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Has Jason rescued me from all my angst about spiritual disciplines and virtue? His comment suggested friendship as a way to cure my allergic reaction. I think that’s a great metaphor to guide our thinking about disciplines and virtues—they’re more like “friends” than “vending machines.” We shouldn’t look to them as techniques that guarantee our possession of a faithful spirituality. Rather, they are friends who help us along the Way—companions from the past reaching into our present in order to help us into an unforseable future.

A vending machine spirituality looks to Christian formation as the key to the God thing, the God-pleasing life. You put in your quarters and out comes the refreshing drink. It is a technique for getting what you want, for fulfilling desires. “I’ll fast so I can get an answer from God.” “I’ll give money so I can get money.” “I’ll sings worship songs because they make me feel better.” But that way of thinking is all about managing God’s gifts. And then, at some point along this path, we have to stop and wonder if what we are talking about receiving can even count as gracious gifts. This vending maching spirituality sounds like it depends more on our purchase power than on God’s unconditional grace—grace that tastes like a refreshing soda that comes to us even when we don’t got the change to stick in the machine. (ok, so sodas probably aren’t the most refreshing drink).

Here is where Jason’s suggestion casts spiritual disciplines in a new light. When we re-describe spiritual practices in terms of friendship, we have to start thinking about the history of the practice. Think about it. As I progress in a relationship with someone, we start sharing about our past and talk about where we see ourselves going. Friends are those people who we come to know quite well—we come to know their histories and how those play out in the present, and direct towards a future. So it can be with spiritual disciplines. We don’t look to some practice abstracted from the people who practiced it. Rather, we take a peak into the lives of the faithfull who have gone before us and see what worked for them. We learn to look to the history of God’s involvement with his people and discover christians through the ages who sacrficed everything in hopes of finding God—those saints who teach us what it means to sell everything for that “pearl of great price” (Matt. 13:45-46). So we turn our senses to the past and hope to experience the same God who met our brothers and sisters of ages past.

Instead of turning to disciplines and virtues in an anxious attempt to secure spirituality—to possess piety, to grasp at a Pharisaistic dream of holiness, to manufacture differences from others that make us feel meaningful—I see them as a chance to enter into a relationship with a living history, a fellowship with those among the great cloud of witnesses. As we use spiritual practices to find where we might fit into these stories, where our bodies might map onto these faithful ones, then we may learn to hear like they did—to feel the caress of divine Love faithfully preserving the life of the church. This spirituality seeks to lose the self and put to death the ego’s desire for self-determination by finding our-self—the possibility of a renewed self in Christ—in those stories of faithfulness.