13. I find that the trust and safety of my spiritual community helps me build self-awareness and experience healing.
(Before looking at the questions below, take a few minutes to think about this statement. Invite Jesus to speak to you about what He would like you to notice.)
If everything that could be known about you were to be represented the number 100, what percentage of that number do you think you know?
How much of you is known only by God?
Do you think there are things about yourself that others know and you don’t?
Are there areas of your interior life that you avoid? Why do you think this is?
The process of being transformed into the likeness of Jesus is heavily weighted with things related to our interior life: thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, desires, biases, prejudices, judgmentalism, criticalness, and so on. The early church father Evagrius understood that our interior life is a critical piece of who we are.
It was Evagrius who is credited with giving us the list of seven “deadly” or crucial sins. These include envy, lust, pride, greed, anger, gluttony, and laziness. James 1:14-15 says that each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death (NIV).
We see in this verse that even though these evil or unhealthy tendencies begin in our interior life, as Evagrius notes, most of them lead to expression in our relationships with other people. To be proud, we need others to compare ourselves to. We typically vent our anger at other people. We are greedy when we want more for ourselves than others have. Envy is wanting what others have. Laziness is letting others do for us what we should do for ourselves. Lust is desiring inappropriate things from others.
Even though we may not make relationships with others a priority in our lives, it is with other people that our interior deficiencies manifest themselves. It is logical then to suggest that for these unhealthy attitudes and practices to be transformed into healthy desires, we will need to be around and among people.
If it is in the context of others that these unhealthy desires manifest themselves, then only as we continue to be with others can we work on, practice, and discipline ourselves, with Spirit’s help, to think and behave in new and better ways.
But transformation is difficult, and sometimes painful. It requires us to make sacrifices, surrender, and humble ourselves. We naturally resist this process! Resistance to becoming aware of our faults is a major obstacle to experiencing healing and abundance in our lives. Without awareness of our faults, transformation is unlikely.
Our resistance to awareness may take the form of removing ourselves from others and “hiding”—in the absence of feedback from others our unhealthy tendencies don’t seem as evident to us. Another form of resistance is self-deception; we imagine that we really don’t have a problem, or that if there is a problem, it must be the other person’s.
The human soul is incredibly capable of deceiving itself and living in a make-believe bubble of existence in which we see ourselves as perfect, or at least nearly so. And our resistance—whether expressed by hiding or self-deception—increases when we find ourselves among people with whom we don’t feel safe. When we are threatened, unsafe, or fearful, our resistance is strongest and creates a protective shield around us that prohibits us from seeing ourselves as we really are.
But when we experience a loving spiritual community and interact with people with whom we feel safe, our resistance subsides. Then, under the Spirit’s tender work, we may be able to acknowledge our weaknesses, unhealthy attitudes, and flawed desires. And, within this grace-filled community, we may be able to experience healing for our brokenness.
The Spirit is the therapist of our soul, but our souls need a safe place for Him to work. The Spirit needs space where He can gently reveal to us those areas of our interior life that we would rather not look at, the deadly sins that Evagrius declares and the unhealthy desires that James describes. Spiritual communities can, and should, provide this space.