Celebration of Discipline
The Book by Richard J. Foster
A Book Review
By Dan McDonald
Many years ago, friend and former
pastor John Boonzaaijer recommended that I read Celebration of Discipline
by Richard J. Foster. At the time I put reading the book on a mental “to do”
list. A couple of weeks ago I had finished watching a movie, and as I pulled
from the mall noticed a Barnes and Noble bookstore across the street. I thought
of a couple of things I needed and then spent a few minutes browsing the books
and saw Celebration of Discipline and remembered having so many years
ago promised myself I would read it. I took it home and began reading it.
It was different than what I had
imagined. I have lived most of my life alone and have never been as disciplined
as I ought to be. I imagined that the reason the book was recommended to me was
to see how horrible it was that I was undisciplined and this was the book that
would help straighten me out. It didn’t take long once I actually started
reading it to realize I had completely misunderstood what Foster’s Celebration
of Discipline was seeking to encourage. It was not a book about gritting
your teeth and using your will power to live a better Christian life. Foster,
instead was telling us about the disciplines of a Christian spiritual life. The
early church had described those aspects in which one meets with God and is
able to pursue intimacy with God as “the disciplines.” It was these areas of
life where the Christian can invest him or herself into pursuing growth into a
lively spiritual life for which Foster sought to use his pen to encourage us.
Far from being a book about overcoming weakness with willpower, it was a book
accentuating how it is only as we sense that God is with us and is gracious to
us that we begin to pursue him with the joy and vigor likely to make strides in
grace. He seeks to promote a pursuit of God based not on willpower but on our
understanding that God is with us and is inviting us to participate in his
goodness and lovingkindness.
What are the disciplines? A
photograph of the table of contents of Foster’s work shows us that a list of
the disciplines he wished to encourage us in using to pursue our knowledge of
and friendship with God. He writes of disciplines that mostly take place within
us, and then of disciplines that we do but in which we relate to the world
around us, and finally he discusses how there are disciplines we do in company
with others and in dependence upon others. You may see his table and contents
and begin to imagine the scope of his work regarding the spiritual disciplines.
Foster writes with the wisdom that
only comes from handling the subject first hand. He is writing about something
he had pursued carefully. As you read the pages you know the author has
struggled to learn to do the things he is telling us we need to learn to do
others. Foster also has studied writers of several traditions including a wide
variety of Protestant perspectives, Roman Catholic, and Orthodox writers on the
Christian life. He had read works and draws from their wisdom spanning the
modern, medieval, and ancient encouragers regarding “the disciplines”. His work
is written with insights that have been shaped both his active pursuit of
seeking God through the disciplines and his desire to learn from those who have
been recognized through the centuries as insightful guides to those wishing to
pursue God through the disciplines..
In the introduction Foster describes
how one of his mentors, Elton Trueblood, had encouraged Foster to write in a
way that led readers to know they wanted and needed to read the next chapter. He
succeeded in following Trueblood’s advice. There is beauty, practicality,
insight, and wisdom distributed to the reader in every chapter. Foster follows
Trueblood’s advice and takes it one important step further. When I finished
reading Celebration of Discipline I felt as if I had been given a vision
of how to pursue living in God’s presence, and that I had been furthermore
given the tools to do so. As I finished the final chapter it was if there was
yet one more chapter. This one more chapter was the chapter that would be
written in my life. What will I do with the tools I have been given? What will
I do now that I have been given a vision of what is possible if we give
ourselves to knowing God through the disciplines made available to us in the
Christian life. The other day I was seeing on Twitter a conversation about how
one of the ancient traditions wanted to settle for nothing less in the
spiritual life than to pray without ceasing. That may seem beyond us. But I am
convinced that Foster’s work sheds light on some of the important ways we can
step closer towards the goal of living in fellowship with God, following him,
hearing his voice, participating in life in His presence. Not only does this
book teach us about some of the ways we can pursue God, this is a work in which
the grace of God is so central that we can begin to feel that our God is
quietly calling us to come, to hear, to listen, to taste, and to enjoy. We
finish the last chapter yearning to now enter the chapter where we take what we
have learned and begin to seek God with a greater hope of finding him and of
being transformed by him than maybe we ever before dared believe was possible.
At least that has been my experience.
No comments:
Post a Comment