Smoking to the glory of God?
29 Jul 2009
IChristine Sine sent me an invitation to write (alongside so many other wonderful writers) in response to a question she posed about Spiritual practices. If I can summarize Christine’s question (no doubt very badly), and premise for the series, she asked why do most people experience God outside church in the world, whilst Christians see only prayer, bible study, and going to church as spiritual practices, for knowing and experiencing the death and resurrection of Jesus?
It was a good question for me, in that it bothered me and got me thinking. In particular, how tragic it is if the bible, church and prayer become self referencing static mediators of the gospel, with no connection to the real world. But also, how equally tragic and a measure of gospel paucity, if spiritual practices, are about experiences of God in the world, with no framing by the canonical-linguistic grammar of the gospel, prayer, and Christian community. Both are as bad as each other, or perhaps at least lead to a question, what are the nature of spiritual practices, and how are they connected to the world, and church, and scripture?
Otherwise without some understanding of that, it’s easy to accept the opening premise at face value as fact, and in response as a Christian to reach for what I do in the world as ‘a spiritual practice’. That is to respond by listing what I do in the world, outside of the bible , prayer, and church, as where I meet God. It’s to locate spiritual practices on those terms, and that’s something I’m uncomfortable with. Just as I am uncomfortable with collapsing ‘spiritual practices’ into bible study, prayer and going to church.
I can easily reach for how having turned 40 years old this year, I became a cliche, and I decided to get a motor bike. I can describe how the training process in the UK, with four separate tests and requisite training, have been forming me as a biker. How I for the first time have a hobby away from my work, and the pressures of Church community. How a ride through the english pastoral countryside, clears my mind, connects me to creation, and how close to God I feel compared to going to Church. And if I were to imagine that Christians who see spiritual practices as solely the domain of prayer, bible and going to church, were to ask me, how can you ride a motorbike as a spiritual practice, my reply might be like that of Charles Spurgeon, when asked how could he smoke cigars? That I do it to the glory of God.
But I misrepresent Spurgeon, and do him a disservice, as do many Christians, when we use his most wonderful aphorism, as a thin veneer, to baptise everything we do as a ‘spiritual practice’. For if I justify all I do as being done to the glory of God, everything is a spiritual discipline, perhaps apart from going to Church, prayer and the bible.
So how might we begin to respond to this separation of ‘spiritual practices’ from church community, the bible and prayer? How did we arrive at this separation, and how might we begin to frame this theologically, to understand the nature of ‘spiritual practices’ and how they form us as human beings before God?
One reading of St Augustine, would provide an understanding of the human condition, in which we have not fallen from God, but we have fallen from ourselves, into ourselves. For Augustine, humanity has not fallen out of perfection, but rather out of Creation, into the condition of privation, isolation, and withdrawal. Sin is not a fall from God, but the fall from ourselves, otherwise we could not exist as human beings. While our response to this condition is further retreat, into isolation from others, and forming life around ourselves, redemption is the move back into Creation and presence with God and others. While Augustine is often critiqued as being world denying, he can be seen as providing just the opposite, with a theology of engagement with the world.
As I read him, Augustine is not world-denying but world-affirming, and it is not that we have too little; it is that we are overwhelmed by the plenitude of Creation, we end up loving love itself, desiring desire, and become lost to ourselves, isolated from God and each other. Augustine does not want us to love the world more, but rather change how we love it. As evidenced in his own life and ministry and teaching, we see Augustine encouraging Christians to move deeper into the world and its affairs.
For Augustine, the Christian life in response to this problem, and human condition, was one of ascesis, of re-training our desire and longings with, towards their proper orientation, and ends, that enable us to participate in the redemption of creation, by Jesus. Within this crude summary of Augustine, we might see that ‘spiritual practices’ are those things that are located within this ascesis, that which leads to re-training and re-directing of our desire towards their god redeemed ends.
Or in response to my own question posed at the start of this post, I might see that prayer, church, and the bible that does not form us in engagement in the world, is as bad a process of ascesis as spiritual practices that move us too deeply into the world and become disconnected from the church, prayer and the bible.
I can ride my motorbike as a spiritual practice and meet Jesus. I can offer God my motorbike riding within his re-training me from someone within a fallen self identity as a workaholic, into someone who can find his identity in the sheer indulgence of the enjoyment riding through God’s creation. Or it can become an ecclesiology for one, having more in common with the problem of my isolation from God and others, and idol of my own making that forms me around my own isolated desires and disconnection from others. A substitute for real ‘spiritual practice’, justified around my own fallen desires and ends, rather than those learned and practiced within the community of God’s people.
Everything can be a ‘spiritual practice’, but not everything is a ‘spiritual practice’. It is the ends, the means, and the formation that takes place within our activities that determines what is ‘spiritual’. Charles Spurgeon new this well I think, which is why when Christians questioned his smoking to the Glory of God’, his reply in a letter to the Telegraph Newspaper was:
‘”The expression ’smoking to the glory of God,’ standing alone, has an ill sound, and I do not justify it; but in the sense in which I employed it, I still stand to it. No Christian should do anything in which he cannot glorify God—and this may be done, according to Scripture, in eating and drinking and the common actions of life.
When I have found intense pain relieved, a weary brain soothed, and calm, refreshing sleep obtained by a cigar, I have felt grateful to God and have blessed His name; this is what I meant, and by no means did I use sacred words triflingly. If through smoking I had wasted an hour of my time—if I had stinted my gifts to the poor—if I had rendered my mind less vigorous—I trust I should see my fault and turn from it; but he who charges me with these things shall have no answer but my forgiveness.” (http://www.spurgeon.org/misc/cigars.htm)
Tagged: Spiritual Disciplines
14 comments
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Comment by steven hamilton
12.11 pm on 29 Jul 2009
jason, i thought your one step back, two steps forward in this was just brilliant. to not accept the proposition, but to really work with what is bothering you about it and during your mind toward enegaing on a whole new level…well, i really liked your take on this issue. i think, without that kind of reflection, we jump in and get all tied up when we try to engage with questions presented like this.
i have to agree also, being a both/and and not an either/or type, that in this case, truly, the either/or are both insufficient, and it is only in both “the church” and “the world” that the great truth and perspetive is to be plumbed.
funny, i – like you – turned 40 recently (last year) – and i too have moved in mid-life to owning and riding a motor bike. and i feel like its a spiritual experience as well! spiritual-discipline-like…i even wrote this clumbsy haiku last year trying to express how i connect to God while riding the bike:
rhythm of the lights
motorcycle on freeway
deep meditation
thanks for sharing this, quite invigorating…
peace
Comment by Jason
7.39 am on 30 Jul 2009
Hi Steve, that’s good to here, thank you.
I love your haiku
So we need a motorbike road trip at the vineyard scholars event 
Jase
Comment by Beth
1.11 pm on 29 Jul 2009
I went not long ago to a lecture by Abbot Jamieson of Worth Abbey (I gather he is probably well known in the UK from a TV series) at a nearby Roman Catholic university, and the topic he was given was spiritual practices. He had some excellent, rather sardonic points about the current “selling” of practices as an adjunct to a secular life in a consumeristic way. At any rate, he made a similiar distinction to yours in the way he phrased his opening question, which was something like “What practices do you engage in as a Christian to foster your spiritual life?” Several people gave standard answers: lectio, daily office, fasting, etc.
Finally, when one person asked about whether she could “count” an activity that she benefited from but that she said was “not Christian,” he pointed out that he deliberately hadn’t used Christian as an adjective to modify “practices.” The Christianity, he said, is not something that is located in the activity as if to segregate a few “Christian practices” from the rest of our “secular” lives; it is located in us and our appropriation, interpretation, and use of any activity. Now obviously among all the various activities in which human beings can engage, there need to be criteria and plumblines against which to measure how congruent they are with the goal of fostering godly life — and the Spurgeon quote there is a nice start. But I thought the point was wise.
Comment by Jason
7.41 am on 30 Jul 2009
Hi Beth,
I was staying right next to Worth Abbey these past two days, small world.
You telling of Abbot Jamieson’s thoughts are just what I am trying to get to, only clearer, thank you
Pingback by Smoking to the Glory of God « Godspace
3.58 pm on 30 Jul 2009
[...] of Charles Spurgeon, when asked how could he smoke cigars? That I do it to the glory of God. Read the entire article Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)How Spiritual Are We?Pastor Bill [...]
Comment by D.G. Hollums
1.17 pm on 2 Aug 2009
Hey Jason:
I’d love to talk to you more about Spiritual Practices, especially is regards for the research I am currently doing for a book idea.
And besides, we still need to find a time to interview you for the Praxis Podcast sometime.
Hope your doing well, blessings!
Comment by Jason
5.23 pm on 2 Aug 2009
Hi D.G,
Great to hear from you. How about early Autumn/Fall for that interview?
Warmly, Jason
Comment by Paul
7.15 am on 3 Aug 2009
Thanks Jase. One Q your excellent piece raised in me is how i like to chose practices to form however I’ve been formed. In that sense I may take anything and call it a spirtual practice but am only embrace those that reinforce me.
So my thought is how how do I adapt practices that define me, rather than jus reinforce my desires. In that prayer, bible & church community could do both, I pray the prayers tbat are about me getting what I want, I read the bible how I want and I attend a church that tells me what I want or is full of people like me. Or not.
Altho if I follow what I think your thoughts about Augustine’s thesis are saying is that we are all collapsed into ourselves so at a certain point we’re all rebelling into ourselves.
So that all said, I wonder if you have any thoughts on how bible, prayer and church can be uplifting rather than just something further to collapse into?
Comment by Jason
10.22 am on 4 Aug 2009
I think it should be the worship life of church communities, that form us. Worship is political, it forms us
for public life, it’s grammar, believes and practices, together shaping us and giving us the ends and means and understanding for locating our desire and formations.
A church that is about hiding from the world until we are dead shapes people with certain practices, just as an approach to private christian faith without a church community, where whatever we want to do is a spiritual practice.
The church and it’s worship, the ordering of life around Jesus is the hear of all ordering for all practices.
Comment by Graham Richards
10.46 am on 3 Aug 2009
Hi Jason,
For years I have been telling people how learning to ski many years back was a deeply spiritual experience for me and was, I believe, a spiritual gift.
It made me attempt to be the best I could be when developing my skills; it took me to places where creation around me was simply awe inspiring; I began to teach others to ski and in doing so shared why I skiied; I truly believed that when skiiing, I could glorify God through the gift he had given me.
I don’t mean any of that in a Bible-bashing way. It was just a part of me and, as a Christian, I believe I have been given gifts to use as part of my Christian expression in my life.
Sadly the knees are no longer capable of allowing me to pursue this amazing experience, but other gifts emerge that take their place instead. They too can enable spiritual experiences within the whole Christian experience.
The other important lesson I learnt was not to allow one’s focus to move from the Cross (representing Christ at the centre of our life), onto these other “interests”. If you use the analogy of a SLR camera, when you focus on the cross at the centre, everything around it has its own degree of focus within the depth of field. The further from the central focus, the less important and so less focussed/clear. If you move from the cross to one of the surrounding objects/activities/interests etc, then the cross loses some focus and the object becomes the central focal point.
Life is about keeping the right central focus and all these other things taking their place around it. They will move with the times. Sometimes sharper, closer to the centre, other times nearer the edge, less focussed, blurred.
I guess this ties in with your both, rather than one or the other point?
Cheers,
Graham
Comment by Jason
10.24 am on 4 Aug 2009
Sorry to hear about your knees! I like the metaphor, thank you.
The focus, what spiritual directions are about, towards and for, is vital. Too often they are about restricted ends, that fail to enter the depths of the mission of Jesus, and at other all about what I want to make me feel good, with no sense of ordering on the Cross.
Comment by bruce robertson
6.21 pm on 3 Aug 2009
This was a very thought provoking post. I do wonder how our activities would change if we truly saw them all as spiritual practices. Which would we stop doing? Which would gain much more meaning?
Comment by Jason
10.25 am on 4 Aug 2009
Great question Bruce, if we thought about our work, play, relationships and asked what are we worshipping, how are we ordering our lives, what are we being shaped and made into? That might be a revealing process for us all.
Pingback by Strange week: An absent father, motor bike and tattoo at Deep Church
4.34 pm on 4 Aug 2009
[...] starters, I wrote the piece on ‘Smoking to the Glory of God’, that captures some of what has been directing me through this period of [...]
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