FORMING THE WHOLE PERSON

THOUGHTS, IDEAS, IMAGES

WELCOME!
OPENING PRAYER
THE WHOLE PERSON
FORMING THE WHOLE PERSON

THE HOLISTIC PERSON SOUL

▸ Seeing the human person under the lens of SOCIAL CONTEXT
these parts helps us understand, and care for,
BODY
each aspect of ourselves.
MIND
▸ Most traditions have emphasized one or a few
parts, and neglected others. WILL
▸ “Understanding is the basis of care. What you
would take care of you must first understand,
whether it be a petunia or a nation. If you would
care for your spiritual core—your heart or will—
you must understand it. That is, you must
understand your spirit.” —Dallas Willard
FORMING THE WHOLE PERSON

WILL SOUL
▸ “Volition, or choice, is the exercise of the will, SOCIAL CONTEXT
the capacity of the person to originate things
BODY
and events that would not otherwise be or
occur.” MIND

▸ Freedom, creativity, desire. WILL

FORMING THE WHOLE PERSON

MIND (THOUGHT & FEELING) SOUL

▸ “Thought brings things before our minds in various SOCIAL CONTEXT
ways (including perception and imagination) and
enables us to consider them in various respects and BODY
trace out their interrelationships with one another.” MIND
▸ Perception, articulation, connection
WILL
▸ “Feeling inclines us toward or away from things that
come before our minds in thought.” (32

▸ Value, evaluation, judgment

▸ “Notice that feeling and thought always go together.

They are interdependent and are never found
apart.” (33)
FORMING THE WHOLE PERSON

BODY SOUL
▸ “The body is the focal point of our presence in SOCIAL CONTEXT
the physical and social world... It is our primary
BODY
energy source or ‘strength’—our personalized
‘power pack’… And it is the point though which MIND
we are stimulated by the world beyond
ourselves and where we find and are found by WILL
others.” (35)

▸ Energy, interaction, presence

FORMING THE WHOLE PERSON

SOCIAL CONTEXT SOUL

▸ “The human self requires rootedness in others. SOCIAL CONTEXT
This is is primarily an ontological matter—a
BODY
matter of being what we are. It is not just a
moral matter, a matter of what ought to be.” MIND

▸ “Western culture is, largely unbeknownst to WILL

itself, a culture of rejection... It seeps into our
souls and is a deadly enemy to spiritual
formation in Christ.”

▸ Connection, belonging, acceptance

FORMING THE WHOLE PERSON

SOUL SOUL
▸ “The soul is that dimension of the person that SOCIAL CONTEXT
interrelates all of the other dimensions so that
BODY
they form one life.”
MIND
▸ This part transcends and relates the person to
all that is, and to the Divine. It is in the most WILL
fundamental way the whole self, and thrives on
wholeness/integration.

▸ “Pull yourself together”

▸ Transcendence, interconnection, centeredness

UNDERSTANDING
THOUGHT
UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

THOUGHT IS CENTRAL TO OUR FORMATION

▸ Romans 12:2—Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the
renewing of your minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God—
what is good and acceptable and perfect.

▸ The goal of a healthy mind: “discern” - the ability to perceive what is true

▸ The focus of a healthy mind: what is “good and acceptable and perfect”

▸ The means to a healthy mind: “renewing”

UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

THOUGHT IS CENTRAL TO OUR FORMATION

▸ Phil 4:8—Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is
just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is
any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

▸ If will/freedom/creativity/desire is the part of us that inclines toward what is

good, thought is the capacity to hold in attention what is good, and take into
ourselves the capacity to relate to it.

▸ DW—“The greatest freedom we have is where we allow our mind to dwell.”

UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

DEFINING THOUGHT
▸ “By ‘thoughts’ we mean all of the ways in which we are conscious of
things.” (DW)

▸ Propositions, yes: but also perceptions, ideas, images

▸ Any way we “bring something before our attention” is thought, under this
definition

▸ Note, these do not have to be articulate. “Thought” is not synonymous with

words or statement or clarity, though it can be those things.
UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

SIDESTEPPING 600 YEARS OF PHILOSOPHY

▸ Wittgenstein: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it
lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us
inexorably.” (Philosophical Investigations)

▸ The I/O picture (Inside/Outside) inherited from Descartes is overly mental,

misleading

but do they
match?!!?!!
UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

SCIENTISM AND THE ENLIGHTENMENT

▸ In addition to the Cartesian I/O picture, the wild success of science and math in
the Enlightenment led to a picture of the human knower as:

▸ objective - detached propositional data, knowable to any observer, is the goal

and mark of knowledge

▸ universal - since these facts are open to any observer, with logic/math/science
as model, humans can know “the mind of God”, universal truth

▸ “the view from nowhere”

▸ Disembodied rational knowledge, acknowledging no perspective

UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

A BETTER PICTURE: COPING

▸ “Our ability to cope can be seen as incorporating an overall sense of ourselves
and our world; which sense includes and is carried by a spectrum of rather
different abilities: at one end, beliefs which we hold, which may or may not be
in our minds at the moment; as the other, abilities to get around and deal
intelligently with things. Any particular understanding of our situation blends
explicit knowledge and unarticulated know-how.” (Taylor & Dreyfus, Retrieving
Realism p. 45)
UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

THOUGHT IS ENGAGED, RELATIONAL COPING

▸ Articulate beliefs/propositions - “the cat is on the mat”

▸ Physical and relational “know-how” (wisdom, capacities, “intuition”)

▸ Ideas (general constructions/models of reality)

▸ Images (laden meaning-bearing symbols which can represent beliefs & ideas
quickly and incorporate feeling into them)

▸ These are usually summed into a NARRATIVE which orients us to our world
UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

PROPOSITIONS/BELIEFS
▸ There’s no need to downplay or diminish the importance of articulate, stated
facts, propositions, as part of thought and knowledge

▸ Some kinds of experience and thought really are well represented by universal,
logical statement: the cat is on the mat. The boiling point of water is 100°C.
Three and two equals five.

▸ The issue is when this kind of knowing is taken to be the definition of

knowledge, when the ability to demonstrate/prove is taken to be the meaning
of truth.
UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

ABILITIES/CAPACITY/KNOW-HOW
▸ The woodworker needs the capacity to see/
discern qualities of grain, wood, how much
pressure to apply, which tools to select, to
achieve her purposes.

▸ This takes attention.

▸ Note the model of ‘learning’ here is

apprenticeship: observing a master carpenter
who knows and demonstrates, and guides the
embodied learning of the novice
UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

IDEAS
▸ “Ideas are very general models or assumptions about reality. They are patterns of
interpretation, historically developed and socially shared.” (96)

▸ “We often do not even know they are there or understand when and who they are at work.
Our idea system is a cultural artifact, growing up with us from earliest childhood out of the
teachings, expectations, and observable behaviors of family and community.” (97)

▸ “It is extremely difficult for most people to recognize which ideas are governing their life
and how those ideas are governing their life. This is partly because one commonly
identifies his or her own governing ideas with reality, pure and simple.” (97)

▸ EXAMPLES: “Freedom”, “America”, “Gravity”, “Science”, “God”

UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

IMAGES
▸ “Closely associated with governing ideas are images that occupy our minds. Images are
always concrete or specific, as opposed to the abstractness of ideas, and are heavily
laden with feeling.” (99)

▸ “They mediate the power of those idea systems into the real situations of ordinary life.
Every idea system is present among us as a life force through a small number of
powerful images.” (99)

▸ “Images increase the danger of inadequate ideas. They have the power to obsess and to
hypnotize, as well as to escape critical scrutiny. The image one has of oneself, for
example, can override everything else and cause one to act in ways contrary to all reality
and good sense.” (100)
UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

IMAGES
▸ Images are heavily symbolic/metaphorical and powerful, a kind of “shortcut” to help us cope
with experience.

▸ They are very often inarticulate but operating at a cultural level.

▸ Cross, bread & wine, dove,

▸ Images can overwhelm thought and mislead us:

▸ Epstein’s 1982 article, “Have you Tried to Sell a Diamond?” in The Atlantic

▸ Images are also essential to allowing us to harm others: we must reduce them (vermin, dog,
witch, sloth, etc. - see war-time propaganda) before we can harm, so we can keep our image of
ourselves as good while doing what we know to be harmful.
UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

NARRATIVE
▸ Narrative winds together all these elements: beliefs, know-how, ideas, images,
in a powerful form

▸ “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”

▸ If asked to tell how your day was, you’ll naturally reach for a narrative form:
hero, conflict, resolution (or lack thereof).
UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

ORIENTATION - LIVING WITHIN HORIZONS

▸ Hans Georg Gadamer describes human
knowledge as within “horizons”

▸ Our thoughts (perceptions, ideas, images,

capacities, etc), woven into a narrative,
provide a kind of spatial orientation for our
lives: what is up, down, forward, backward,
where and who we are - allows us to cope

▸ the image of horizon also implies location (a

perspective), limitation (there are limits past
which we do not see), the possibility of
collision with alternate horizons
SMALL GROUPS
FORMING THOUGHT
FORMING THOUGHT

FORMATION AND THOUGHT

▸ “Now, Christian spiritual formation is inescapably a matter of recognizing in
ourselves the idea system (or systems) of evil that governs the present age and
the respective culture (or various cultures) that constitute life away from God.
The needed transformation is very largely a matter of replacing in ourselves
those idea systems of evil (and their corresponding cultures) with the idea
system that Jesus Christ embodied and taught and with a culture of the
kingdom of God.” (98)

▸ Taking on the beliefs, know-how, ideas and images of Jesus, summed in a

narrative of the Kingdom of God
FORMING THOUGHT

OUR MOST IMPORTANT THOUGHT

▸ “The single most important thing in our mind is our idea of God and the
associated images.” (DW)

▸ Part of what Jesus is up to is helping people come to grips with their real
image of God, and encounter an alternative picture

▸ Our ideas and images of God (and the narratives the convey them) are central
because they tell us what we think reality itself is like

▸ Paul Tillich called God “Ultimate Reality” - what we ultimately, most basically,
have to engage with at all times
FORMING THOUGHT

IMAGES OF GOD
▸ “This is the basic idea back of all temptation: God is presented as depriving us
by his commands of what is good, so we think we must take matters into our
own hands and act contrary to what he has said. This image of God leads to our
pushing him out of our thoughts...” (DW)

▸ A. W. Tozer—“Our real idea of God may lie buried under the rubbish of
conventional religious notions and may require an intelligent and vigorous
search before it is finally unearthed and exposed for what it is. Only after an
ordeal of painful self-probing are we likely to discover what we actually believe
about God…”
FORMING THOUGHT

NARRATIVE, HORIZONS, GESTALT

UNDERSTANDING THOUGHT

NARRATIVE, HORIZONS, GESTALT

FORMING THOUGHT

PROBLEMS FOR THOUGHT

▸ THE WRONG STORY

▸ if our meta-narrative is not a good account of reality

▸ FALSE UNITIES

▸ we are capable of deluding ourselves in order to find unity/meaning

▸ FOREGONE CONCLUSIONS (prejudice)

▸ we are quick to categorize based on prior assumptions

▸ CLOSED BOUNDARIES

▸ we consider our view “objective” and “true”, and unable to be altered by encounter
FORMING THOUGHT

STUDY - MORE THAN JUST BOOKS

▸ “Study” is the practice of attending to something outside ourselves so that we take its
order into our minds and relate to it on an appropriate basis

▸ Books/texts/ideas, yes - but also:

▸ physical aptitudes
▸ living creatures
▸ systems, biological/physical/social
▸ the way of Jesus
▸ Study is that practice that enables us to grasp and interact with things as they truly are
- it ls “learning to cope” and a highly bodily process
FORMING THOUGHT

STUDY - MORE THAN JUST BOOKS

▸ Simone Weil’s letter on Study:

▸ The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realisation that prayer consists of
attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable towards God.
… School children and students who love God should never say: “For my part I like
mathematics”; “I like French”; “I like Greek.” They should learn to like all these subjects,
because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed towards God, is the
very substance of prayer. .. If we concentrate our attention on trying to solve a problem of
geometry, and if at the end of an hour we are no nearer to doing so than at the beginning,
we have nevertheless been making progress each minute of that hour in another more
mysterious dimension. Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has
brought more light into the soul. The result will one day be discovered in prayer.
FORMING THOUGHT

MEDITATION, NOT LEARNING FACTS

▸ The very bookish-intellectual wings of Evangelical, Reformed and Catholic
Christianity have focused on knowing statements of proposition about God.

▸ “Credo” - I believe = “I assent to this as a fact” (disengaged “knowledge”)

▸ But what the Bible offers rather are pictures/narratives to steep in so that our
relational ideas and images of God are altered

▸ the Creation poem, Psalm 23, Jesus’ Parables, the Lord’s Prayer
FORMING THOUGHT

THE LORD’S PRAYER

▸ Our Father, always and everywhere around us,
may your name and character be treasured.
Let your peaceable reign come among us.
Let your good will be accomplished among us,
that earth would become an extension of heaven.
You generously give us all that we need this day,
You graciously free us from every debt,
overflowing with abundance
so we may forgive every debt owed us.
Guide us away from what would ensnare us,
keep us safe from the one who would entrap us.
CHANGING OUR MINDS
FORMING THOUGHT

THE BASIC ATTITUDE FOR FORMING THOUGHT

▸ Repentance

▸ “Metanoia” - think about your thinking, rethink everything

▸ the essential willingness to discover new, alternate, or modified ideas/

images/narratives that better account for reality & Ultimate Reality

▸ “I might be wrong; let me look again”

FORMING THOUGHT

BEING A HUMAN KNOWER IS ESSENTIALLY LIMITED

▸ Incomplete: there is always more to know

▸ Perspectival: we are “thrown” into a context,

place, culture, which we can’t shake loose

▸ Bounded: we have horizons of experience,

narrative, ideas that limit what we “pick out” as
important/valid/true

▸ NOTE: none of this is “sin” or “fault” - it is

human!

▸ Gen 3: “then you will be like God, knowing…”

FORMING THOUGHT

KNOWING REQUIRES RELATIONSHIP

▸ Gadamer and conversations:

▸ “A genuine conversation is never the one that we wanted to conduct… Reaching

an understanding in conversation presupposes that both partners are ready for it
and are trying to recognize the full value of what is alien and opposed to them.”

▸ “To reach understanding in a dialogue is not merely a matter of putting oneself

forward and successfully asserting one’s point of view, but being transformed into a
communion in which we do not remain what we were.”

▸ Gadamer calls this “fusion of horizons” - our story expands, takes in more, we
change and become more than we were, relationally.
FORMING THOUGHT

WHAT TO STUDY? WHERE TO ATTEND?

▸ The task set before us is to attend to our own lives and the people before us.
We do not need to go looking for esoteric subjects or “the right course” of
study.

▸ What delights and interests you that is good and beautiful and true? Attend to
that.

▸ What in those around you is excellent and admirable and lovely? Attend to
that.
FORMING THOUGHT

A PICTURE OF REPENTANCE
▸ Attending to what is not-us teaches us the skill of unknowing, looking again.

▸ Iris Murdoch, M&D

▸ “M’s activity is essentially something progressive, something infinitely

perfectible. So far from claiming for it a sort of infallibility, this new picture
has built in the notion of a necessary fallibility. M is engaged in an endless
task.”

▸ The task to know anything, anyone, God, is an endless task, because it is

LOVE for what is not ourself
FORMING THOUGHT

THE APOPHATIC TRADITION

▸ kataphatic - with images

▸ apophatic - imageless, beyond image

▸ Psuedo-dionysus: The Divine Names

▸ All names and theological representations must be negated. According to

pseudo-Dionysius, when all names are negated, "divine silence, darkness,
and unknowing" will follow.
ACTIVITY
FORMING THOUGHT

CENTRAL PRACTICES FOR FORMING THOUGHT

▸ Meditation & Memorization (quality, not quantity)

▸ Lectio Divina

▸ Breath Prayer

▸ Attending to Nature

▸ Examen: what is occupying my mind and attention?

▸ General examen

▸ Keeping a Thought Log

FORMING THOUGHT

CENTRAL PRACTICES FOR FORMING THOUGHT

▸ Study

▸ texts, persons, systems, capacities, places

▸ “attending"

▸ Looking again (repentance)

▸ Apophatic prayer: attending to unknowing, being with God as Other

▸ Encountering the Other around us