Is there such a thing as Wal~mart spirituality?

Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 9-

Have you ever lost your party at Wal~mart?

This is how it happens: You are with a group of people, or even one other person. You are talking and sticking fairly close together. Something catches your eye and you stop to look for a moment. When you look around, your party is gone. In the case of my family, we call one another on our cell phones and say things like, “Where did you go?” “Where are you now?” “Meet us in electronics.”

Welcome to Wal~mart spirituality.

I say I am a follower of Jesus, but sometimes I get interested in something and, when I look up, I realize I stopped following. Here I am, looking at men's socks, and Jesus is in sporting goods looking a fishing nets. Soon the loudspeaker announcement is heard: "Will the party that was following Jesus please come to the service counter. Your party is waiting."

To deny yourself and follow Christ means, in this case, no browsing on your own.

While our faith is of old, it is also present and current. It is informed by the Scriptures and by the lives and writings of those from the past that have followed Christ as disciples. Our faith is transformed by the ever-present God who is at hand for us moment by moment. Thus, our spiritual director here can say, “you have not far to go to find the source of living waters.” (Page 32)

There can be no denying the importance and the richness of that which we have in Christian thought through the Bible, church history and through the life of the Church over the centuries with Christ at the head and the Apostles the neck and shoulders of this glorious body. These, to the mind of Caussade, are given; they are in place. They are so established and so unassailable that he can freely demand that we bring these glories current – that we realize that the church is not a museum for faith but a contemporary center for divine inspiration.

Father C is constantly emphatic: God’s “inexhaustible action” has not ceased. God has not merely spoken and paused in silence. He has not acted and now sits in heaven with hands folded. Caussade complains, “Oh, Unknown Love! It would seem that thy marvels are over and that all we can do is copy thy ancient volumes and quote thy words of the past!”

What then would bring such marvels current, thriving and active now but that God’s Holy Spirit continues to work, minister and flourish in the lives of today’s believers? The key to integrating this current life of God in life, the good father says, is “simply to live in a perpetual self-abandonment to [God’s] secret operations.”

To say “simply” here could be deceptive. There is nothing particularly easy about leaving one’s will in the dust and radically changing the center of one’s life from self-service to selfless service. To say “simply” here does not mean ease, but rather it is a clear statement of the cost. A current, God driven life of faith will cost you perpetual self-abandonment.

Jesus was clear about this to his listeners: “If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross every day and follow me … anyone who loses his life for my sake will save it.” (Luke 9:23-24)

Gone is any shallow idea that we would merely annex Jesus to our life as it is. This is possibly my most burning concern about the quality of faith in my culture – where Jesus has become an additional interest in one’s life, rather than the singular, unequivocal motivator as Lord of everything one does and thinks.

When we pray, “Thy will be done,” or we read of Jesus in the garden praying, “Not my will but thine,” we are hearing this cost of the journey again. The quest for God’s will does not necessarily mean I am interested in actually following it. It just means I am interested in it. Maybe I am just browsing and do not have it in me to afford true discipleship. A living Christian faith, however, demands that we know and follow God, especially when his direction and intent differs from our own.