GOING DEEPER

One of the delights of working at Renovaré is to work on books and to get better acquainted with the editors/writers of these products. Our most recently published Resource, Spiritual Classics, was co-edited by Emilie Griffin and Richard Foster and is featured in this issue of the Perspective. To help you know Emilie better, we asked her a few questions about Spiritual Classics.

Q: In looking over the variety of sources excerpted, it becomes obvious that you have read widely in the "spiritual classics." How has this reading deepened your spiritual life?

Emilie: I experienced a conversion in my twenties. At that time I discovered spiritual reading, mostly autobiographies like C. S. Lewis' book, Surprised by Joy, and Catherine Marshall's book, A Man Called Peter. As these people recounted their yearnings for God, their struggles, I found it enriched me. I understood my own promptings much better. And I came to see that the experience of God is similar in many different times and placesBacross the centuries, God speaks to many in a voice of unmistakable clarity.

Q: Why did you decide to use the twelve disciplines as outlined in Celebration of Discipline as the framework for Spiritual Classics?

Emilie: I think these disciplines are foundational for the spiritual life. They have helped people in many times and places. The disciplines don=t transform us, but they give a structure to our practice. They dispose us toward spiritual transformation, and grace does the rest.

Q: In the "Introduction" you mention that the "Reflection" by Richard Foster at the end of each selection is meant to become an example of what "reading with the heart" might look like. Could you explain "reading with the heart" or what you also call "spiritual reading"?

Emilie: In our busy society, we may read for many reasons: to gain information; to become experts; to be amused or entertained. But "reading with the heart"—an ancient expression—means that when we read, we open up to what the Lord wants to say to us in the text. The Lord's voice—one of teaching and encouragement—is speaking to us but we have to be open and listen. It's something like Mary of Bethany sitting at the feet of Jesus and listening to him.

Q: Of the fifty plus writers featured in Spiritual Classics, some lived many centuries ago. Why should we read the works of these, as some people call them, "old writers"?

Emilie: Sometimes I think that our worst enemy these days is our sense of sophistication—often we think we have nothing to learn from the past. There are men and women of tremendous spiritual vision in every century. Circumstances may change. But someone like Martin Luther King, Jr. who fixed his eyes on Jesus and was shaped by the Sermon on the Mount can say a lot to us almost forty years later, and more than one hundred years ago Phoebe Palmer showed us the "shorter way" of letting go and being led by grace.

Q: Imagine that I'm a single mother with three children who works at Merrill Lynch, the investment firm. How will reading Spiritual Classics help me?