To train the body, strengthening its muscles, increasing its cardiovascular health, and improving its agility, you need to do exercises like stretching, running, and lifting weights.
To train the soul, expanding its capacity, you likewise need to perform exercises, in this case, what are called “spiritual disciplines” — practices like fasting, silence, self-examination, study, and simplicity.
As a pastor, John Mark Comer approaches the spiritual disciplines from a Christian perspective, as the habits and practices from “the way of Jesus” that allow individuals to make deeper layers of themselves available to grace and access the transforming power that’s necessary to become what John Mark calls “a person of love.”
But the practices that are considered spiritual disciplines can be found across different religions, and even philosophies like Stoicism, and can be utilized by people from varied backgrounds to deepen their inner life and strength, center themselves in chaos, find greater purpose, and subdue baser desires to reach for higher ideals.
Today on the show, John Mark offers an introduction to the spiritual disciplines, and the way they can be an act of resistance, a way for us to form our own values and rhythms in life, instead of allowing our lives to be formed by the defaults and external forces of our age.
Resources Related to the Podcast
- The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer
- Practicing the Way by John Mark Comer
- AoM’s series on the spiritual disciplines:
- AoM Article: How and Why to Take a Tech Sabbath
- AoM Podcast #503: The Case for the 24/6 Lifestyle
- AoM Podcast #708: Overcome the Comfort Crisis
Connect With John Mark Comer
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Read the Transcript
Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. To train the body, strengthening its muscles, increasing its cardiovascular health, and improving its agility, you need to do exercises like stretching, running, and lifting weights. To train the soul, expanding its capacity, you likewise need to perform exercises, in this case, what are called spiritual disciplines, practices like fasting, silence, self-examination, study, and simplicity. As a pastor, John Mark Comer approaches the spiritual disciplines from a Christian perspective, as the habits and practices from the way of Jesus that allow individuals to make deeper layers of themselves available to grace and access the transforming power that’s necessary to become what John Mark calls a person of love. But the practices that are considered spiritual disciplines can be found across different religions and even philosophies like Stoicism, and can be utilized by people from varied backgrounds to deepen their inner life and strength, center themselves in chaos, find greater purpose, and subdue baser desires to reach for higher ideals.
Today on the show, John Mark offers an introduction to the spiritual disciplines and the way they can be an act of resistance, a way for us to form our own values and rhythms in life instead of allowing our lives to be formed by the defaults and external forces of our age. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/spiritualdisciplines. All right, John Mark Comer, welcome to the show.
John Mark: Very happy to be on. Thanks for the invite.
Brett McKay: So, something that you’ve written about in your books, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry and Practicing the Way, is the idea of spiritual disciplines which are habits and practices that help us train our souls and access the more transcendent parts of life. So let’s start off with this: Why do we even need this stuff, like, to become spiritual? Can’t you decide, well, I’m going to be spiritual. People say, “I’m spiritual, but I’m not religious.” They don’t have any set practices around their spirituality. So what’s the case for practicing the spiritual disciplines? What is it about them that actually makes a difference?
John Mark: Well, I mean, first off, there’s a whole rabbit trail there of spiritual is one of those words. In our kind of modern, pluralistic, post-secular age, spiritual is a word that everybody uses, but people mean wildly different things by spiritual. So what spiritual means in the Christian tradition is in relationship with a spirit, whether that be the spirit that we understand to be the spirit of God Himself, the Maker of all things, or another spirit that in kind of crass language, we would call an angel or a demon or a dark energy. In LA language where I live now, or whatever it may be. And if you think about relationships, I know you’re a family man. All relationships require disciplined intentions to make connection. And so my wife and I have a weekly date night which means about every other week in the reality of life, and that’s a discipline. There are times when I feel it, times when I am busy, times when I really want to go, times when I’d rather do something else, watch TV or catch up on work. But we discipline ourselves to go out and share a meal and look each other in the eyes and offer appreciation to each other and talk over hard stuff and have shoulder-to-shoulder time to build our connection in order to have a relationship.
And so the reason we need spiritual disciplines is, I can say all I want. I’m a romantic. I’m a lover of my wife, T. But if I never spend any time with her, if I never put down my phone, we don’t have this small repertoire of disciplines, which for us is a daily emotional touchpoint. It’s a weekly date night. It’s a quarterly getaway. It’s an annual vacation. If we don’t have these touchpoints for connection that are at some level scheduled into our lives or at least built into our kind of just natural responses to the stimuli of life, or both, then I can say whatever I want. But you got to put your money where your mouth is or where your time is. And so, in a sense, we need spiritual disciplines because the world that we are in is adamantly opposed to spirituality. It wants us on our phones, because spirituality tends to not make money. In fact, people that become deeply spiritual seem to find great happiness, and this is true not just in the Christian faith, but particular Buddhism and other traditions seem to find great happiness. Living lives that are increasingly free of consumption and materialism and even busyness and hurry, and that’s not great for business.
And so there are powerful forces at work to constantly distract us, and we collude in our own self-sabotage because we use these forces to attempt to numb the pain of life. And spiritual disciplines often put us more in touch with the pain of life. And over time, they can shape us into people, great happiness and joy, but often short term, they actually place us before our pain. And so powerful forces outside of us and inside of us resist a spiritual life. And so we need spiritual disciplines to form an intelligent, thoughtful, intentional counteraction, counter-formational work to the kind of powerful currents of our day.
Brett McKay: So you’re coming at spiritual disciplines from a Christian perspective. But as you mentioned, if you look at other faiths or even philosophies. They have their own ideas of spiritual disciplines. Like in Buddhism, there’s meditation. In Islam, there’s fasting and prayer. And then Stoicism has had its own sorts of sets of spiritual disciplines. They’d have these practices where you would maybe sleep on the floor and wear this raggedy toga, maybe sleep out in the cold.
John Mark: Imagine your death.
Brett McKay: Yeah, imagine your death. Yeah. That was a spiritual practice, and it was all about formation. I think it’s interesting, the intersection between Christianity and Stoicism. You can kind of see that in Paul’s writing a bit, where the Stoics thought about, you had to train the soul, kind of liken themselves to wrestlers or Olympic athletes, so you had to do these exercises to shape your soul. Well, you see that in Paul. Paul was educated as a Roman, and so he probably knew. He knew about the Stoics. And you see that in the New Testament writings, like, you want to finish the race, be a wrestler, et cetera.
John Mark: Yeah, absolutely. One of the most fascinating things to do with the New Testament because I’ve spent so many years as a pastor and teaching the Bible. The Bible was written thousands of years ago in a very different world. And so you end up immersing yourself in the world of the Greco-Roman, Mediterranean, and ancient Near East. And one of the most fascinating things to do with the Bible is to see where what the writers like Paul are saying is similar and where they are radically different. I mean, I think Paul and the biblical writers, they celebrate truth wherever they find it. And I attempt to follow that example, whether it be in meditation from the Buddhist tradition and some of the wisdom they have about detachment or imagining your death from the Stoic tradition or, there’s so much wisdom now to be had in the cumulative effect of human history. And I think what Paul and the other writers do for us is they show us to just celebrate that wisdom wherever we find it and subvert the aspects or the ideas that live in every age that seem to actually be deeply untrue.
Brett McKay: One insight I’ve gotten from your writing I thought was particularly useful in thinking about Christianity. I think a lot of people in America, particularly when they think of Christianity, they just think of it as just doctrines. You have to believe these ideas. I mean, it is like that there’s been wars fought about what we’re supposed to believe in. But you talk about how if you look closer, there’s actually a way presented in the New Testament. There’s a way of life. And this idea of the yoke, I’m sure everyone’s heard that Bible verse where Jesus says, “Take upon you my yoke. My yoke is easy.” And people read that. What does that mean? This is really interesting. You did some historical background. What the idea of a yoke means. Can you walk us through that and how it’s connected to spiritual disciplines or spiritual practices?
John Mark: Yeah, absolutely. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” And, one way to think about Christian spirituality is through that three-part lens of way or kind of a way of life, a lifestyle that’s kind of a goofy word that’s been, capitalized. But a way of life, a way of being in the world. It’s a truth. It is a philosophy, a metaphysic. It is a worldview. It is a metanarrative about what is good and beautiful and true, about where we come from, where we’re going, what’s wrong with the world, and how to fix it, and what the real true meaning and purpose of life actually is and where true happiness is to be found. And it’s also a life. It is a living, breathing, relational experience with the relationship that we believe to be at the center of the universe that Christians call Trinity, or Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so this idea of yoke and the teachings of Jesus, which sounds a little esoteric or like kind of an odd word picture to us today, but if you can imagine a yoke, it’s an agrarian world behind two oxen or something, and a farmer plowing a field with a plowshare.
A yoke was actually a common metaphor that the rabbis used in the first century for kind of their set of teachings, their summary of what they would have called the Torah or the part of the Bible that was written in central in their day. And their kind of way, it was more than just their teachings. Their way of reading the Bible. It was their kind of way of naming. This is how you shoulder the weight of life and we learn Jesus yoke partially through His teachings that come to us through these four biographies in the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and through the kind of corpus of writings that make up the new testament to His earliest followers that were working out his teachings and ideas in different parts of the Greco-Roman world and the empire. But also through just looking at and watching His life. Paying close attention to how He spent his time, how He organized his relational world, what He did, what He did not do, how He used money, how He interacted with the political powers of the time, all of those things, And so yes, a yoke is just a way of reading what life is all about, what Christian Spirituality in this case is all about and how to shoulder the weight of life with peace and with grace. There is a way to life.
There is a weight to life. There’s just no way, there’s no version of life that is easy. Anybody that tells you that is, I think, selling you something, or naive, but there is a way to shoulder the weight of life. There’s not an easy life, but there is an easy yoke, as I like to say it. There’s a way to shoulder the weight of life with peace and with a relational strength that comes from living deeply in connection to God and to other people.
Brett McKay: This idea of spiritual disciplines is also connected to this idea from monks, from monasteries. The rule of life tell us about the rule of life.
John Mark: Yes. Yeah. So, okay, so the first followers of Jesus, the ones that were the most serious, which eventually kind of began what we would now call the monastic tradition, which, kind of grew up over many hundreds of years and took different shapes at different moments in church history and still all around the world today. But the most serious, the earliest serious followers of Jesus all said, all right, Jesus has some, if you read the Sermon on the Mount, some extraordinary ideas, but how do we actually do this? Because good information in your brain and willpower is simply not enough. And that’s the Achilles heel of Western culture. We think that insight and willpower are enough to change, whether it’s through therapy or reading a great book or listening to a killer podcast, if I can just get the right insight, match it to some, good heart intentions, I’ll just go out and do it. And then we tend to. That only works on very, very, very small changes in our life and character. It simply is powerless against the deeper stuff. If you become a husband or a father, or you mature much in life, or you end up in a leadership position, or you have any kind of public scrutiny on you, the weak foundation of your life will be quickly exposed, and you will realize that what you need most to become the person you were destined to be is beyond the power of insider and willpower.
And so much of this goes to, how do we actually create a workable plan to become the kinds of people that Jesus invites us to become, the kind of people who naturally live his ideas on the Sermon on the Mount, which is loving your enemy and living with that anxiety and being free of the worship of money and people of our word, where what we say when we say yes, we mean it. When we say no, we mean it. We don’t use verbal manipulation. People that do not use what some call condemnation engineering, where we try to manipulate people through our judgment and our contempt and our criticism, which the world has just reached a fever pitch with all these beautiful ideas in the Sermon on the Mount. How do we actually live them? So the answer that the first followers of Jesus came up with is a beautiful one. They called it a rule of life. And that is, it’s a bit tricky to get it into English today because this word rule is really hard to translate. It’s regula in Latin. It’s very important to say it’s rule of singular, not rules for life, plural.
So a rule of life, is not a list of rules, though you may have some rules in your rule of life. This word regula was a Latin word. It literally means straight piece of wood. And a lot of scholars debate over this, but believe it was the word used in the ancient Mediterranean for the trellis underneath a vineyard or a winery. And in one of Jesus’ most famous teachings, he has this beautiful line. It’s a word picture of a vineyard. And he says, abide in me and you will bear much fruit. Meaning, if you live in deep relational connection to God through Jesus, then it will produce in the same way that a vine grows fruit, it will bring goodness out of your life, which is later codified in the New Testament as this list of love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and gentleness and so on. And so early followers of Jesus took this word picture of a vineyard to its logical conclusion and said, listen, a vine doesn’t just grow wild on the ground, and you don’t just, like, wait for the rain to come and hope for the best.
A vine is cultivated. A vine has this trellis, this straight piece of wood underneath it that is a support structure designed to lift it up off the ground, to guard it from predators, disease trampling by humans, and to index its growth in the right direction, move it toward maximum sun exposure to make sure it’s well hydrated so it can bear the maximum amount of fruit. And in the same way, if we want to follow Jesus’ teaching, to abide in him and bear much fruit. And again, this is very first century Jesus rabbinic language. For those of you not familiar with the Bible or the writings of the New Testament, if we want to become these kind of people that naturally bear the byproduct of goodness in our life, then we have to, in the same way, organize our life. We need some kind of a support structure, some kind of a regula, a rule, a straight piece of wood to kind of lift our lives up from, to guard our lives from all that would sabotage our deepest desires of our heart and to guide our lives into becoming, we would say, people of love. But whatever your tellus is.
And so, imagine similar work being done by James Clear and others around kind of organizing your life. I mean, there’s so much that will. If you don’t organize your life, somebody else will organize it for you. What’s the Greg McKeown line? If you don’t set the agenda for your life, somebody else will. And so a rule of life is a way to set the agenda for your life. I think Stephen Covey once said something to the effect of we achieve inner peace when our schedule is aligned with our values. So, very simply, and forgive my over speaking here, I define a rule of life as a schedule and a set of practices and relational rhythms that organize our life around God and allow us to live in alignment with the deepest desires of our heart. And that’s it.
Brett McKay: Well, it sounds like you could have a rule of life even if you weren’t intentional about it, because you kind of default to something like we all default to some sort of rhythm of life or practices that we do throughout our day, how we relate to other people, and we just don’t think about it. We just kind of take on a rule of life.
John Mark: Yes, that is exactly the point I make in my last book, that even if you’ve never heard of the language of rule of life until five minutes ago, even if you hate this idea, even if you’re an antinomian kind of, I hate rules, I’m a free spirit, I’m spontaneous, I like to go with the flow kind of person. You already have a rule of life. You just don’t call it. We all have, we likely have a way that we begin our day. We likely either choose to sleep with our phone as our alarm plugged in next to our bed or something else. We have a morning routine. We maybe have an exercise routine or not. We have a workday. We have activities that make up our time. We have apps on our phone. We have relationships. We have a way of life, a way that we have organized, even if it’s incredibly chaotic and reactionary, that that in itself is a way of living. All of us have this rule. We all have this way of life. And so the question isn’t do you have a rule of life? The question is, do you know what your rule of life is? And is it working for you, or is it actually working against you? Is the way that you’re living, is it actually enabling you to live the life that you want? Is it giving you the life that you most deeply desire? Or is it actually sabotaging your best intentions? And many of us, we actually have good heart desires.
We have good intentions, and we even know what we want out of life. But yet the way we have structured our life, organized our life, the way we have allowed ourselves to be manipulated by our phones and all that stands behind them, the way we have been manipulated by social media, by the way modern news organizations work, by modern politics, the way we’ve let them hijack our autonomic nervous system and lead us into anxiety, group thing, and so many other things. It often is sabotaging the deepest desires of our heart. And so I’m a firm believer that the only way we can live a flourishing life in the modern era, whether you’re a Christian or absolutely agnostic about such things or more, I think is a very intentional, disciplined form of resistance that you do that, somewhere there exists a piece of paper or a document that names the schedules, the practices, the relationships by which you will form resistance. And this has to be done in community. We simply all resisted resistance. Cells to all empires down through history were never individuals alone. They were always small kind of guerrilla bands trying to fight from the margins for what they believed to be good. And I think that’s the only way that we will survive this kind of a moment.
Brett McKay: Yes, so takeaway there, you’re being informed by something, the spiritual practices can help you. Like, I’m going to take control, there’s that Flannely O’Connor you had to push against the age.
John Mark: Yes. I love that quote. Yeah.
Yes. Push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you.
Yeah. And so that’s the key idea of my last book, is you are being spiritually formed. And what that’s going to be weird language to people that aren’t Christians. What I mean by spiritually formed is your spirit, your inner woman or man, your inner person, the web and the nature of who you are. Call it character in your old school language that it is being formed. Human beings are dynamic, we’re not static. Like none of us are the same person we were 20 years ago. None of us are the same person we were 20 minutes ago. It’s just so incremental we don’t see it. And over time, we see these broad stroking changes. We are being formed into a particular kind of person. You may be becoming more joyful and happy and relaxed and kind and patient, or you may become more selfish and agitated and angry and freaked out about the world. The point is, you’re becoming a type of person. Who are you becoming? Is it the kind of person you want to become? And is your rule of life, your way of life? Is it helping you become that person or is it hindering you from becoming that person?
Brett McKay: Well, let’s talk about some of these spiritual disciplines that you advocate for, and one is solitude and silence. And you talk about the idea of eremos in the Bible, did I pronounced that right?
John Mark: Yeah, I mean, I’m not going to correct your Greek pronunciation, bro. I think it’s eremos.
Brett McKay: Eremos.
At the end of the day, we’re just doing our best here.
Yeah, tell us about the eremos. I thought that was really interesting, how it’s connected to solitude and silence.
John Mark: Yeah, so it’s interesting. So again, I’m just obsessed with the life and the person of Jesus. And when you look at his life, there are so many remarkable things about him, so many things that just cut straight across the bow of kind of our intuitions and certainly how we’ve organized the world today and how you would imagine a celebrity today. But one of the things that Jesus did a lot is he was deeply engaged with the world, deeply engaged with people. He spent many years in obscurity. But then once he kind of began to engage as a rabbi, I mean, it was extraordinary, the things he did and the crowds He was a part of the deep relational life that he lived with his disciples, but He would regularly disappear into this place that the Greek word is eremos, and it can be translated all sorts of and is translated if you have an English translation Bible, that Greek word, the same word is translated all sorts of different ways as the desert or the wilderness, or the solitary place or the quiet place or the lonely place. These are all legitimate translations of this Greek idea.
And it’s a very different world. It was much less populated, but Jesus basically would just disappear out into the middle of nowhere, into nature, up a mountain or out into the desert. It’s not quite the right translation because much of it was up in the Galilee and such, but he would just go out and, and he would be alone with himself and with God. And you’d see him living in this rhythm of what I call retreat and return, where he would kind of. He wasn’t a monk. Jesus was not a monk. He did not disappear from the world. He did not hole up in a hermitage. He lived a deeply active life, but neither was he a modern day politician with 18 hours, days, and surrounded by his staff constantly and people. He would live this fascinating rhythm where he would deeply engaged with the world. But then he would retreat, and he would disappear. They would literally send out search parties for him. When he got too popular, he would attempt to hide up in the hills. And it was just a fascinating experience where he would get up early. Mark chapter one, one of the first stories read about Jesus in Mark’s biography is very early.
While it was still dark, Jesus got up, went out to, and it translated a solitary place, it’s eremos in Greek, and prayed. And so he would carve out these long, uninterrupted times for maybe what we today would call meditation or prayer, for deeply being himself with God and others. And this is one of the things that enabled him to live with such extraordinary equilibrium, poise, courage, fortitude, wisdom, to know just the right thing, to say and do at just the right time. And so, the spiritual discipline, in the Christian tradition, this has come to be called the spiritual discipline of silence, solitude, and stillness, which is where we follow Jesus’ example. And we basically withdraw. We kind of retreat from the noise and the stimulation of all external inputs, whether that be a phone or a crowd of people, or even our close friends, and the busyness of the city. And we find a quiet place, and that may be hermitage on top of a mountain or it may be our living room as the sun rises before our family is up with our phone in another room. And we find these quiet places and quiet moments to retreat, to center ourselves in God, to become aware of our own heart, our own life, and to begin to get thoughtful about how we live our life, to not just live but to work on our living, and to begin to then re-enter the world, our families, our jobs, our work, running a podcast, whatever it is we’re doing with greater wisdom, fortitude, and peace.
Brett McKay: I love that. So you can do this on a daily basis like you described. Maybe you have a time in the morning when you wake up a little bit earlier, you don’t check your phone, you just cut off all inputs, and it could be meditation, it could be prayer. You’re just going to be there by yourself to work things out?
John Mark: Absolutely. Yeah. So I have my personal rule of life. I have this for me is like essential so I think, it’s one of the most important of all the spiritual disciplines. So, yes, I have a daily kind of hour first thing every morning. Then I have a weekly. We practice Sabbath, so I have a whole 24 hours. We turn our phones off for a full 24 hours every weekend, and I have a longer period every Saturday. And then monthly, I’ll take a full day every month to just retreat. And I will tend to bring nothing but my journal and my heart. I don’t bring books. I don’t bring a phone. You can’t get a hold of me. I’m not with other people. It’s just me, my soul, and God, and I cannot even put into words. And then annually, I will try to do a couple of days, a couple of nights in full retreat. And for that, I’ll often go to a monastery or somewhere that offers a place to live quietly, or I’ll just go solo camping a lot by myself up in, off-grid country or something and just be alone.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I’ve been to a monastery for a weekend. One of the things I found was incredible about it. I just slept so much. I didn’t think I was tired. But for some reason, getting out of my schedule, my body just, like, responded, like, you’re tired, you need to just sleep. And I was surprised how much I slept during that time.
John Mark: Yeah, I think that’s healthy and right. One of the gifts of solitude, there are so many gifts, but one of the gifts is we just learn so much about ourselves when we finally are just with ourselves and God. And we often begin to realize how much we’ve been running away from in our pain, which is why I think so many people avoid solitude, even though it’s actually quite joyful once it becomes a part of your life. But at first, often, the painful feelings we’ve been running away from through our busyness and our devices and binge watching TV, come up. But one of the first things that comes up for most people is just exhaustion. The busyness, the hurry, the overcommitment, the multitasking, the digital stress on our nervous systems, the political climate we’re in. It is utterly exhausting. And so I think one of the great gifts of solitude and our age is just a chance to take a nap, to sleep, to let our nervous systems, like, begin to calm down, you know? Who’s the author? I’m forgetting his name of The Comfort Crisis.
Brett McKay: Michael Easter.
John Mark: Yes. Have you had him on the show before?
Brett McKay: We have, yeah.
John Mark: I loved his insights, and I went and did a bunch of research after reading that book, and man, was he spot one. But about noise pollution and his insight that basically if you’re out in nature, if you’re backpacking in the Sierra Nevadas, if you hear something really loud over a certain decibel level, the likelihood is that it’s bad. It’s a grizzly bear or a wolf or an avalanche or an earthquake. There are very few things in nature that are very loud, that are not dangerous. And so our bodies have evolved to sound over a certain decibel level puts our bodies into fight or flight. And that decibel level is basically just living in a city, just normal life, where, living in LA or whatever. And so I think one of the gifts of solitude is we can really begin to participate in the healing of our nervous system. I think when we’re running at fight or flight, I mean, one way to interpret the just absolute cluster cuss disaster that is politics in America is this is what a bunch of under slept, exhausted people in fight or flight from too much noise and stimulation, following their phones around through anxiety and anger driven groupthink.
This is what it looks like, and it is not pretty. And so if we want to be people that spread peace, goodness, wisdom, and courage in this age and era, then I think it is essential that we come away for periods of time. From the mess, from the chaos, to center ourselves, calm our bodies, and to return with a renewed sense of mission and purpose.
Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Another spiritual discipline is Sabbath. You mentioned that as part of your solitude and silence practice. I’m sure people are familiar with the Sabbath. This idea comes from Judaism, where you take a day off where you don’t do anything. Why do you think that idea went away? What happened there? That’s such a great idea. You get a 7th of your life, you just to chill out. But we were like, no, I don’t want to chill out.
John Mark: Yes. And yeah, I was chatting to my dad the other day. My dad is 73, grew up in what’s now called Silicon Valley. At the time it was just Santa Clara. And he tells stories about how everything on Sunday would close down and almost everyone went to some house of worship. They were either a Catholic or Protestant or Jewish synagogue. And then most people would have family dinner together afterward, and everything was closed on Sunday. It was actually illegal to run anything. And he talks about the year that 711 came to town and how revolutionary it was to go out and buy a Slurpee or whatever on a Sunday. And I looked it up, and this off the top of my head, I have to Google it again to make sure. But I believe that the year that 711 came to Silicon Valley was 1969. And it’s just bizarre. That was not very long ago, half a century, where the whole world, whether you are a Christian or not, would essentially pause and breathe. And, in Christian theology or Judeo-Christian theology, the Sabbath isn’t just like a good idea or habit or a practice.
In Genesis, chapter one, the way that the kind of mythology of Genesis is written, it’s actually woven into the fabric of creation itself, that creation is built, the environment, the natural world, is built with this rhythm into creation of six and seven. And on the 7th day, you breathe, you pause, you rest, you worship. And whether you buy that or not, I certainly do, actually, some intriguing scientific stuff that would argue that, at least for the human body. But whether you buy that or not, I think there is this. We’re creatures of rhythm. We’re not machines. There’s summer and there’s winter, there’s day and there’s night. There’s workweek, and there’s Sabbath. There’s morning and there’s evening. And we’re built to live in this rhythm. And so it’s just bizarre how the whole world has almost, just abandoned this practice without even almost any group-wide public conversation about it. And I think the various reasons you could go around blaming, I don’t know, marketing or capitalism gone awry or whatever, secularism, you could find somebody to blame. But the reality is that we have lost this essential practice. And there is the Christian practice of Sabbath is very unique in that it’s not just a day off or a day to be quiet.
It’s a day to deeply rest, but also to attach more deeply to God and offer more of yourself joyfully to God and to really anchor your life in your community of other Christians. But, you have Pico Iyer and other secular thinkers that are arguing for a secular Sabbath. You have doctors now arguing for a digital Sabbath, which we practice, by the way, as well. And it’s wonderful. And so I just think wisdom is wisdom is wisdom, whether you’re a Christian or not. The wisdom of living by rhythm, of living with more than just accomplishment and accumulation or constant stimulation as our end. It’s never been more important, arguably now, than it ever has before.
Brett McKay: So, yeah, the Sabbath is a way to push back against the world’s rhythm.
John Mark: Oh, yeah, it’s subversive. I mean, it’s so, the level of resist, because we don’t buy, we don’t sell on the Sabbath. We turn our devices. I mean, it is full-on resistance to the powers of digital empire.
Brett McKay: Yeah, we actually had a guest on the podcast a while back ago about having a digital Sabbath. We’ll link to it in the show notes. I thought it was really interesting. So what could a Sabbath practice look like? I know you say there aren’t any hard rules to follow, but what does it look like for you? Because as a pastor, you’re really busy on Sundays, and you do a Sabbath on Saturday and actually start on Friday night.
John Mark: For our family, yes, we begin the night before or the night of in Hebrew theology, the day begins at sundown, not at midnight or at sunrise, like we think of in the western world. And there’s a whole theology behind that of the day begins with rest, with sleep. So, yes, we start the night before. We throw a big kind of Sabbath dinner party. We have some of our closest family and friends who come every Friday night. We do homemade sourdough bread and a really good bottle of wine, and we laugh and we do gratitudes and highlight of the week, and we do fire pit and watch the sunset and play games. We put all of our devices away literally in a box for 24 hours, including my teenage kids. There’s no phones, there’s no laptops, there’s no TV. Everything, the clicker, it all goes into a box that we put away. And we spend the evenings kind of a party. So it kind of starts with a relaxed party celebration, and then we sleep for a long, long time, and we’re pretty chill. Our family’s pretty chill. So, Saturdays then, for us, I’m in this great stage where I have teenagers, so they sleep in really late.
So I basically get a half-day retreat every Saturday morning, which is nice to read and pray and journal and go on walks with the dog, and then it’s family time. So it’s a real mix of trying to connect with our own souls, connect with each other and deepest, closest friendships and family, and connect with God. So we have a lot of kind of relaxed, kind of micro-practices woven throughout the day that just kind of return us to a grateful posture before God, and we spend the day just resting. And honestly, usually, it’s the highlight of our week, and it’s become an anchor practice, really, even our family spirituality, I have my own kind of individualistic. This is how I do life with God or receive life from God. But for our family, Sabbath has really become like the anchor. And for most Christians, the Sabbath would also include going to church and worshiping and being with other people of God.
Brett McKay: Another spiritual discipline is fasting. A lot of people are fasting these days for health reasons. What’s the spiritual reason for fasting?
John Mark: Yeah, there’s more than one. I mean, like all of this stuff, there are layers to it, so we believe, and I think there’s good, good evidence for this, that it has a deeply reforming effect on purging what we would understand, I’m trying to think of language here that would make sense to non-Christians. All of us have these primal animal bodily desires that are basically oriented around self-preservation and self-satisfaction. And that could be lust, it could be greed, it could be gluttony, it could be anger, it could be selfishness. And overcoming these powerful undercurrents of bent desires that all of us carry in our bodies is very difficult. It’s much more difficult than most people are honest about. And fasting has this profound effect upon the body where we would understand it to be, this is language used by the writer Paul in the New Testament of the flesh and the spirit. And this is very kind of Christian or religious-sounding language. But the flesh you could understand is this kind of primal, carnal, bodily survival part, this is the animal part of our nature and the spirit, you could understand.
I think of non-Christian language as like, the enlightened part of us moving toward people that live over those animal desires in wisdom and love and peace and kindness and fortitude. And so fasting is a way to starve your flesh and feed your spirit. So there’s something that happens when you do not, many of the early Christian thinkers said that Christian spirituality begins in the stomach, and that if you can’t overcome your gluttonous desires, your stomach, your bodily desires, you’re never going to have victory in other areas of your life, whether that be channeling your sexuality toward a healthy direction, or money, or your mouth, and how you speak to other people or your decisions you make with your life, impulse control. And so there’s a powerful thing. I mean, Christian spirituality is holistic in that it believes the body is not just a thing that we’re in, it’s actually a part of who we are and an essential part of who we are. It’s deeply, deeply embodied spirituality. And so fasting is a way to turn your body from an enemy into an ally in the fight to become a person of love.
Brett McKay: So how do you incorporate this into a spiritual practice? Is it something you do once a week, once a month? Is it 24 hours? Is it no water, no food? How do you?
John Mark: It’s, yeah, I mean, well, traditionally, fasting is just not eating, but drinking water. There are some rare examples of not drinking water either, but you can’t do that very long. So, yeah. Again, there’s not a right way. There’s no command from Jesus in the New Testament writers. There’s a long-running Christian tradition of fasting once or twice a week until sundown, typically on Wednesdays and Fridays. So I will do that on Wednesdays and Fridays. I will just wake up and not eat until kind of a simple dinner at sundown. And some seasons of my life, I’ll just do it one day a week. Others will do it two days a week, and then there will be longer periods of fasting that I will do for several days. Up to maybe a week for me tends to be the upper limit for me, but those tend to be responsive. Like, I’m going to do a couple of day fast next week in response to something that happened to me in this last month. They will be when I really think, there’ll be certain occasions that call for it. So one could be when I’m in the process of really trying to discern a major decision.
And it’s an incredibly helpful practice to really what I would understand to be hear the voice of God speaking in my inner man and discern what the next step is. I will often practice a longer fast when I’m facing some kind of a crisis and I just need the help of God. I will often practice a longer fast when, again, this is going to be a very Christian language. When I have sinned, when I have done something egregious, something wrong, when I have, maybe really hurt the feelings of my wife or my children through selfish behavior, whatever it is, I will often fast to repent and attempt to. Not to self-masochate, not to, self-flagellate myself. Not out of shame, but out of an attempt to really purge myself. I will often fast in response to grief. Thankfully, I don’t have that happen very often. But fasting in most traditions is very common. After the death of a loved one, you would fast for up to a week at a time as a way of, like, again, grieving. You could think of fasting as praying with your body, in prayer we all run out of words.
We all get to the spot where we don’t know what to say or do. And it’s a way to just pray with your body, even beyond words, and even when you don’t know what to say.
Brett McKay: Another spiritual discipline you talk about is community. And I don’t think a lot of people would think of community as a spiritual discipline. So how is community a spiritual discipline?
John Mark: Yeah. And that may not be a helpful way to frame it for people, but certainly in our radically individualistic age. Brett, I mean, people just live shockingly lonely lives. For all of the connection that we have through our devices and modern features of the world, people have few close friends. Families tend to be fragmented and torn apart, if not by relational breaches and at least by distance and busyness. And so, again, if we’re going to live against that flow of kind of atomized culture, as some would call it, or this radical individualism, as the sociologist Robert Bellah called it, we have to live very intentionally and subversively. And so, that’s simple for us. It would be things like, once a week, we share a meal with about, eight other people that we love and we deeply know and have chosen to kind of do life with. And we’re all followers of Jesus, or we’re helping each other toward a specific kind of life telos or life goal, it would be I have one close friend that, after my wife, kind of knows everything there is to know about me, for the most part.
And so, it would be us attempting to get together once a week and bear a soul. Sometimes we just laugh and catch up. Sometimes we encourage each other. Sometimes we talk about mistakes we made, and we are deeply, honest and vulnerable, but it’s letting somebody else into the inside and being deeply vulnerable. Sometimes it looks like regularly practicing service where we find people that aren’t in our income bracket or are kind of preferred. These are the people we like to hang out with, and we find ways to serve them. And the gift that is not just to them, but to us is insurmountable.
Brett McKay: Okay, so that one, you can practice it by just getting together with people, having dinner with them once a week. And this is, I think, going back to this idea that spiritual disciplines are a way for you to resist and push back against whatever’s forming us out there in the world. Like, this requires, like, getting together with people is hard. I mean, if anyone’s tried to plan a dinner with friends, everyone knows they’ve got so much going on in their lives. I got kids going to this thing, and I got this meeting to go to, and I got. And so you have to, like, set things a month in advance whenever that happens. Like, I shouldn’t live like this. This is not normal. I don’t feel good. So actually making relationships an integral part of your life is a way to push back against that.
John Mark: Yeah, absolutely. And this is, again, in the Christian tradition, why you can’t be a Christian by yourself. Not, you shouldn’t, not it’s not a great, like, you literally can’t. To be a Christian is not just to follow Jesus. It is to be a member of Jesus’ community. And the wisdom there is that, listen, if you want to live a particular kind of life, in particular, if it swims upstream against the cultural currents of your day, then you have got to be a part of a community that forms almost like an alternative society or this little microcosm, this little cell group type of thing. And that’s what the church is in Christian theology. And often in America, we think of the church as these big kind of weekend experiences with thousands of people, and there’s a place for that. But that’s not the primary expression of church, certainly not in the New Testament and down through church history. It’s much smaller, it’s much simpler, and it’s a group of people doing life together. And the wisdom there is, you can’t do this by yourself. You need other people. And for other people to join you, you have to have some kind of a group way truth and life.
You have to have some kind of a group shared value system that you’re working for and holding yourself to some kind of a group shared rule of life in our language or kind of rhythms that you live by. And that could be as simple as, we’re a group of five different families. We all have kids in the same era, and we’re trying to, we get together every Sunday afternoon because we want to be healthy families. And it could be really, really simple. It doesn’t have to be deeply metaphysical, but you have to have a group of people, a community that you do this with. You have to have some kind of articulated, shared value system, and then you have to have some simple habits, rhythms, disciplines, practices, relational touchpoints that turn this value system from an aspirational idea into an embodied reality.
Brett McKay: In your book, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, you talk about simplicity as a spiritual discipline. How can practicing simplicity help you order your desires?
John Mark: Yeah. I mean, again, if you’re trying to think of this as an outsider to the Christian faith, minimalism is kind of like the secularized version of the very ancient Christian discipline of simplicity. You could hear a lot of the things that we’re talking about, Brett, somebody who’s listening to your show and could think that I’m asking them or encourage them to go add, like, 95 things to their already over-busy, stressed-out, maxed-out life. And that is, nothing could be further from the truth. I think for most people in the world today.
Any serious spiritual life, or just any intentional, meaningful, life organizational system begins with subtraction, not addition, with doing less, not with doing more, with pursuing simplicity, not with increasing complexity. So I am certainly not saying, hey, you’re busy, you’re stressed out, you’re maxed out, okay, now you need to do an hour of meditation every morning and a digital Sabbath and schedule this relational touchpoint every week. I’m saying you need to actually not just replace other practices and habits with these more meaningful ones, but actually cut down. Depending on how busy you are, probably at least 20%, if not way more of your commitments, even relational obligations, activities, practices, consumeristic kind of behaviors, media-based entertainment behaviors.
Simplify your life. Let it be slower, let it be simpler, let it be more meaningful, let it be more about what is deeply good, not just the fleeting pleasures of our age. And so ultimately, simplicity is about organizing your life around what matters most. And again, many of us have this inner sense of tension, disequilibrium, angst, because the chaos of our daily lives does not match, it does not align with, and it certainly does not further, what our actual aspirational ideal of life is. And so the more some of that tension is just what it means to be human and live in a world and have a job and life. But the more we can integrate our daily lives with our spiritual values, our highest values, our deepest desires, the more we can align and integrate and bring those two things together, the more peace and joy we will experience this side of eternity.
Brett McKay: So what are some concrete things that people can do to practice the spiritual discipline of simplicity?
John Mark: Well, I think this is where the minimalism world and all that literature and good thinkers on that subject are really helpful. You don’t have to start esoterically. Start by just like decluttering your bedroom and your house. Start literally, it’s shocking how just getting rid of stuff, crap you don’t need out of your house. How amazing that will actually open up breathing room in your soul. It sounds weird to us in the West, but we’re such embodied creatures. Then, the more that you can begin to change your consumerism habits. I mean, everybody’s different, but most people I know, most of us, myself included, buy far more than we need. So if you can begin to limit your consumption and begin to deeply savor things that are either simple like a morning cup of coffee, or free, like watching the sunset or walking in a park near your house. And then from there, if you can, begin to simplify your schedule by cutting just obligations out that enable you to begin to live with margin so you can actually have breath in your life, which, again, does not mean not living a productive, meaningful life.
I have quite a bit of margin in my life, and I like to believe that I’m still living a meaningful and productive life. Those things are not mutually exclusive in the least bit. Often by pruning, we bear more fruit, not less. But I think one of the simplest places to start is just by actually beginning to simplify your possessions, your living situation, and your habits of materialism.
Brett McKay: Another habit you talk about, or discipline you talk about, is slowing down, like literally doing things more slowly. So how can slowing down be a spiritual discipline?
John Mark: Well, I mean, again, this only makes sense at some, you can make sense of it through a well being level. I think about it through the lens of, Christian spirituality, which is to become a person of love. But even if that’s not your ultimate goal in life, if you just want to feel better, most of us, when we’re hurried and stressed out and I maxed and, I just got home from the airport, LAX, late last night, just thinking of, like, trying to travel through LAX. It’s just that feeling. It’s just a terrible feeling of being late and stressed and hurried and maxed out. And many of us live that way chronically. And so I think that the world has sped up to an unhuman and unhealthy place and an inhumane pace of life. And I think literally, again, holistic spirituality, embodied spirituality. Learning to breathe, to breathe slower through our bellies, to walk slower, to multitask less, which is a myth we all know anyway, to have more margin in our life. Hurry is not having a lot to do. Hurry is having too much to do and not enough time to do it.
And so the only way we attempt to do it all is we speed our bodies, our central nervous systems, our minds, and our relationships up to a pace that is simply incompatible with being loving, joyful, peaceful people. And we all could tell that example, whether it was me trying to get my family to the airport yesterday, I was not at my most loving best because I was hurried and stressed, or me this morning, when my wife was having a hard morning, she wanted to have a quick conversation with me and I was late for a meeting, and so I was curt and I don’t have time for this. And I rushed out the door, and it wasn’t like, it was fine. It was just normal stress, married stress. But that’s because I was hurried. I didn’t have the space to be with her in a hard morning because I had a little bit too much to do my first day back to work after vacation. And some of that is inevitable. It is in life. But I think that slowing our lives down, especially for the kind of people that probably listen to a podcast like this, that are deeply interested in productivity, living meaningful lives, living healthy lives, most of us tend to do too much, not to do too little.
Brett McKay: They’re probably, they’re probably listening to the podcast at 1.5 speed, too.
John Mark: Exactly. The amount of people that have listened to the audiobook of my book on hurry and said, I listened to it at 1.5 speed, and I realized I’m a total hypocrite. You’re just normal. Thousands of people have said that to me practically. You’re just normal. That’s the speed of our world. And it is a speed that is incompatible with love. And I’ve just decided that I am much more interested in becoming a person of love and joy and peace in the way of Jesus than I am with living at the frenetic pace of our modern era.
Brett McKay: And it’s another form of resistance because everything’s pushing you to go faster and faster. So drive the speed limit, walk a little bit slower, don’t answer emails or the slack right away. As soon as you get the ping, like, take your time, or just go.
John Mark: On a walk in the first place and leave your phone at home. Just go walk. Go walk your dog, go take a walk with your kid or your spouse or your friend or your girlfriend, whatever. Just go out, just be outside, watch the sunset. I mean, this is not rocket science, just drink your coffee and actually just drink your coffee in the morning. Don’t do anything, don’t read the news, don’t fall, just drink your coffee and be present to that. This is where joy is so often.
Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, I’ve experienced that. Just living a life of hurry turned me into that snippy dad. It’s like, oh, don’t have time, get going. I get out the door, it’s like, man, what am I doing? What am I doing? And then the people I’ve been around, when you’re around them, they feel so life affirming, like, I just feel really good being around this person. They’re slow. They’re not in a hurry to get anywhere. They talk a little bit slower.
John Mark: They’re present to you.
Brett McKay: Yeah, they’re just present to you. It’s like, man, I want to become that sort of wise, joyful. Yeah.
John Mark: Yep. Okay. Yeah, that’s it. And again, it’s hard. It’s hard in the throes of life and responsibility and parenthood and working a job. And we’re not aiming for perfection here. We’re just aiming for practice, for progress, for slow incremental growth.
Brett McKay: We’ve talked about a couple of spiritual disciplines. There’s several more out there, but how do you decide which one to start with? If you’re like, I want to incorporate some more spiritual disciplines in my life. I want to add a rule of life to my life. How do you decide where to start?
John Mark: Well, again, there’s no official starting place, and this would be totally different if you are an ardent Christian than if you’re an atheist or, whatever. But I think for again, most people in the modern world, especially the type of people that likely listen to this lovely podcast, I think the starting place would be, again, subtraction, not addition. So I think that would be one of three places. It would be either the practice of Sabbath, which is, I think, the most important place to start. The challenge with Sabbath is it’s technically 24 hours, and that’s just a high bar of entry. So you might need to start with like 4 hours on a Saturday morning. I’m going to turn my phone off and take a four hour block, or whatever it is, or 3 hours on a Sunday afternoon. You might need to start smaller and work your way up. But Sabbath rest is a beginning place. Solitude, a daily kind of, whether you want to frame it as prayer or meditation or quiet, or just drinking your coffee and doing nothing else for 30 minutes every morning while you watch the sunrise, I think that’s a beginning point.
And then I think a regular relational touch point, whether that’s a weekly coffee or run with your best friend, or a weekly meal around the table with a couple of other families or couples or friends, some kind of intentional, regular not, “Hey, let’s get something on the schedule,” and you end up seeing each other, three times a year, but some kind of a “Hey, no. Every Saturday morning, we go cycling and we get a cup of coffee and we have a connection point.” Or, “Every Thursday night, we share a meal together,” or, “Every Sunday afternoon, we go to the park or to the lake or whatever it is.” I think those are the three places. A regular relational connection, a daily time of quiet and solitude and retreat, and some kind of a weekly time or day of rest. I would start at one of those three places and slowly begin to slow your life down through subtraction, not addition.
Brett McKay: Well, John Mark, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?
John Mark: Oh, it’s pretty easy to find. John Mark Comer. I have a website, you’re welcome to go there, or I run a nonprofit called Practicing The Way. You can go to PracticingTheWay.org as well, or JohnMarkComer.com. All my work’s available. I’ve written a number of books and anything I do, if it’s helpful, wonderful to hear.
Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, John Mark Comer, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.
John Mark: Thanks for having me on.
Brett McKay: My guest here is John Mark Comer. He’s the author of a number of books, including his latest, Practicing the Way. You’ll find more information about his work at his website, JohnMarkComer.com. Also, check out our show notes at AOM.is/SpiritualDisciplines, where you’ll find links to resources where we delve deeper into this topic, including an in-depth AOM series of articles on the spiritual disciplines that are written for folks from any background who want to practice them well. That wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at ArtofManliness.com, where you’ll find our podcast archives as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you can think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you take 1 minute to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast but put what you’ve heard into action.
