2 of 6

Your mother was seriously ill in your adolescence. That must have shaped your faith in some way.

Actually, my parents were both quite ill during those years. My mother had multiple sclerosis, and it was a very long and painful death for her. We didn't know much about it in those days.

My first prayer as a new Christian was for my mother's healing. It wasn't to be. The first verse I ever memorized wasn't John 3:16; it was 1 Peter 1:7: "That the trial of your faith, being much more precious than gold that perishes, though it be tried with fire, might be found unto praise and honor and glory at the appearing of Jesus Christ."

When I went away to college, about a thousand miles away, my brother and I had a long discussion about what to do. Three times that freshman year, I had to rush back because they said she was dying. But each time she would rally a bit. So finally my brother and I made the tough decision that he wouldn't let me know until she died. As it ended up, it happened when I was home that next summer on break. In fact, I was the last to see her in the hospital.

How did you start to become interested in spiritual formation in a more focused way?

My first church out of seminary was a Friends church in San Fernando Valley in Southern California, with between 55 and 80 people on Sunday mornings. Dallas Willard and his wife attended there—she was the organist, and he led singing. Dallas also taught classes at the church, material that eventually became The Divine Conspiracy.

In that little church, when I taught, people might come, but when Dallas taught, they brought their tape recorders. And I did too! I cancelled all adult Sunday school classes when he taught.

We not only had teaching, but we would also visit in homes. This church was a little ragtag group of people that had no middle-class props. There were many people from prison, from the drug culture. And they were hungry for God. I remember this one guy, Bob Harrington, would study probably 15 hours a week just to go to the class, because Dallas gave a lot of homework!

I gave that congregation everything I learned in seminary in the first three months. Here were these very needy people, and I knew that I didn't have enough substance to really help them. So I went to our elders, the ruling body, and said, "I need to learn the spiritual life. I need to get to know God." And they heartily agreed. So we arranged for me to take a weeklong retreat four times a year.

That was probably the place where I really encountered Scripture in large pieces. I remember the first retreat reading the Book of Jeremiah. Jeremiah was the prophet whom I identified with most. There's suffering again in that. So that was formative.

And—I don't know exactly why—I instinctively went to the old writers. I just felt like Augustine's Confessions and Teresa's Interior Castle—this was real meat. The first line of Celebration is, "Superficiality is the curse of our age." And I guess I felt that. It was all around me.

next page... |  2 of 6

share this page

September 2008, Vol. 52, No. 9