Excessive Spirituality (Hopeful Realism, Pt. 2)

*Editorial Note: Part 1 of Seth’s “Hopeful Realism” series, entitled “Searching for a Robust Spirituality in a Doomscrolling World can be read here. “Excessive Spirituality,” Part 2 of this series, can be read below. “Negotiating Difference” is Part 3 and serves as Seth’s conclusion to this series. ~CK

For most of my life, Christianity has worked for me. Church, Bible studies, seminary, liturgies, music, ordination, retreats – the whole structure – worked. Even through difficult and confusing seasons, there was always a spiritual plausibility net that caught me. There was a sensible spirituality to reach back, grab hold of, and quickly regain that feeling of stability. 

I was nurtured by a spirituality of stability, designed mostly by people living in stability, in order to work inside a stable life, a life that works.  

But conditions are shifting, and folks like me are beginning to grasp in our lived existence (not simply intellectually) what BIPOC and other marginalized people have known for a long time. The prevailing spiritual frameworks that sustain white, evangelical expressions of Christianity don’t work for people with their backs against the wall, as Howard Thurman noted decades ago. Worse, those spiritual frameworks play a role in keeping people’s backs against the wall.¹

As I began to describe in Part 1,² within these conditions, I am searching for a robust spirituality, one that is sufficient for navigating an unstable world that (increasingly) does not work. I’m using the term “hopeful realism” to capture this vision.   

Hopeful realism is about faithfully following Jesus within the death-dealing, dysfunctional, diseased, dominating, and dehumanizing conditions haunting our lives that aggregate in our consciousness and our bodies, leaving us with that sneaking sense of doom.    

Hopeful realism is a posture that holds together both the tragic realities and transfigured possibilities in our world. It is a refusal to be swallowed by despair on the one hand or give-in to spiritual bypassing on the other. It’s an openness to the often disorienting yet renewing work of God’s Spirit, which necessarily takes shape from within wounded and broken realities.

The prevailing spiritual frameworks that sustain white, evangelical expressions of Christianity don’t work for people with their backs against the wall. Worse, they play a role in keeping people’s backs against the wall. Click To Tweet 

Beyond Third Ways and Into Excessive Spirituality 

In Part 2, I want to describe how hopeful realism is also an excessive spirituality. At base, an excessive spirituality readily and honestly acknowledges what is broken, without fear of what is lost in admitting it, while orienting toward new forms of life with God and others being recreated by the Spirit. 

An excessive spirituality makes space for people (like me) who benefit from spiritualities of stability into a repentative relationship³ with tragic realities. It also allows us to hold together complexity in the existing spaces and relationships of our daily lives, which are marked by both tragic and transfigured elements, trusting the Spirit’s work through simultaneity.   

Because the life that the Spirit draws us into (the very life of Christ) exceeds the broken, unstable systems of our world, we need not attempt to construct a “third” or “middle” way between two (allegedly equal) bad options, which keeps us stuck merely rearranging the furniture in the same diseased house. It also means we need not abandon the possibility that God really is renewing Christ’s life among us by the Spirit, which leaves us stuck inside a disenchanted world fighting for control.            

As I have wrestled at the edge of doom (again, see part 1), I’ve noticed that many of the proposals that attempt to respond directly to the brokenness in our world tend to throw spiritual practices and discipleship models at people’s anxiety. Even when those practices are ancient, “Jesus-centered,” and even necessary for spiritual growth, they often ignore the way systems of domination turn spirituality sideways and put people’s backs against the wall. 

Or the proposals that do attempt to describe what has gone wrong blame outside forces (like [post]modernity), functionally arguing that we need to return to something we forgot, do something better we’ve already been doing, or think harder about theology we’ve already determined. 

The problem I want to draw attention to in these proposals (some of which I myself have made!) is that there is no space for radical newness. They can help people feel better about the existing system, tweaked a bit, perhaps. Sometimes they want you to be concerned, but never too alarmed. 

I’m convinced that responding faithfully to the doom under these conditions requires a spirituality oriented toward the kind of newness that we did not manufacture on our own and do not control. There is reason to be alarmed, maybe even angry, but that alarm aches toward newness. 

An excessive spirituality is fundamentally about the possibility of radical newness being forged by God’s Spirit. It’s the kind of spirituality that spills over when we hold together the reality of the tragic along with the possibility of transfiguration.  

An excessive spirituality readily and honestly acknowledges what is broken, without fear of what is lost in admitting it, while orienting toward new forms of life with God and others being recreated by the Spirit. (1/3) Click To Tweet 

An excessive spirituality makes space for people who benefit from spiritualities of stability into a repentative relationship with tragic realities, allowing us to hold together complexity in the existing relationships of life. (2/3) Click To Tweet

An excessive spirituality is about the possibility of radical newness forged by God’s Spirit. This spirituality spills over when we hold together the reality of the tragic along with the possibility of transfiguration. (3/3) Click To Tweet

A Repentative Relationship with the Tragic

I’m realizing that spiritualities of stability did not give me an imagination for how to have a repentative relationship with the tragic features of our world in which Christians are complicit. I learned either to ignore and escape from the tragic, or when the tragic was acknowledged, I learned to create distance between “us” and whatever is broken. 

This can look like responding to the tragic by attempting to be Jesus’ public relations team. It usually sounds something like, “Yes, issue X is bad, but that’s not the real church or what Jesus really meant.” 

There’s a sense in which that distinction is true, of course. But there’s also a way that move is made that creates distance between us and the tragic. There is often a privilege to this distance that can function as a kind of spiritual bypassing. When we make this move, we don’t actually have to wrestle with how tragic dynamics have malformed us or how we’ve also been complicit in constructing or sustaining tragic realities. 

To further complicate things, this move is endemic to evangelicalism itself. Because evangelicalism functions like a fuzzy set (Whose evangelicalism are we talking about?), there is always room to shift blame to someone else: “Well, that’s not the kind of evangelical I am. They are not representative of all evangelicals.”⁴ 

In a repentative relationship, instead of trying to create distance between us and the grotesque tragedy, we can allow the tragedy to become an apocalypse for us. By apocalypse I mean that it can reveal our true selves to us – reveal things about us and to us that we couldn’t (or wouldn’t) see about ourselves.

This is why hopeful realism requires holding together both the tragic and the transfigured. My imagination is aided here by James Cone who describes holding together two realities (the cross AND the lynching tree) so that by holding them together, they can be mutually interpreting and illuminating. Cone describes how part of the witness of black liberation is the ability to articulate both the beauty and brutality of black existence under a dominating, dehumanizing social structure.⁵

A spirituality that can respond meaningfully to death-dealing realities, on the other side of stability, is anchored to the Gospel reality that Jesus is redeeming a wounded world in and through his wounds, transfiguring death into life. That means having a repentative relationship to the tragic can never threaten faithfulness to Jesus because it’s exactly how we can avail ourselves to the possibility of transfiguration. 

From Both/And to Simultaneity 

A bit of clarification is due here. Excessive spirituality is characterized by holding together two (apparently conflicting) realities simultaneously, but what I’m gesturing toward with simultaneity is not the same as how “both/and” thinking is often deployed.

Spiritualities of stability and some third way frameworks utilize both/and thinking, but both/and thinking often relativizes the way that those two realities are true, as if they are true in the same way. 

When I bring to mind a complicated space like the church community I grew up in, for example, I want to hold together both the tragic dynamics and transfigured possibilities I experienced. I want to reckon both with the ways I was malformed by male-centric hierarchy spun through purity culture and celebrate how individual men and women embodied Jesus’ self-giving love to me.  

I don’t have to ignore one at the expense of the other; they can be held together at the same time. Yet, they are not true in equal and opposite ways. In this example, acknowledging (and celebrating) the elements that were life giving does not relativize the deep (and ongoing) tragedy wrought by the dominating system of patriarchy, nor the need for me to repent of my complicity in that system, nor the need for prophetic resistance to it. 

I want to reckon both with the ways I was malformed by male-centric hierarchy spun through purity culture and celebrate how individual men and women embodied Jesus’ self-giving love to me. Click To Tweet 

Simultaneity, by contrast, holds together multiple, co-existing realities while also reckoning with how those two things are true in different ways. It seeks an account for the kind of work death-dealing dynamics can do even amidst contradictory elements, and even when nice people don’t intend to do harm. 

Simultaneity does not gloss over contradiction. For example, listening again to James Cone, nothing was a more blatant contradiction to Christianity than lynching. A contradiction like that needs to be named, unveiled, and resisted. 

The reason I use the term “transfigured,” rather than the more generic term “transformative,” is to capture how a spirituality sufficient to bring life under these conditions, a spirituality that opens us to radical newness, trusts that God’s redemption in Christ is already taking shape in instability, among those for whom our built system does not work, from inside the doom.  

There’s more to say about what this excessive spirituality called hopeful realism means for our relationship with those who are “not like us.” Article 3 will address this further in a few weeks.

A spirituality that opens us to radical newness trusts that God’s redemption in Christ is already taking shape in instability, among those for whom our built system does not work, from inside the doom. Click To Tweet 

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Seth Richardson is an Anglican priest, leading Resurrection Little Rock, an Anglican contemplative community in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he lives with his wife Caralisa and their two daughters, Ruth and Lydia. He is also the director of a congregational research/consulting initiative called Gravity Congregational Transformation (with Gravity Leadership). Seth holds a doctorate in Contextual Theology from Northern Seminary. He probably drinks too much coffee.

Footnotes    

¹ See Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited. See also Cindy S. Lee’s new book, Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation.

² Part 1 of Seth’s series is entitled “Search for a Robust Spirituality in a Doomscrolling World (Hopeful Realism, Pt. 1),” and can be found here: https://www.missioalliance.org/searching-for-a-robust-spirituality-in-a-doomscrolling-world-hopeful-realism-pt-1/. 

³ I first heard this term used by J. Kameron Carter.

⁴ Thanks to my writing partner, Chris Burgess, for teasing out this connection.

⁵ James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree, 95.