world. He did not hole up in a
00:23:03.500
hermitage. He lived a deeply active life. But neither was he a modern day politician with 18 hour days and
00:23:10.180
surrounded by a staff constantly and people. He would live this fascinating rhythm where he would
00:23:15.600
deeply engage with the world. But then he would retreat and he would disappear. They would literally
00:23:21.180
send out search parties for him. When he got too popular, he would attempt to hide up in the hills.
00:23:27.700
And it was just a fascinating experience where he would get up early. Mark chapter one, one of the
00:23:33.960
first stories to read about Jesus in Mark's biography is very early while it was still dark.
00:23:38.400
Jesus got up, went out to, and it's translated, a solitary place. It's a ramos in Greek,
00:23:44.660
and prayed. And so he would carve out these long uninterrupted times for maybe what we today would
00:23:53.320
call meditation or prayer for deeply being himself with God and others. And this is one of the things
00:24:00.760
that enabled him to live with such extraordinary equilibrium, poise, courage, fortitude, wisdom,
00:24:08.760
to know just the right thing to say and do at just the right time. And so the spiritual discipline,
00:24:15.480
this is in the Christian tradition, this has come to be called the spiritual discipline of silence,
00:24:19.700
solitude, and stillness, which is where we follow Jesus' example. And we basically withdraw,
00:24:26.920
we kind of retreat from the noise and the stimulation of all external inputs, whether that be a phone
00:24:34.460
or a crowd of people, or even our close friends and the busyness of the city. And we find a quiet place,
00:24:41.640
and that may be a hermitage on top of a mountain, or it may be our living room as the sun rises before
00:24:49.340
our family is up with our phone in another room. And we find these quiet places and quiet moments to
00:24:55.320
retreat, to center ourselves in God, to become aware of our own heart and our own life, and to begin to
00:25:02.860
get thoughtful about how we live our life, to not just live, but to work on our living, and to begin
00:25:10.760
to then re-enter the world, our families, our jobs, our work, running a podcast, whatever it is we're doing,
00:25:20.440
I love that. So you can do this on a daily basis, like you described. Maybe you have a time in the
00:25:25.360
morning when you wake up a little bit earlier, you don't check your phone, you just cut off all
00:25:29.540
inputs, and it could be meditation, it could be prayer. You're just going to be there by yourself
00:25:37.240
Absolutely. Yeah. So my personal rule of life, this for me is essential. So I think it's one of the most
00:25:44.160
important of all the spiritual disciplines. So yes, I have a daily kind of hour, first thing every
00:25:49.020
morning. Then I have a weekly, we practice Sabbath, so I have a whole 24 hour, we turn our phones off
00:25:54.980
for a full 24 hours every weekend. And I have a longer period every Saturday. And then monthly,
00:26:00.960
I'll take a full day every month to just retreat. And I will tend to bring nothing but my journal
00:26:07.700
and my heart. I don't bring books, I don't bring a phone, you can't get a hold of me, I'm not with
00:26:13.480
other people. It's just me, my soul and God. And I cannot even put into words. And then annually,
00:26:20.760
I will try to do a couple of days, a couple of nights in full retreat. And for that, I'll often
00:26:27.460
go to a monastery or somewhere that offers a place to live quietly. I'll just go solo camping a lot by
00:26:34.280
myself up in, you know, off grid country or something and just be alone. Yeah, I've been to
00:26:40.460
a monastery for a weekend. One of the things I found was incredible about it. I just slept so much. I
00:26:46.740
didn't think I was tired. But for some reason, getting out of my schedule, my body just like
00:26:52.740
responded. It's like, you're tired, you need to just sleep. And I, I was surprised how much I slept
00:26:57.880
during that time. Yeah, I think that's healthy and right. You know, one of the gifts of solitude,
00:27:02.660
there's so many gifts. But one of the gifts is we just learn so much about ourselves when we
00:27:08.000
finally are just with ourselves and God. And we often begin to realize how much we've been
00:27:16.320
running away from and our pain, which is why I think so many people avoid solitude,
00:27:21.100
even though it's actually quite joyful once it becomes a part of your life. But at first,
00:27:25.820
often the painful feelings we've been running away from through our busyness and our devices and
00:27:31.400
binge watching TV, you know, come up. But one of the first things that comes up for most people
00:27:35.900
is just exhaustion, the busyness, the hurry, the overcommitment, the multitasking, the digital stress
00:27:43.580
on our nervous systems, the political climate we're in. It is utterly exhausting. And so I think
00:27:49.700
one of the great gifts of solitude in our age is just a chance to take a nap, to sleep, to let our
00:27:56.200
nervous systems, like begin to calm down. You know, who's the author? I'm forgetting his name
00:28:07.200
I loved his insights. And I went and did a bunch of research after reading that book. And man,
00:28:11.080
was he spot on, but about noise pollution. And, you know, his insight that basically,
00:28:15.700
if you're out in nature, if you're backpacking in the Sierra Nevadas, if you hear something really
00:28:20.400
loud over a certain decibel level, the likelihood is that it's bad. It's a grizzly bear or a wolf or
00:28:27.100
an avalanche or an earthquake. There's very few things in nature that are very loud that are not
00:28:33.980
dangerous. And so our bodies have evolved to, you know, sound over a certain decibel level puts our
00:28:41.060
bodies into fight or flight. And that decibel level is basically just living in a city, just normal life
00:28:47.800
where, you know, living in LA or whatever. And so I think one of the gifts of solitude is we can
00:28:54.760
really begin to participate in the healing of our nervous system. I think when we're running
00:28:59.800
at fight or flight, I mean, one way to interpret the just absolute cluster cuss disaster that is
00:29:05.780
politics in America is this is what a bunch of underslept, exhausted people in fight or flight from
00:29:12.960
too much noise and stimulation, following their phones around through anxiety and anger driven
00:29:17.700
group think. This is what it looks like. And it is not pretty. And so if we want to be people that
00:29:23.520
spread peace, goodness, wisdom, and courage in this age and era, then I think it is essential that we
00:29:30.500
come away for periods of time from the mess, from the chaos, to center ourselves, calm our bodies,
00:29:39.580
and to return with a renewed sense of mission and purpose.
00:29:44.400
We're going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors.
00:29:46.660
And now back to the show. Another spiritual discipline is Sabbath. You mentioned that as
00:29:57.540
part of your solitude and silence practice. I'm sure people are familiar with the Sabbath. This
00:30:02.640
idea comes from Judaism where you take a day off where you don't do anything. Why do you think that
00:30:08.800
idea went away? What happened there? Because that's such a great idea. Like you get a seventh of your life
00:30:13.360
for you just to chill out. But we were like, no, I don't want to chill out. Yes. And yeah, you know,
00:30:19.200
I was chatting to my dad the other day. My dad is 73, grew up in what's now called Silicon Valley. At
00:30:25.920
the time, it was just Santa Clara. And he tells stories about, you know, how everything on Sunday
00:30:33.820
would close down. And almost everyone went to some house of worship. They were either a Catholic or
00:30:40.440
Protestant or Jewish synagogue. And then most people would have family dinner together afterwards.
00:30:46.280
And everything was closed on Sunday. It was actually illegal to run anything. And he talks
00:30:51.400
about, you know, the year that 7-Eleven came to town and how revolutionary it was to like go out
00:30:58.440
and buy a Slurpee or whatever on a Sunday. And I looked it up and I, this off the top of my head,
00:31:03.900
I have to Google it again to make sure. But I believe that the year that 7-Eleven came to Silicon
00:31:07.640
Valley was 1969. And it's just bizarre. That was not very long ago, half a century where the whole
00:31:15.440
world, whether you were a Christian or not, would essentially pause and breathe. And, you know,
00:31:21.060
in Christian theology or Judeo-Christian theology, the Sabbath isn't just like a good idea or habit
00:31:25.940
or a practice. In Genesis chapter 1, the way that the kind of mythology of Genesis is written,
00:31:32.700
it's actually woven into the fabric of creation itself. That creation is like built, the environment,
00:31:39.760
the natural world is built with this rhythm into creation of six and seven. And on the seventh day,
00:31:47.480
you breathe, you pause, you rest, you worship. And whether you buy that or not, I certainly do
00:31:53.600
actually. And there's some intriguing scientific stuff that would argue that, at least for the human
00:31:57.900
body. But whether you buy that or not, I think there is this, we're creatures of rhythm. We're
00:32:03.020
not machines. There's summer and there's winter. There's day and there's night. There's work week
00:32:07.720
and there's Sabbath. There's morning and there's evening. And we're built to live in this rhythm.
00:32:13.860
And so it's just bizarre how the whole world has almost just abandoned this practice without even
00:32:22.520
almost any group-wide public conversation about it. And I think the various reasons, you could go
00:32:28.700
around blaming, I don't know, marketing or capitalism gone awry or whatever, secularism. You could find
00:32:35.140
somebody to blame. But the reality is that we have lost this essential practice. And the Christian
00:32:43.640
practice of Sabbath is very unique in that it's not just a day off or a day to be quiet. It's a day to
00:32:48.800
deeply rest, but also to attach more deeply to God and offer more of yourself joyfully to God and to
00:32:55.520
really anchor your life in your community of other Christians. But, you know, you have Pico Ayer and
00:33:01.880
other secular thinkers that are arguing for a secular Sabbath. You have doctors now arguing for a digital
00:33:07.220
Sabbath, which we practice, by the way, as well. And it's wonderful. And so I just think wisdom is
00:33:12.280
wisdom is wisdom. Whether you're a Christian or not, the wisdom of living by rhythm, of living with
00:33:19.680
more than just, you know, accomplishment and accumulation or constant stimulation as our end
00:33:25.920
is just, it's never been more important, arguably, now than it ever has before.
00:33:31.620
So yeah, the Sabbath is a way to push back against the world's rhythm.
00:33:35.020
Um, oh yeah, it's, it's, it's like subversive. I mean, it's so the level of resistance because we
00:33:40.400
don't buy, we don't sell on the Sabbath. We turn our devices. I mean, it's just, it is full on
00:33:45.680
resistance to the, to the powers of digital empire. We, yeah, we actually had a guest on the podcast a
00:33:51.400
while back ago about having a digital Sabbath. We'll link to it in the show notes. I thought it was
00:33:55.340
really interesting. So what could a Sabbath practice look like? I know you say there aren't any hard rules
00:34:00.400
to follow, but what does it look like for you? Cause as a pastor, you're really busy on Sundays
00:34:05.360
and you do a Sabbath on Saturday and actually start on Friday night.
00:34:10.180
For our family. Yes. We begin the night before or the night of, you know, in Hebrew theology,
00:34:16.100
the day begins at sundown, not at midnight or at sunrise, like we think of in the Western world.
00:34:21.860
And there's a whole theology behind that of the day begins with rest, with sleep. So yes,
00:34:26.900
we start the night before we throw a big kind of Sabbath dinner party. We have some of our closest
00:34:31.720
family and friends who come every Friday night. We do homemade sourdough bread and a really good
00:34:37.420
bottle of wine. And we laugh and we do gratitudes and highlight of the week. And we do fire pit and
00:34:42.820
watch the sunset and play games. We put all of our devices away, literally in a box for 24 hours,
00:34:48.900
including my teenage kids. There's no phones, there's no laptops, there's no TV, everything,
00:34:54.280
the clicker, it all goes into a box that we put away. And we just spend, you know, we spend the
00:35:00.360
evenings kind of a party. So it kind of starts with a relaxed party celebration. And then we sleep for
00:35:07.040
a long, long time and we're pretty chill. Our family's pretty chill. So, you know, Saturdays then
00:35:13.120
for us is, I'm in this great stage where I have teenagers, so they sleep in really late. So I
00:35:18.660
basically get a half day retreat every Saturday morning, which is nice to read and pray and journal
00:35:24.900
and go on walks with the dog. And then it's family time. So it's a real mix of trying to
00:35:30.080
connect with our own souls, connect with each other and deepest, closest friendships and family
00:35:35.000
and connect with God. And so we have a lot of kind of relaxed kind of micro practices woven
00:35:40.340
throughout the day that just kind of return us to a grateful posture before God. And we spend the day
00:35:46.220
just resting. And honestly, it is mostly that usually it's the highlight of our week and it's
00:35:51.380
become an anchor practice really for our, even our family's spirituality. You know, I have my own
00:35:57.160
kind of individualistic, this is how I do life with God or receive life from God. But for our family,
00:36:03.820
Sabbath has really become like the anchor. And for most Christians, the Sabbath would also include
00:36:09.000
going to church and worshiping and being with other, other people of God.
00:36:13.840
Another spiritual discipline is fasting. A lot of people are fasting these days for health reasons.
00:36:22.680
Yeah, there's more than one. I mean, like all of this stuff, there are layers to it, you know?
00:36:27.060
So we believe, and I think there's good, good evidence for this, that it has a deeply
00:36:32.840
reforming effect on purging what we would understand. I'm trying to think of language here
00:36:39.760
that would make sense to non-Christians. All of us have these primal animal bodily desires
00:36:46.280
that are basically oriented around self-preservation and self-satisfaction. And that could be lust,
00:36:53.440
it could be greed, it could be gluttony, it could be anger, it could be selfishness. And overcoming
00:36:59.360
these powerful undercurrents of bent desires that all of us carry in our bodies is very difficult.
00:37:06.580
It's much more difficult than most people are honest about. And fasting has this profound effect
00:37:12.720
upon the body where we would understand it to be, this is language used by the writer Paul in the
00:37:18.280
New Testament of the flesh and the spirit. And this is very kind of Christian or religious sounding
00:37:22.560
language, but the flesh you could understand is this kind of primal, carnal, bodily survival part of
00:37:30.020
this, the animal part of our nature. And the spirit, you could understand, I don't think of
00:37:35.220
of non-Christian language as like the enlightened part of us moving toward people that live over
00:37:41.760
those animal desires and wisdom and love and peace and kindness and fortitude. And so, you know,
00:37:49.100
fasting is a way to starve your flesh and feed your spirit. So there's something that happens when you
00:37:55.560
do not, you know, many of the early Christian thinkers said that Christian spirituality begins in the
00:38:00.860
stomach. And that if you can't overcome your gluttonous desires, your stomach, your bodily desires, you're
00:38:06.760
never going to have victory in other areas of your life, whether that be channeling your sexuality toward a
00:38:12.520
healthy direction or money or your mouth and how you speak to other people, or your decisions you make with
00:38:19.140
your life, impulse control. And so there's a powerful thing. I mean, Christian spirituality is holistic in that it
00:38:25.120
believes the body is not just a thing that we're in. It's actually a part of who we are and an essential
00:38:31.080
part of who we are. It's deeply, deeply embodied spirituality. And so fasting is a way to turn your
00:38:37.260
body from an enemy into an ally in the fight to become a person of love.
00:38:43.680
So how do you incorporate this into a spiritual practice? Is it something you do once a week,
00:38:47.060
once a month? Is it 24 hours? Is it, you know, no water, no food? How do you, how do you...
00:38:52.460
It's, yeah. I mean, well, traditionally fasting is just not eating, but drinking water. There are some rare
00:38:57.520
examples of not drinking water either, but you can't do that very long. So yeah, and again, there's not a right
00:39:03.060
way. There's no command from Jesus and the New Testament writers. There's a long running Christian tradition
00:39:08.640
of fasting once or twice a week until sundown, typically on Wednesdays and Fridays. So I will do that on Wednesdays
00:39:15.700
and Fridays. I will just wake up and not eat until kind of a simple dinner at sundown. And sometimes
00:39:22.360
in some seasons of my life, I'll just do it one day a week. Others will do it two days a week.
00:39:27.120
And then there will be longer periods of fasting that I will do for several days up to maybe a week.
00:39:34.840
For me, it tends to be the upper limit for me, but those tend to be responsive. Like I'm going to do
00:39:40.360
a couple of day fast next week in response to something that happened to me in this last month.
00:39:45.640
It will be when I really think there'll be certain occasions that call for it. So one could be
00:39:50.640
when I'm in the process of really trying to discern a major decision. And it's an incredibly helpful
00:39:57.780
practice to really what I would understand to be hear the voice of God speaking in my inner man
00:40:04.560
and discern what the next step is. I will often practice a longer fast when I'm facing some kind
00:40:12.440
of a crisis and I just need the help of God. I will often practice a longer fast when, again,
00:40:18.540
this is going to be very Christian language, when I have sinned, when I have done something
00:40:22.560
egregious, something wrong, when I have, you know, maybe really hurt the feelings of my wife or my
00:40:28.540
children through selfish behavior, whatever it is, I will often fast to repent and attempt to
00:40:34.480
not to self-mascicate, not to, you know, self-flagellate myself, not out of shame, but out of an attempt to
00:40:40.320
really purge myself. I will often fast in response to grief. Thankfully, I don't have that happen very
00:40:46.200
often, but fasting in most traditions is very common after the death of a loved one. You would
00:40:50.720
fast for up to a week at a time as a way of like, again, grieving. You could think of fasting as
00:40:57.060
praying with your body. You know, in prayer, we all run out of words. We all get to the spot where we
00:41:02.440
don't know what to say or do. And it's a way to just pray with your body, even beyond words and even
00:41:07.440
when you don't know what to say. Another spiritual discipline you talk about is community. And I don't
00:41:12.220
think a lot of people would think of community as a spiritual discipline. So how is community a
00:41:16.880
spiritual discipline? Yeah. And that may not be a helpful way to frame it for people, but certainly
00:41:21.880
in our radically individualistic age, Brett, I mean, it's just, as you know, I mean, people just live
00:41:28.340
shockingly lonely lives for all of the connection that we have through our devices and modern features
00:41:35.320
of the world. People have few close friends. Families tend to be fragmented and torn apart, if not by
00:41:41.880
relational breaches, then at least by distance and busyness. And so again, if we're going to live
00:41:48.080
against that flow of kind of atomized culture, as some would call it, or this radical individualism,
00:41:53.480
as the sociologist Robert Bella called it, we have to live very intentionally and subversively. And so
00:42:00.200
that's simple for us. It would be things like once a week, we share a meal with about, you know,
00:42:07.000
eight other people that we love and we deeply know and have chosen to kind of do life with. And we're
00:42:11.700
all followers of Jesus, so we're helping each other toward a specific kind of life telos or life
00:42:16.800
goal. It would be, I have one close friend that after my wife kind of knows everything there is to
00:42:23.400
know about me for the most part. And so it would be us attempting to get together once a week and
00:42:28.460
bear a soul. Sometimes we just laugh and catch up. Sometimes we encourage each other. Sometimes we talk
00:42:34.060
about mistakes we made and we are deeply, you know, honest and vulnerable, but it's letting somebody else
00:42:39.700
into the inside and being deeply vulnerable. Sometimes it looks like regularly practicing
00:42:44.720
service where we find people that aren't in our income bracket or are kind of preferred. These
00:42:50.880
are the people we like to hang out with and we find ways to serve them. And the gift that is not just
00:42:56.580
to them, but to us is insurmountable. Okay. So that one, you can practice it by just getting together
00:43:02.140
with people, having dinner with them once a week. And this is, I think, you know, going back to this idea
00:43:06.900
that spiritual disciplines are a way for you to resist and push back against whatever's forming
00:43:12.320
us out there in the world. Like this is, this requires like getting together with people
00:43:17.340
is hard. Like, I mean, if anyone's tried to plan a dinner with friends, everyone knows they've got
00:43:23.600
so much going on in their lives. I got kids going to this thing and I got this meeting to go to and I
00:43:28.440
got, and so you have to like, you know, set things a month in advance. Whenever that happens, like I
00:43:33.860
shouldn't live like this, this is not normal. This is this, I don't feel good. So actually making
00:43:39.280
relationships, an integral part of your life is a way to push back against that.
00:43:45.700
Yeah, absolutely. And this is again, in the Christian tradition, why you can't be a Christian
00:43:51.320
by yourself. Not you shouldn't, not it's not a great, like you literally can't. To be a Christian
00:43:56.260
is not just to follow Jesus. It is to be a member of Jesus community. And the wisdom there is that,
00:44:03.620
listen, if you want to live a particular kind of life, in particular, if it swims upstream,
00:44:08.980
strain against the cultural currents of your day, then you have got to be a part of a community
00:44:15.460
that forms, you know, almost like an alternative society or this little microcosm, this little
00:44:21.320
cell group type of thing. And that's what the church is in Christian theology. And often in America,
00:44:27.260
we think of the church as these big kind of weekend experiences with thousands of people. And
00:44:31.440
there's a place for that. But that's not the primary expression of church, certainly not in the New
00:44:35.740
Testament and down through church history. It's much smaller. It's much simpler. And it's a group
00:44:40.360
of people doing life together. And the wisdom there is you can't do this by yourself. You need
00:44:45.280
other people. And for other people to join you, you have to have some kind of a group way truth in
00:44:51.920
life. You have to have some kind of a group shared value system that you're working for and holding
00:44:57.740
yourself to some kind of a group shared rule of life in our language or kind of rhythms that you
00:45:03.120
live by. And that could be as simple as, you know, we're a group of five different families.
00:45:09.300
We all have kids in the same era. And we're trying to, you know, we get together every Sunday
00:45:13.400
afternoon because we want to be healthy families. And it could be really, really simple. It doesn't
00:45:17.860
have to be deeply metaphysical. But you have to have a group of people, a community that you do this
00:45:23.340
with. You have to have some kind of articulated shared value system. And then you have to have
00:45:29.560
some simple habits, rhythms, disciplines, practices, relational touch points that turn
00:45:36.140
this value system from an aspirational idea into an embodied reality.
00:45:40.960
In your book, The Ruthless Elimination of Her, you talk about simplicity as a spiritual discipline.
00:45:47.820
How can practicing simplicity help you order your desires?
00:45:50.860
Yeah. I mean, again, if you're trying to think of this as an outsider to the Christian faith,
00:45:55.580
you know, minimalism is kind of like the secularized version of the very ancient Christian
00:46:03.000
discipline of simplicity. You know, you could hear a lot of the things that we're talking about,
00:46:06.980
Brett, somebody who's listening to your show and could think that I'm asking them or encouraging
00:46:12.120
them to go add like 95 things to their already over busy, stressed out, maxed out life. And that is
00:46:18.920
nothing could be further from the truth. I think for most people in the world today,
00:46:24.400
any serious spiritual life or just any intentional, meaningful life organizational system begins with
00:46:33.300
subtraction, not addition, with doing less, not with doing more, with pursuing simplicity,
00:46:40.700
not with increasing complexity. So I am certainly not saying, hey, you're busy, you're stressed out,
00:46:47.600
you're maxed out. Okay. Now you need to do an hour of meditation every morning and a digital Sabbath and
00:46:51.940
schedule this relational touch point every week. I'm saying you need to actually not just replace
00:46:58.220
other practices and habits with these more meaningful ones, but actually cut down, you know,
00:47:03.980
depending on how busy you are probably at least 20%, if not way more of your commitments, even
00:47:10.780
relational obligations, activities, practices, consumeristic kind of behaviors, media based
00:47:16.580
entertainment behaviors, simplify your life. Let it be slower. Let it be simpler. Let it be more
00:47:22.820
meaningful. Let it be more about what is deeply good, not just the fleeting pleasures of our age.
00:47:29.380
And so ultimately simplicity is about organizing your life around what matters most. And again,
00:47:36.880
many of us have this inner sense of tension, disequilibrium, angst, because the chaos of our
00:47:44.340
daily lives does not match, it does not align with, and it certainly does not further what our actual
00:47:51.420
aspirational ideal of life is. And so the more, some of that tension is just what it means to be human
00:47:57.340
and live in a world and have a job and life. But the more we can integrate our daily lives with our
00:48:05.160
spiritual values, our highest values, our deepest desires, the more we can align and integrate and
00:48:11.740
bring those two things together, the more peace and joy we will experience this side of, of eternity.
00:48:19.460
So what are some concrete things that people can do to practice the spiritual discipline of simplicity?
00:48:23.700
Well, I think this is where the minimalism world and all that literature and good thinkers on that
00:48:29.380
subject are really helpful. You don't have to start esoterically. Start by just like decluttering
00:48:34.320
your bedroom and your house. Start literally, it's shocking how just getting rid of stuff,
00:48:40.920
crap you don't need out of your house, how amazing that will actually open up breathing room in your
00:48:47.380
soul. It's just, it's, it's, it sounds weird to us in the West, but we're such embodied creatures.
00:48:52.460
Then, you know, the more that you can begin to change your consumerism habits. I mean,
00:48:57.640
everybody's different, but most people I know, most of us, myself included, buy far more than we need.
00:49:03.800
So if you can begin to limit your consumption and begin to deeply savor things that are either simple,
00:49:13.220
like a morning cup of coffee or free, like watching the sunset or walking in a park near your house.
00:49:18.480
And then from there, if you can begin to simplify your schedule by cutting just obligations out that
00:49:26.680
enable you to begin to live with margin so you can actually have breath in your life, which again,
00:49:33.200
does not mean not living a productive or meaningful life. I have quite a bit of margin in my life and I,
00:49:39.500
I like to believe that I'm still living a meaningful and productive life.
00:49:43.340
Those things are not mutually exclusive in the least bit. Often by pruning, we bear more fruit,
00:49:49.540
not less. So, but I think one of the simplest places to start is just by actually beginning
00:49:55.200
to simplify your possessions, your living situation and your habits of materialism.
00:50:00.820
Another habit you talk about or discipline you talk about is slowing down,
00:50:05.000
like literally doing things more slowly. So how can slowing down be a spiritual discipline?
00:50:10.280
Well, I mean, again, this only makes sense at some, I'm a lot, you can make sense of it through a
00:50:17.080
wellbeing level. I think about it through the lens of, you know, Christian spirituality, which is to
00:50:22.640
become a person of love. But even if that's not your ultimate goal in life, if you just want to feel
00:50:27.100
better, most of us, when we're hurried and stressed out and maxed and, you know, I just got home from the
00:50:32.920
airport LAX late last night, just thinking of like trying to travel through LAX. It's just that feeling.
00:50:38.460
It's just a terrible feeling of being late and stressed and hurried and maxed out. And many of
00:50:43.660
us live that way chronically. And so I think that the world has sped up to an unhuman and unhealthy
00:50:52.240
place and an inhumane pace of life. And I think literally, again, holistic spirituality, embodied
00:51:00.260
spirituality, learning to breathe, to breathe slower through our bellies, to walk slower,
00:51:08.340
to multitask less, which is a myth we all know anyway, to have more margin in our life.
00:51:15.600
Hurry is not having a lot to do. Hurry is having too much to do and not enough time to do it.
00:51:23.440
And so the only way we attempt to do it all is we speed our bodies, our central nervous systems,
00:51:30.920
our minds, and our relationships up to a pace that is simply incompatible with being loving,
00:51:40.280
joyful, peaceful people. And we all could tell that example, whether it was me trying to get my
00:51:46.400
family to the airport yesterday, I was not at my most loving best because I was hurried and stressed,
00:51:51.700
stressed. Or me this morning when my wife was having a hard morning, she wanted to have a quick
00:51:56.340
conversation with me and I was late for a meeting. And so I was cursed and I don't have time for this.
00:52:00.700
And I rushed out the door and it wasn't like, you know, it was fine. It was just normal stress,
00:52:05.180
married stress. But that's because I was hurried. I didn't have the space to be with her in a hard
00:52:11.300
morning because I had a little bit too much to do my first day back to work after vacation.
00:52:15.740
And some of that is inevitable. It is in life. But I think that slowing our lives down,
00:52:21.380
especially for the kind of people that probably listen to a podcast like this that are deeply
00:52:25.280
interested in productivity, living meaningful lives, living healthy lives. Most of us tend to
00:52:32.220
do too much, not to do too little. They're probably, they're probably listening to the podcast at 1.5
00:52:37.200
speed too. Exactly. The amount of people that have listened to the audio book of my book on hurry and
00:52:43.900
said, I listened to it at 1.5 speed. I realized I'm a total hypocrite. You're just normal. Thousands of
00:52:49.340
people have said that to me practically. You're just normal. That's the speed of our world. And
00:52:54.160
it is a speed that is incompatible with love. And I've just decided that I am much more interested
00:53:00.780
in becoming a person of love and joy and peace in the way of Jesus than I am with living at the
00:53:07.900
frenetic pace of our modern era. And it's another form of resistance because everything's pushing you
00:53:13.740
go faster and faster. So drive the speed limit, walk a little bit slower. Don't answer emails or
00:53:20.780
the slack right away. As soon as you get the ping, like take your time.
00:53:23.880
Or just go on a walk in the first place and leave your phone at home. Just go walk, go walk your dog,
00:53:29.200
go take a walk with your kid or your spouse or your friend or your girlfriend, whatever. Just
00:53:32.820
go out, just be outside, watch the sunset. I mean, this is not rocket science, you know,
00:53:38.040
just drink your coffee and actually just drink your coffee in the morning. Don't do anything.
00:53:41.920
Don't read the news. Don't fall. Just drink your coffee and be present to that. It's this is,
00:53:47.780
this is where joy is so often. Yeah. I mean, I've, I've experienced that
00:53:51.120
just living a life of hurries turned me into that snippy dad. It's like, Oh,
00:53:55.360
don't have time. You know, get going, get out the door. And it's like, man, what am I doing?
00:53:58.980
What am I doing? And then I, I mean, the people I've been around where they're just,
00:54:02.920
when you're around them, they feel so life affirming. Like you just, I just feel really good being
00:54:08.060
around this person. They, they, they're slow. They're not in a hurry to get anywhere. They talk
00:54:13.400
a little bit slower. They're present to you. Yeah. They're just present to you. It's like,
00:54:17.860
man, I want to become that sort of wise joyful. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Yeah. That's it. And again,
00:54:23.540
it's hard. It's hard in the throes of life and responsibility and parenthood and working a job.
00:54:29.800
And we're not aiming for perfection here. We're just aiming for practice, for progress,
00:54:35.820
for slow incremental growth. We've talked about a couple spiritual disciplines. There's several
00:54:41.360
more out there, but how do you decide which one to start with? If you're like, I want to incorporate
00:54:45.780
some more spiritual disciplines in my life. I want to add a rule of life to my life. How do you decide
00:54:50.440
where to start? Well, again, there's no official starting place and this would be totally different
00:54:56.580
if you are a ardent Christian than an atheist or, you know, whatever. But I think for, again,
00:55:03.080
most people in the modern world, especially the type of people that likely listen to this
00:55:06.940
lovely podcast, I think the starting place would be again, subtraction, not addition. So I think that
00:55:13.940
would be one of three places. It would be either the practice of Sabbath, which is, I think, the most
00:55:19.200
important place to start. The challenge with Sabbath is it's, it's technically 24 hours and that's just a
00:55:24.660
high bar of entry. So you might need to start with like four hours on a Saturday morning. I'm going
00:55:30.220
to turn my phone off and take a four hour block or whatever it is, or three hours on a Sunday
00:55:34.880
afternoon. You might need to start smaller and work your way up. But Sabbath, rest is a beginning
00:55:40.960
place. Solitude, a daily kind of whether you want to frame it as prayer or meditation or quiet or just
00:55:49.040
drinking your coffee and doing nothing else for 30 minutes every morning while you watch the sunrise.
00:55:53.380
I think that's a beginning point. And then I think a relational, a regular relational touch point,
00:56:00.140
whether that's a weekly coffee or run with your best friend or a weekly meal around the table with
00:56:06.300
a couple of other families or couples or friends, some kind of intentional, regular, not, hey, let's
00:56:11.620
get something on the schedule. And you end up seeing each other, you know, three times a year,
00:56:15.060
but some kind of a, hey, no, every Saturday morning we go cycling and we get a cup of coffee and we
00:56:20.820
have a connection point or every Thursday night we share a meal together or every Sunday afternoon,
00:56:25.780
we, you know, go to the park or to the lake or whatever it is. I think those are the three places,
00:56:31.660
a regular relational connection, a daily time of quiet and solitude and retreat,
00:56:36.740
and some kind of a weekly time or day of rest. I would start at one of those three places
00:56:42.200
and slowly begin to slow your life down through subtraction, not addition.
00:56:49.320
Well, John Mark, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?
00:56:53.560
Oh, it's pretty easy to find. John Mark Comer. I have a website. You're welcome to go there or I run a
00:56:58.120
nonprofit called Practicing the Way. You can go to practicingtheway.org as well or johnmarkcomer.com.
00:57:03.820
All my work's available. I've written a number of books and anything I, anything I do, if it's
00:57:09.100
helpful, wonderful to hear. Fantastic. Well, John Mark Comer, thanks for your time. It's been a
00:57:13.180
pleasure. Thanks for having me on. My guest here is John Mark Comer. He's the author of a number of
00:57:19.100
books, including his latest Practicing the Way. You'll find more information about his work at his
00:57:22.840
website, johnmarkcomer.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is slash spiritualdisciplines,
00:57:28.200
where you'll find links to resources and read a little deeper into this topic, including an in-depth
00:57:32.240
AOM series of articles on the spiritual disciplines that were written for folks from any background who
00:57:36.420
want to practice them. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out
00:57:48.020
our website at artofmanly.com where you'll find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles
00:57:52.240
that have been written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven't done
00:57:55.580
so already, I'd appreciate it if you take one minute to just read up a podcast or Spotify. It helps out a
00:57:59.160
lot. And if you've done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the
00:58:02.220
show with a friend or family member who would think of something out of it. As always,
00:58:05.580
thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it's Brett McKay. Remind you to
00:58:08.580
not listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you've heard into action.