Summary: Exploring how our spiritual formation needs to be decoupled from western culture.
I am not sure I can describe Our Unforming better than an edited quote from the introduction.
“For all my life, I’ve read books on spiritual formation written by white authors and internalized their experiences of God as the norm and even as the authority. In recent centuries, our spiritual formation resources and teachings have primarily come from Western spiritual traditions. In that process, Western voices have generalized what spiritual formation is for all of us. The way we teach formation in the church is heavily influenced by Western values—such as individuality, dualism, and linear thinking—and Western history like colonialism, the Enlightenment, and industrialization. Even the African roots of early church fathers and mothers have often been ignored when interpreted through a white male lens…I want to untangle and de-westernize the ways my soul has been distorted by the disproportionate influence of Western authority in the church. This does not mean disregarding our long and rich history of Christian spiritual traditions. Rather, we need to recognize that our current understanding of spiritual formation is limited because it was developed under a dominant Western cultural tradition.
Our Unforming is largely written to racial minority Christians who are grappling with the ways that they have distorted themselves to fit into western or white molds. But Cindy Lee is also writing for people like me (a middle-aged, middle-class, white, male, heterosexual, seminary-trained spiritual director). She is pointing out areas where our language and practice of spiritual formation may be more culturally constrained than we understand. It complements books like Karen Swallow Prior’s Evangelical Imagination (about how many of our Evangelical norms are rooted in Victorian culture) or Barbara Holmes’Joy Unspeakable about the particular contemplative practices of the Black church. And if pastors or spiritual directors are going to work in diverse communities, they need to be aware of where their biases toward white or western normative ideas or practices are constraining their ability to serve the people they serve.
I believe we need a more robust spirituality for our times. Our spiritual practices need to be reimagined as our communities become increasingly diverse. We need a spirituality not detached from reality but one that takes seriously the injustices and disparities of our societies. We also need to be re-formed in order to discover the sacred in one another. Sadly, voices are missing from this conversation. We need to hear from one another and make space for one another so we can evolve and mature into a more dynamic spiritual community.
Books like this make explicit the ways that we constrain people by not exploring our biases. The quick vignette below reveals one way our culture denies our human limitations.
I still remember the words that began my unforming. An Asian American pastor and mentor, Dan, once said to me, “One day you’ll make a big mistake, but the people around you will love you anyway. On that day, you’ll be free, and you’ll be able to more fully receive God’s love for you.” These words continue to resonate in my soul. They reveal to me how easily I can get caught up in the drive for flawless performance, even in spiritual things. The push for perfection in performance is not just a Western trait, but it has become the standard for modern culture, no matter where we are in the world. The strength of a linear cultural orientation in spirituality is that it is optimistic, hopeful, and focused on growth. Even in suffering and grief, we can soothe our pain with the belief that God can use our sufferings for good. We expect positivity and growth even in the deepest of sufferings. The drawback of a linear orientation is when things don’t go as planned, when life turns messy and complicated, we lack the spiritual vocabulary and depth needed to navigate.
One of the main refrains that I keep at the front of my thoughts when I think about my spiritual direction practice is that grace has to be the center. As Cindy Lee says, “A “just work harder” society creates a “just work harder” religion.” We need to help people see that while spiritual practices have value, western default thinking about spiritual practices tends to think of them as work to be completed so we can achieve self-mastery. A grace-centered orientation doesn’t try to get people to work harder to find God, but that is explicitly what many western Christians say.
A well-known Christian leader that everyone would know directly said in his book on prayer that people who know more pray better. Cindy Lee rightly counters by pointing out this weakness:
…the Western church has tried to limit spirituality to the mind by suppressing or neglecting the body. Western Christianity starts with the premise that forming right beliefs will lead to right practices, right morals, and a right society.
It is not just the explicit orientation toward knowledge that is a problem. Even relatively aware Christians who have studied missiology and culture often default to hierarchical thinking that biases western thought by assuming “contextualization” is a type of translation that makes western ideals local instead.
The work ahead to unform our spirituality, however, requires that we break free from these Western parameters. Sometimes this task is referred to as “contextualization.” Contextualizing, however, still assumes that the Western way is the standard way, and all other ways are creative deviations. The work of unforming and re-forming our souls is not contextualization. We are not taking Western norms and adding ethnic expressions. We are going back to what the missionaries should have done in the first place, to allow our experiences of God to be fundamentally changed by sitting and learning from one another. Carvalhaes writes that historically colonized communities still find subversive and creative ways to reimagine worship and liturgy, and we need to learn from these expressions. He writes, “While empires and colonization processes tried to fix rituals as a way of controlling senses, understandings, and bodies, colonized people have always intervened in these processes, creating, rebelling, challenging, undoing, and redoing.” These practices are ways in which colonized people have tried to break free from Western-controlled spaces. Carvalhaes states that we can reclaim our spiritual practices through other forms of knowing, such as attending to our bodily movements, senses, and emotions as expressions of our spirituality.
I could easily continue this as a long quote review, but I will only share one more. Over the past year, I have been researching Christian discernment in particular. There is a good chapter that is largely about discernment that I very much commend. But central to that chapter is this important reminder. “The practice of listening to ourselves is a reminder that we are worthy of being listened to.” Lee rightly notes that one of the largest problems of western default thinking is that it creates hierarchical assumptions where non-white or non-western people are taught to mistrust their own thoughts because they are not white or western. It is central to discernment to learn to trust our own thoughts and feelings and rightly name them so that we can begin to discern where God is speaking to us.
This is a brief book but I intentionally did not read more than a chapter at a time because it is a book that I needed to think about and not just quickly move on to the next idea.
One additional note: This is not a “deconstruction book,” but I do think that it would be helpful for many people who are consciously in a deconstruction mode to think through how their assumptions may be culturally constrained and while they may be aware of how politics or relational abuse or other issues have impacted them, that deconstruction work should also look at areas of faith and spirituality where they may be less conscious of work that needs to be done. Books like this I think can help make the deconstruction process easier in the long term because it gets at underlying issues, not just those issues which are most visible.
Our Unforming: De-Westernizing Spiritual Formation by Cindy S Lee Purchase Links: Paperback, Kindle Edition