Spiritual tinkering: good or bad?

We’ve been having a stimulating conversation at the campus ministry summer institute at Candler School of Theology about the nature of young adult spirituality. Part of the presentation described many millennial young adults as “spiritual tinkerers,” a phrase which had a slightly pejorative edge to it and rubbed some people in the room the wrong way. The implicit critique in this phrase is that you need to make up your mind whether you’re “in” or “out” instead of just dabbling. Are you going to submit to another person or institution’s authority completely or are you appropriating pieces of a thought-system for your own personal agenda? I know that I myself am definitely a spiritual tinkerer. I tinker in all sorts of things: fasting, taking Roman Catholic communion illegally, praying in other languages, using physical objects as prayer tools, walking labyrinths. And yet I don’t think I’m just being a navel-gazing, perpetually adolescent dilettante when I engage in these practices rather than just adopting a single tradition that I embrace completely. So I wanted to ponder what kind of tinkering is healthy and should be encouraged and what aspects of it do we need to call people away from when we’re discipling them.

Individualism is always bad. That’s the message that l was indoctrinated with in seminary. That’s our basic critique of the consumerist culture we’re surrounded by. The way to discredit somebody else’s theology is to show how individualistic it is. In this context, there is a distaste for the concept of spiritual practices “that work for me.” So narcissistic! So immature! So Oprah! Just like that Eat Pray Love crap. I wonder if it’s time to push back a little bit against the individualism-hating. Yes, we need to be taken up into a community that’s bigger than ourselves, but we also need to be engaged in practices that are entirely personal instead of just becoming cookie-cutter religious commodities. God has one song, but that song has many harmonic parts within it.

There is definitely a way in which individualism is the opposite of Christianity. As Augustine says, all sin emerges from the soul being “curved inward on itself.” The journey of Christian spirituality is very much a move away from isolated self-alienation through our incorporation into the body of Christ. It is a journey of learning to say us instead of me. I often don’t realize that what actually works better for me is what works for us. My spiritual journey involves the need to be walking with other people who pray with me, study with me, and confront me when I need to be confronted. It is in the context of raw Christian community that I move from a spirituality of doing things on my own that feel vaguely comfortable to a spirituality of uncomfortably earth-breaking, life-invigorating transformation.

At the same time, there is another way in which I actually should be pursuing “what works for me” instead of trying to find a one-size-fits-all “what works.” One of the subtle poisons within modern thought is the idea of the supremacy of the universal to the particular. Its greatest expression is the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant: that we should only do what it’s okay for everybody to do at the same time. This underlying presumption is endemic to the franchising nature of capitalism. Create products and experiences that work everywhere so that the world can become one giant strip mall chain retail monoculture that reflects these universal products and experiences. The best example of how this happens in Christian culture is the franchising of the wildly successful suburban evangelical megachurch in which there’s a single church-in-a-box to be exported for universal use in every possible cultural context: “seeker-friendly” though covertly theologically conservative worship services built around a charismatic alpha male “vision-caster” with an invisible lapel mic who encourages everyone to “join a small group” in every sermon.

I think it’s admirable that millennial “spiritual tinkerers” are cynical about the prospect of being sheep in a giant groupie stadium getting spoon-fed universal theological platitudes and talking points by the alpha male “vision-caster.” It’s not a problem to me for people to pursue their spirituality as “tinkerers” if the alternative to that is submitting to the cult of personality around the “vision-caster” with the invisible lapel mic. A positive way to interpret the phenomenon of spiritual tinkering is to see it as a hunger for a spirituality that is authentic and personal rather than a fake, commodified McSpirituality.

So what’s the problem with spiritual tinkering? I think it’s mostly a problem because it’s usually a ruse, something that I say I’m doing as an alternative to actually doing something: when I’m in love with the idea of being “spiritual but not religious” as an ideology, but I’m not actually pursuing spiritual practices with any degree of seriousness or commitment. Am I perpetually in the process of “trying out” spirituality or am I actually cultivating a personal daily rhythm of prayer with God’s help? If tinkering means that I don’t follow through and actually build any personal spiritual disciplines that become my life’s regular ritual, then it’s a problem. If it means that I’m drawing from an eclectic variety of Christian traditions without embracing and submitting myself unflinchingly to the institutional authority of one tradition, I can see how that’s offensive to a certain type of Christian (like the curmudgeons at First Things), but it’s precisely the kind of annoying ecumenism that United Methodists like me have always been all about and should stop being ashamed of.

My personal spiritual journey has involved a refinement of my prayer life over time as God has given me different elements to add onto it. Four years ago, God told me that I would fast on Mondays until suppertime. Right now, he is challenging me to add Thursdays. Two years ago, God gave me prayer beads and I started praying the Jesus prayer and the Lord’s prayer in Greek with them. In the time since then, I started memorizing the Hebrew for verses from the Psalms that God gave to me and added them to my prayer repertoire. I usually pray the best when I’m walking around. It’s also good for me to kneel on hard marble floors in Catholic cathedrals and let God remind me with a passage from 1 Corinthians 6 in Greek that my “body is for the Lord and the Lord for the body” rather than being a self-indulgent sack of flesh that I can gratify all day like a disgusting glutton.

The fact that my own esoteric, eclectic spiritual practice is not something that can or should be universalized as a “7 steps to Christian discipleship for every Christian” does not mean that I’m being a dilettante by “doing my own thing.” I truly believe that the Holy Spirit has engraved these practices into my heart. Just because I’m not doing something that God is telling every Christian to do in exactly the same way does not mean that my personal discipleship is not a genuine form of obedience. I cannot be myself anymore without fasting on Mondays (and perhaps Thursdays in the future). I’ve actually gotten physically ill the few times that I’ve had to deviate from my Monday fasts for whatever reason. It is who I am to fast on Mondays and pray in Greek and Hebrew touching my prayer beads while I’m walking around in the woods. My spiritual practices are way more definitive of who I am than silly superficial things like being a Duke basketball fan who likes Ethiopian food. I don’t think anyone else should do exactly the same thing I do, but that doesn’t mean that I’m just a wishy washy live-and-let-live cultural relativist liberal.

The way I’ve come to understand my spiritual journey is that God is using these practices to write the poem of my personal identity in Christ. As Ephesians 2:10 says (in my translation), “For we are his poetry, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.” I think God has a different poem that he wants to write into the heart of each student at Tulane and Loyola University. It won’t be my poem, but part of God’s use for my poem is to provide one source among the many eclectic sources of poetry for those whom I disciple. They’re not supposed to become identical bricks to put into a wall of “orthodoxy.” As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12, an eye isn’t supposed to be a hand or a foot. We are all different parts of the body of Christ; different parts need different nourishment. Each muscle in Jesus’ body has a different natural poetry though we share the same genome. God has one song, but he’s pulled together a very big orchestra to play it together. The flutes should not be expected to play the clarinets’ part, though they do need to be tuned to the same pitchfork so that they can harmonize. We need harmony rather than univocity; that is our tension as a body of Christ.

So I think it’s totally legitimate to be a spiritual tinkerer as long as you’re actually letting God shape you into the spiritual practices by which he is making you part of Jesus’ body and not just taking things out of the ancient rummage pile and putting them back. You can be eclectic without being flaky. Tinker away, but listen to the Spirit while you’re tinkering and whatever you are inspired to do, stick with it so God can write you into a poem that gives him glory.