Finding God in listening and living

Invitation to Solitude and Silence: Experiencing God’s Transforming Presence Ruth Haley Barton. Intervarsity Press. 143 pages.

Down-to-Earth Spirituality: Encountering God in the Ordinary, Boring Stuff of Life R. Paul Stevens. InterVarsity Press. 208 pages.

Ruth Barton advocates retreating from the stuff of life occasionally to adjust direction according to a deeper appreciation of God. Paul Stevens’ focus is the reality of God at work directly within one’s everyday (lifelong) struggles.

Barton – a developer of spiritual formation curricula for churches, including Willow Creek – warns that busyness blocks ability to hear God. She defines “silence” and “solitude,” describes how to reach resting places when harried by religious activity, specifies forms of resistance we’ll face, explains what rest looks like, and invites (and models) accountability in facing self and God with honesty.

Stevens’ earlier books on lay ministry, marriage dynamics, and “marketplace” spirituality are theologically astute and relevant. Here, with similar effect, he investigates the “earthy spirituality” of the Bible’s Jacob – that “Grabber.” Fourteen concise chapters grab the reader. Topics: birth, eating, family, sleep, courting, marriage, work, conversion, sex, home, calling, dressing, finishing, and death. Evocative, even provocative, this makes a great tool for teaching, preaching, counselling, small group life, or personal growth. Readers will find themselves at home in Jacob’s tent in one respect or another.

Barton’s book reads almost like a confession. Stevens’ work also carries conviction. Both books extend out of sincere, Spirit-inspired compulsion; each is emotionally engaging.

Barton’s heart-felt plea is for readers to remember, “Someone is seeking me out, desiring my presence enough to initiate an encounter.” Her concern is that Christians, especially leaders, would “extend love and compassion” because “every broken place that has not been healed and transformed in God’s presence is a hard edge of our personality that slices and dices other people when they bump up against it.”

Stevens lets us catch God-glimpses in life’s most mundane moments and dysfunctional dimensions. He celebrates grace, not the grinding of teeth. That is, he points to spiritual empowerment and liberation via obedience – forgiveness, primarily – not via perpetual life-limiting lamentation as the voice of victimization. For him, the Jacob story proves “that you and I do not have to be somewhere else, raised in a different family, in some other relationship, in some other workplace, in some other body, to be found by God and be inundated with life.”

Ruth Barton’s limitation is that she writes from (and to) a middle-class circle where retreat is an affordable option. Paul Stevens’ depth may dissuade some readers, though it helps that theological technicalities are consigned to footnotes.

Both authors honour the biblical vision of a transcendent God who works with humanity in intimate ways and in immanent encounter as the Spirit forms Christ’s person in the individual. Connections between personal spirituality and corporate accountability are strong in both, but are not developed to the depth Anabaptist readers might wish for.

These books will sit near enough to my desk to supply occasional refreshment, and to serve for timely reference and recommendation.

Doug Schulz is senior pastor at Vineland (Ont.) MB Church.