“Honoring the body. Hospitality. Household economics. Keeping Sabbath. Saying yes and saying no. Testimony. Discernment. Shaping communities. Forgiveness. Healing. Dying well. Singing our lives. To explore the full range and depth of any one of these would take not a single chapter but an entire library, not a single life but many lives joined together in a community that spans generations.”

So begins the fourteenth chapter of the book, Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People.  And so, too, ends a month-long blogging project for credit towards my Master of Theological Studies at McMaster Divinity College, which was also something of a hopeful experiment for me. “Could I,” I wondered, “intensify and strengthen my own faith practices by reading, reflecting on, and writing about 12 Christian practices, and thus arrive at a new place in my journey with Christ?”

It has been an intense time of thinking deeply, of wrestling with the implications of what it means to practice my Christian faith, and of reflecting on how and why it’s worth taking the time to do both. It has also been a time of vulnerability; I’ve shared things about my life even as I’ve wondered about the wisdom of disclosing them, but trusted that American writer Frederick Buechner is correct when he writes, “The story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.”

My only regrets as I look back on this experiment? That it’s over, and that due to class deadlines, I didn’t have more time to put into embracing each practice, one by one.

And yet, my learning has been profound.

I mean that. I actually think I’ve been changed in some important ways. I’ve realized among other things the need: to do a better job of caring for our planet and for my body, to live my life in an attitude of greater openness to strangers, and to more fully receive God’s gift of the Sabbath, to continue to sing my faith with confidence and boldness, and to turn to God with prayers for healing as a first—rather than last—resort.

Looking back, I realize that I began this project, somewhat naively, and with some incorrect assumptions. The first idea I had wrong was that Christian practices can ever be “practiced” in isolation. I know that there are many people today who live out their spiritual lives as lone wolves. But that was not the way of Christ, and it was not his intention for his church. That is why the Apostle Paul used the metaphor of a body to describe the community that Christ called into being. I’ve been reminded again and again over the past month that to really live in Christ and to grow and thrive and be healthy it is important to remain connected to a community of believers.

I had imagined at the outset gathering together a community of readers who might also share their experiences with practicing faith. That did not occur to the extent I had hoped; whether the timeline was too short, my musings too personal, my writing too weak, or my topic of too narrow interest, I don’t know. But I am grateful for every person who did read, comment, or tell me that you, too, were learning and thinking about what it means to live out your faith in such a way that it really seizes your life. You encouraged and energized me throughout this experiment and I thank you for giving me your time, attention, and feedback.

Necessarily and essentially communal

Part-way through this project, I interviewed the man whose leadership initiated Practicing Our Faith: A Way of Life for a Searching People, Craig Dykstra. He told me, emphatically, that Christian practices are not individual, but “necessarily and essentially communal. They’re not just devotional. They’re about a way of life—about everything we do.”

That also corrected another faulty notion I had at the start—that there were a limited number of Christian practices, and if I could somehow manage to just get them right, then I would become the sort of Christian I long to be. I learned that there are hundreds, if not thousands of practices, and that two of them, according to Practicing Our Faith, “run through all the others, fostering attention to God, who grounds this whole way of life. These practices are prayer and Bible study.”

This fact helps me understand why I’ve seen my prayer life take on new and meaningful rhythms and dimensions over the past month, and why my times spent reading or listening to my Bible have yielded good and important fruit.

Jesus taught that he came so that we might have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:10). As I’ve focussed on practicing my faith to a deeper degree over the past month, I know that I have tasted life more abundantly. I’ve relished that taste; it’s made me hunger for more. So much so that I end this project with a determination to continue to intentionally practice the practices of my faith.

And yet

I also know that this past month has challenged me in some ways that feel somewhat unsustainable; it may not be realistic to expect to keep thinking so deeply, daily, about my behaviours, actions, and reactions in the midst of life’s routine busyness, its ups and downs.

“What does it mean to live the Christian life in 2019? And am I living it well, as well as I could be?” These were the questions that provoked me to embark on this journey. I’ve learned that there is room for improvement in every one of the 12 practices on which I’ve been focusing, even though I also know that practice will never make perfect. But that’s okay, for I’ve been reminded of the truths of Romans 5, beginning with the fact that I already have “peace with God,” through Jesus Christ.

Living the Christian life for me in 2019, then, has to begin with the recognition of God’s grace to me, which is always present. With that thought, the yearning with which I began this exercise has quieted. Because, ultimately, that’s what the Christian life comes down to for every one of us: God’s amazing grace.

“We shall not cease from exploration

And at the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.” – T.S. Eliot

I remembered Eliot’s words this morning and looked them up as I thought of the irony of where I’ve landed. “At the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

At the end of this first phase of deliberate exploration of practices of my faith, here is what I know: Jesus loves me, in spite of my faults and failures, just as He loves you in spite of yours. And he wants us to experience life in all its fullness. The more we embrace him and the wisdom he offers, the more we receive that gift of life abundant. It’s there for the taking. The degree to which we accept it—just as the degree to which we practice the practices of our faith—is up to us.

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Practicing My Faith, Part 15 – This is the final post in a 15-part series and part of a culminating project for a course I am taking on Spiritual Discernment and Theological Reflection at McMaster Divinity College with Dr. Wendy Porter. For context, read part 1 and part 2.