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If the Holy Spirit through Scripture as a whole both forms the company and provides the map to the "North Pole," the Gospel of Mark is as good a place as any to take our bearings. The entire canon of Scripture is our comprehensive text, but Mark as the first Gospel holds a certain primacy. It is the basic text for Christian spirituality.

Formed by gospel
No one had ever written a Christian gospel before Mark wrote his. He created a new genre. It turned out to be a form of writing that quickly became both foundational and formative for the life of church and Christian.

The Bible as a whole comes to us in the form of narrative, and it is within this large, somewhat sprawling narrative that Mark writes his gospel. Stories invite us into a world other than ourselves, and, if they are good and true stories, a world larger than ourselves. Bible stories are good and true stories, and the world that they invite us into is the world of God's creation and salvation and blessing.

This is in contrast to the ancient preference for myth making, which turns us into spectators of the supernatural. It is also in contrast to the modern preference for moral philosophy that puts us in charge of our own salvation. "Gospel story" is a verbal way of accounting for reality that, like its subject—the Incarnation—is simultaneously divine and human. It reveals something we could never come up with on our own by observation or experiment or guess; and at the same time, it engages, it brings us into the action as recipients and participants without dumping the responsibility on us for making it turn out right.

This has great implications for our spirituality, for the form itself protects us against two major ways we go off the rails: becoming frivolous spectators, clamoring for new and more exotic entertainment out of heaven; or, becoming anxious moralists, putting our shoulders to the wheel and taking on the burdens of the world. The very form of the text shapes responses in us that make it hard to become a mere spectator or a mere moralist. This is not a text that we master, it is one that we are mastered by.

Spirituality is the attention we give to our souls, to the invisible interior of our lives that is the core of our identity, these image-of-God souls that comprise our uniqueness and glory. Spirituality would appear to be a wonderful thing, and our initial exclamation is most likely, "Would that all the Lord's people were so engaged!" But 20 centuries of experience in spirituality qualifies our enthusiasm considerably. In actual practice, it turns out to be not so wonderful. When you look at our history, it is no wonder that spirituality is so often treated with suspicion, and not infrequently with outright hostility. For in actual practice, spirituality very often develops into neurosis, degenerates into selfishness, becomes pretentious, turns violent. How does this happen?

The short answer is that it happens when we step outside the gospel story and take ourselves as the basic and authoritative text for our spirituality; we begin exegeting ourselves as a sacred text. We don't usually throw the gospel out; we merely put it on the shelf and think that we are honoring it by consulting it from time to time as an indispensable reference work.

Our spiritual guides tell us, "You are wonderful, glorious beings, precious souls. Your aspirations for holiness and goodness and truth are splendid. But you are not the content of spirituality; God revealed in Jesus is that. You need a text to read and study and learn from—here's your text, the gospel of Jesus Christ. Start with Mark's gospel as your basic text."

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July 13 1998, Vol. 42, No. 8