Raking & Spiritual Formation
I live in an old neighborhood filled with big, old trees. Many of these 100+ year old brawny giants have grown to stand 3-4 times the height of the houses below. Fall is a beautiful time of year around here. It’s also a lot of work. There are leaves everywhere. When the wind gets particularly feisty, these leaves travel, swirl and form deep new piles anywhere they find resistance, which happens to be against my house, fence, and landscaping. In my neighborhood, it’s possible to get all of your leaves taken care of on Saturday, only to see your neighbor’s leaves relocate to your yard on Sunday. Such is life in the 05 and I’ve come to love it. The color above and the texture below provides a way of keeping time. It sends signals and turns pages. If I’m listening, the work of embracing fall never fails to bring about new reflection, which is why I’m writing this post.
Last week, while raking, I was hit with something that felt like an epiphany—a way of seeing that felt novel, sudden, and deeply true. It felt like a realization that came from somewhere else, from some far away culture and time outside of my POV. As these things tend to go, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed ironic in how fresh this realization seemed to me. There’s humor in being shocked and amazed by what is obvious yet somehow hidden in plain site. My epiphany was this: raking is good for me.
A little context and backstory…sometime in my early 30’s I fell hard for the school of technological efficiency. With this philosophy, this way of seeing, if technology offered an easier way, it was necessarily better, no questions asked. My world became one big i-Phone. This of course meant rakes looked silly and outdated next to high powered leaf blowers. Getting the job done as fast as possible, with as little pain and effort as possible was the mission, without hesitation. I was all in on easier and why wouldn’t I be? Less time with leaves meant more time doing other things like resting, watching games, or playing with my kids. No doubt there were upsides to this approach, and there still are. However, looking back, I was not the least bit aware of what this way of seeing was doing to me.
Slowly, I came to see manual labor as an outdated hassle. By extension of this premise, I came to believe the fastest and least demanding option was best for me. And, when I say best for me, I’m trying to get at more than just a preference informed by the cold hard metrics of time. Yes, technological efficiency is about time, but it also, quietly, contains a moral compass and anthropology. It promises to deliver a better life not just by saving us a few minutes or hours here and there but primarily by freeing us from “unnecessary” struggle. Herein lies the heart of the matter for me. I came to desire a life increasingly free from manual labor because I believed a better life would be found in having more rest and less struggle. To sum it all up, I thought easy was good for me.
Before I continue, an important disclaimer is needed. I am not against technology or innovation, nor do I believe we’d all be better off living as people did hundreds of years ago. This is not a call to go back to the glory days or to make things harder under a misguided romantic view the past. I really like hot showers, brushing my teeth, watching Netflix, and having access to doctors and healthcare. For the many ways innovation has saved lives and increased wellbeing for humanity, I’m grateful and eager for more. Besides, the hard or slow way isn’t always the right solution. If you cruise by my house, you may catch me using a leaf blower. My recent epiphany, if you can call it that, is not about striking a perpetual scowl upon technological efficiency in general. Rather, I’ve become gladly bewildered with the popular assumption that the easier way is better.
Disclaimers made, now I’ll make my case. Let’s start with familiar territory, a place we’ll all agree. When it comes to the health and strength of our bodies, what is easier is not what is better. We know this intuitively, through experience, and it’s one of the most popular story lines of our time. We find it in sports commentary, Nike and Gatorade commercials, and movies. We deeply resonate with the truth that health, athletic performance, and strength are things we come to slowly through hard work and dedication. Whether you’re just off the couch and seeking to run a 5k, lifting weights with the goal of getting stronger, or making changes to your diet in pursuit of health, all these moves come loaded with an expected level of difficulty. Health and strength require hard work. Our bodies were designed by God to maintain health through movement and struggle, not through ease. This is one aspect of what I’m expressing when I say raking is good for me. The pain and struggle of it on a purely physical level is better for my health than using a blower and getting it done quicker. It’s like taking the stairs instead of the elevator.
Yet, I’m interested in a deeper, more consequential, less obvious conviction. One that’s much harder to prove but one that’s coming into view with a stark self-evident clarity through my experiences over the last several years. Ok, here it is, here’s my epiphany: just like struggle is a crucial pathway to health for our bodies, it is also a pathway to health for our souls.
What is a soul? Drawing from my own experiences and the work of writers and thinkers I follow, the soul is the center of our being, it is our deepest and truest self, it is where our mind, body, and spirit integrate faith, hope, and love into a stream of vitality. It is a center for wisdom and a kind of deep knowing that transcends logic. In classic Christian thought, the soul is a living, immortal, immaterial essence created by God that animates the body. James Bryan Smith writes, “…the soul is the most essential, precious thing about any of us. And, paradoxically, our soul is something we are the least aware of, the least concerned about, until our lives begin to fall apart.”
Much more could be said in describing the essence of the soul but here’s my point: the condition of our souls bears enormous influence upon our lives. Yet, unlike our culture’s intuition about the value of slow struggle as it relates to health (take the stairs if you can), most of the ambient messages we receive tell us that soul work should be comfortable. Or, put differently, slow struggle related to our spirituality can and should be avoided.
Over the last several years there’s been an astounding increase in the amount of spiritual guidance one can receive via the internet. It has been an amazing thing to have instant access to thinkers and teachers I admire through podcasts, interviews, Instagram posts, and videos. I have gained a lot from being able to listen to brilliant and soulful people online, but I’m coming to see, I’ve also lost a lot and some parts of these losses have been significant. Rather than processing a complex question through a slow and tedious pathway of contemplation, reading, prayer, journaling, silence, and talking with trusted friends, a well-produced podcast on the topic offers a convenient substitute for all the work. Instead of slowly feeling my way through something sublime, a process that might take months or years, it’s tempting to quickly adopt the view of a well-known thinker. Rather than driving in a state of quiet reverence, why not listen to someone who is entertaining describe in detail their practice of driving in a state of quiet reverence.
In some dark corners of the internet, quick fix, hustle culture related to deep spiritual questions runs rampant. By this logic, for a cost, one can make unbelievable advances in a short amount of time through access to a sage, exclusive curriculum, or a “life changing experience.” When it comes to soul work our culture is clearly obsessed with short-cuts, influencer aesthetics, certainty, and experiences we pay for, over the manual, old school process of slow struggle. Meanwhile, our souls, the most essential part of us, remain neglected.
Our souls find themselves in dangerous times. Political polarization has outgrown the talking phase and evolved into real-life, local problems for all of us. Tech companies are openly conspiring to capture our attention for ad revenue around the clock. As a result, violence, scarcity, hostility, and competition are being normalized as acceptable means to an end. The end is winning, being big, and in power, all as a twisted vision of the good life. This energy is dangerous in part because it’s always in a hurry. It creates a surrounding environment of speed, the perception that things must get done quickly, the impression that not knowing or not taking a side is indefensible and indecisive, the assumption that slow and difficult is outdated.
All of this rage, all of this hurry and speed is antithetical to the way of the soul. Of course there are times when we need to hustle. All of us must hurry sometimes. However, if the prevailing forces have their way with us, we will come to see speed and ease as the ideal approach to every moment. Clearly the pace of life is being rapidly increased by people (tech moguls, billionaires, and political sectarians) who are profiting on these terms. These are people who do not know or seem to care about what’s good for the human spirit. It’s high time we see this for what it is and get serious about making intentional shifts which give rise to a different way of life.
To see the invitation to slow struggle as a good thing, it’s also important to contrast it against the common harmful experience of Christian community as burdensome and tiring. With this approach, the emphasis is upon validating one’s devotion and belonging through effort. It could be attendance, service, study, prayer, or anything a church might ask for. The massive difference between the validation grind and the way of slow struggle has to do with our expectation of how we will be loved and accepted. Where love and acceptance are conditionally acquired through work, there will always be exhaustion and insecurity.
Jesus throws a lifeline to people trying to make the cut when he says, “Are you tired? Worn out? Burned out on religion? Come to me. Get away with me and you'll recover your life. I'll show you how to take a real rest.” Thankfully, Jesus invites us to a life of being deeply formed by spiritual practice and community without trying to prove ourselves. Following Jesus, we struggle for a deep and beautiful maturity, not belonging. We work from a place of security and love for our growth and for the good of others, not for a seat at the table. In healthy community, the slow struggle feels sustainable and joyful, not exhausting and demanding.
In closing I’d like offer up some pastoral encouragements for those intrigued by the odd possibility of reuniting with their rakes. I’d like to cheer on those who sense something false and dehumanizing lurking in the unquestioned worship of ease and speed. This is a call to take seriously the formative powers of prayer, silence, poetry, reading, and weekly worship in community. Yet, much more than that, and considerably more crucial, this is a call to remember that these things are not supposed to feel easy. Easy is not a trustworthy marker of what is best for us.
If we tend to our souls, we will encounter friction. We will be stretched beyond our liking. We will come upon rich spiritual disciplines which at first, second, and third try, simply do not connect with us. We will be introduced to essential books that offer perspectives we do not like or relate with. We will encounter people of wisdom who see the text and the world differently than we do. We will at times feel nothing but boredom within the healing balm of silence. We will feel in stretches disappointed and confused by prayer. We will have moments when we no longer feel easy going connection in important relationships. In all of these situations, I implore you not to interpret the difficulty, difference, or slow struggle as a sign that these things are not good or right for you. The feeling of slow struggle may actually be a sign that you’re in the right place, that your soul is being fed. It only takes years to know :)
As I get into my late forties, my observation is this, the most loving, peaceful, content, and joyful people are those who have prioritized the health of their souls by way of the slow struggle. Their souls have no room for cynicism, addiction, and fear because they have slowly cultivated interior lives filled with faith, connection, and love. I want to be like these people. Today, I am a beginner, an aspiring apprentice. If you are interested and you’re willing to give this a try, I’ll be out in the yard. The wind is blowing and the leaves are falling again. Let’s rake together.
— Josh VonGunten
