Spiritual discipline?

So my friend Wayne credits me, among others, with “helping me to view blogging as in many ways a spiritual discipline for the 21st century”; and that started me thinking, because it had never occurred to me to consider it that way. Dallas Willard, in his classic book The Spirit of the Disciplines, has this to say about them:

We can, through faith and grace, become like Christ by practicing the types of activities he engaged in, by arranging our whole lives around the activities he himself practiced in order to remain constantly at home in the fellowship of his Father. . . . When we call men and women to life in Christ Jesus, we are offering them the greatest opportunity of their lives—the opportunity of a vivid companionship with him, in which they will learn to be like him and live as he lived. This is that “transforming fellowship” explained by Leslie Weatherhead. We meet and dwell with Jesus and his Father in the disciplines for the spiritual life.

We could also say that spiritual disciplines are practices in which we engage in order “to cultivate our daily lives into fertile ground in which God can bring growth and change”; practicing the disciplines forms and shapes our lives much as the farmer forms and shapes the soil, clearing away unhelpful growth and carving the ground into furrows that will receive the seed and the rain, so that the crop will grow.

Now, I could go on and talk about the role and importance of spiritual disciplines such as silence and solitude, prayer and fasting in actually living the life to which Christ calls us; but what I’m wondering is, does blogging really belong on that list? Not that blogging is automatically a spiritual discipline—but then, none of the disciplines are automatic. You have to be, well, disciplined about them. The question is, granted that we can blog unspiritually just as we can pray unspiritually, can we really use blogging as a discipline for spiritual growth?

It’s a question I’d never thought about before; but I think we can. What’s more, I think this is something those of us who are Christians who blog need to consider seriously and carefully. That being so, though I haven’t been a meme-y sort, I’d like to pose it to you as a meme:

In what ways can you use blogging as a spiritual discipline?

For myself, the first thing I’d have to confess is that I often don’t. Granted, I never have on a conscious level; but the thing about spiritual disciplines, properly understood, is that they aren’t just something we do, they’re something to which we submit. If, for instance, your prayers are merely a litany of your own arguments and opinions and requests, with no room in them for anyone but yourself, that’s not a spiritual discipline, because there’s no space in there for you to be changed. Similarly, if all I do in blogging is assert my own ideas and contentions, whatever the value of those ideas might be, it’s not a spiritual discipline; someone else might be formed by that, but I certainly won’t be. It seems, then, that in using blogging as a spiritual discipline, a key element has to be receptivity.

Given that, then, and given the natural tendency of human beings to want to challenge others without challenging ourselves, my first thought is this: blogging can help me see the gaps between what I live and what I believe. Put another way, one spiritual discipline for me in blogging is to apply my beliefs and their implications not only to the lives of others out there in the culture, but also to myself and my own life. If I say x, and that means someone else ought to change and to live differently, how does it mean that I need to change and live differently? It’s an important question, and one that blogging as a discipline can force me to face.

That’s one thought, and certainly not the only one; I’d like to hear what others have to say. If you happen to come across this post, I’d like to challenge you to think about this question, and answer it for yourself. To start the ball rolling, I’m specifically tagging Wayne (of course), Hap (ditto), and Dave Moody at blog 137. You three, and whoever will, I ask to do the following:

1. Answer the question on your own blog. (If you don’t have one and would like to chew on this anyway, please do so in the comments on this post.)

2. Keep this going–tag a friend or three.

3. Come back and post a comment here to let me know you’ve responded, and where to find your response. I would very much like to see what others have to say on this.

Thanks.