Spiritual growth often arrives by addition. We add in. Adding to one’s daily life a 15-minute block for morning prayers/yoga/a walk. Adding to one’s weekly schedule, a Bible study class or Kalos group. We seek out ways to serve by tutoring a child at Hartman or serving supper to the hungry neighbor at Micah. I suppose we preacher types are often encouraging this kind of growth.

But there could be another way of accessing the deep recesses of spiritual vitality. Maybe it also comes with subtraction. It seems counterintuitive. Stripping away feels harsh. The great spiritual masters describe it as the “via negative,” meaning “by way of negation.” Sometimes it happens involuntarily with a physical setback. After taking a fall, you find you cannot walk. Solitude becomes forced. Or maybe it is a life curve that comes out of the blue: job loss or divorce or mental breakdown. How will you survive? And yet in the loss, something becomes vividly clear. God’s presence seems more evident than in the past.

During our service learning trip to Tanzania we walked alongside children who attend school in frayed uniforms with gaping holes in the pants, zippers that are broken, and shoes that are made of motorcycle tires. We sat with teenagers crippled by cerebral palsy and teachers who teach arithmetic by drawing equations in the dirt with a stick. Deprivation to the extreme. And yet, there was this incredible spiritual vitality. In a much less dramatic way, each team member from our church experienced certain hardships along the way. And yet, the subtraction of our typical creature comforts did not diminish us but awakened us to new insight and gratitude.

For centuries, the church has asked the question, “How will we make room for God in our lives? How will we make time for what truly matters in this walk through life?” Could it be by subtraction? Things like solitude, fasting, slowing down, sitting still, doing less, living with less.

The great Christian thinker St. Augustine wrote in The Confessions:

“The house of my soul is too small for you to enter: make it more spacious by your coming. It lies in ruins: rebuild it.”

Grace and Peace,
Carla