By grace and faith alone

Spirituality and the first two Solas

Spirituality is, quite simply, the entirety of your being-in-the-world. The way you pour your coffee in the morning; the way you conduct your business affairs; the way you look at the dust on the windowsill, or don’t look at it — all of these are aspects of your spirituality, as are all the other big and little things of life.

It follows that our spirituality is never quite in our control. There is no way to mold and fashion every little thing we do or experience. Moreover, doing so would defeat the purpose of authentic spirituality. After all, its very point is to be in touch with a truth deeper than our little selves. Which is only possible if we allow ourselves to be touched by such truth.

This insight has led people, in all times, to acknowledge that there must be higher powers — or deeper truths — that we do not possess and yet that guide our lives. That’s the origin of the very term spirituality: spirit refers to something ungraspable, a reality always out of conscious reach.

The Reformers, coming out of a culture that, in global comparison, was rather individualistic, took this insight to a new level. Because they had to. You see, in most human cultures, it is not the individual but the community that acts and makes decisions. Thus, for each member of such a community, spirituality — guidance by a higher power — is already ‘built into’ their culture.

Not so in the Western world. The more we became reliant only on our individual selves, the more we lost a sense of spirituality. At some point, the old communal teachings of the Roman Church could no longer soothe the tormented souls of seekers. Isolation ensued. And with isolation comes freedom — a severe freedom, to be sure, a painful liberty, but freedom nonetheless. The freedom to reject the old ways because somehow Spirit has bypassed the institutional routes and managed to infuse your tormented soul with love. That’s when the Reformation happened.

The point of spirituality is to reconnect the seeker with the ineffable aspects of life, and thus with life itself. (The other point is to live a good, authentic, ethical life — we’ll get to that later.) From a spiritual standpoint, the experience of salvation — of being born again, of encounter with the Spirit — is thus ‘merely’ the breakthrough. Without daily nurturance, it does not by itself bring about a spiritual life. And daily nurturance happens on a definitive path. One must be grounded in responsibility and practice to encounter mystery.

Individualistic as they were, the Reformers could never quite agree on one single, simple outline of their path. We benefit from that, but we also feel the downside: it affords us freedom, but it leaves us fending for ourselves. Little wonder, then, that Protestant spirituality seems a bit warped to outsiders. On the evangelical end of our faith, our born-again siblings tend to cling to their encounter experience and become rigid as a result, submitting their freedom to pastoral power and immovable beliefs. Which hampers the Spirit who wants to move us and set us free. (Trust me on this one — I’ve been there.)

On the mainline side — my turf — we tend to be rather cut-and-dried, sticking to ethics and to routine. Underneath which we are, again, left to fend for ourselves: free but disconnected. Living water cannot flow from shallow to shallow. Which is why seekers leave us in droves to find it elsewhere.

(I’m not talking about my own church here btw. We are the rare mainline community where Spirit is truly palpable and love flows freely. But I digress.)

Thus, to find something similar to a path that all the major players might have agreed upon, we have to dig deep, all the way down to the roots. And there we find that most concise summary of the Protestant faith, the Five Solas. I list their Latin form below, for a bit of gravitas; in English, we usually summarize them as follows:

• By grace alone (and not by merit)
• By faith alone (and not by works)
• By Scripture alone (and not by tradition)
• Christ alone (no other mediator between God and humans)
• For the glory of God alone (and not for our own selfish ends)

The first two Solas go together. Sola gratia and sola fide (‘by grace alone’ and ‘by faith alone’) make sense only in conjunction: by grace are we saved, and by faith do we reap the fruits of our salvation.

Let’s go theological for a second. By grace alone our fate is sealed, we say: there is nothing we can do about or add to our salvation. Saved from what, you may ask? The traditional answer is, from the wrath of God that we incurred for our sin. And the theologians have differed wildly in what they believe is meant by that. Some take the idea of wrath quite literally, while others argue it is merely a way of speaking, a metaphor for our brokenness and our isolation.

I’m going to remain agnostic on this one, not because I don’t have my own take on it but because I’d like to convince you that spirituality can benefit you no matter where you stand on this question. You see, from our seeker’s perspective the teaching is always the same: we need not worry about our ultimate fate. For we believe that the fullness of our condition and the true nature of God are revealed in Jesus, the Christ. So no matter how you understand wrath, in Christ there is none of it left after forgiveness has swept the land, swept around the cross even, and beyond the tomb. Our salvation is completed. What, then, remains for us to do?

The sober answer is: heal from the torment of our lives. You see, while there is little agreement on the exact meaning of wrath or sin, everyone concurs that they are real: that we are, quite frankly, a messed-up lot, awful to ourselves and to Creation. And we suffer from this. The price of sin is not only death but also lostness, isolation, and confusion. From those come restlessness and greed — for we are constantly searching for the fullness of life, and clutching it violently whenever we believe we have found it. And from restlessness, greed, and violent clutching comes evil.

There is a place in eternity where all our trouble dissolves — but if, in the meantime, we simply carry on in our awfulness, our torment might as well be called endless, for there would be no end in sight.

To summarize, we don’t have to worry about our ultimate fate, about the places we go after life and death are over — in the end of all things, we are sealed to God. But that’s not the main concern of Jesus, who kept pointing us to this life. Repent, he said; turn around to find the love that is already here so you may pass it on to others. That’s what we mean by the first two Solas: in our fallen condition, love is always a gift, not something we can fabricate from the raw materials given to us by sin. And faith, itself a gift, is the ability to extend our hands and accept the gift of love.

But that’s not where the journey ends. In fact, it only starts there. For faith isn’t simply a return to some imagined Eden. It is the starting point of a journey of allowing Spirit to transform us into a people slightly more reminiscent of Jesus. You see, we are, each and every one of us, loved and held from before the beginning of time — and yet we act, habitually, as if that were not true. Faith is the first step into letting go of some of those bad habits; in the ensuing zones of relative freedom grace can find a foothold and start changing our hearts and our minds.

How do we let go of our sinful ways? Traditional answers to this include repentance; loving God and others; prayer and service; and following Jesus to live a godly life. All of which are part of the journey, for sure. But whence do they come? Put otherwise, what if grace keeps knocking at our door and for some reason the door is so jammed that we cannot open it no matter how hard we try?

Repentance and the entire journey of faith begin in our heart, in our mind, and in the little tiny actions with which we engage in life, and which shape our experience of it. Thus, if we are stuck at the level of heart, mind, and action, we may need to dig a little deeper to find the gift of faith. It is my contention and my experience that this digging is what we call meditation. And we will spend the next post looking into meditation as the primal act of faith.