Tony Jones is a an author, commentator, freelance theologian, and ecclesial gadfly. You can find his blog at blog.tonyj.net. Join Tony as he leads the Christian Spirituality cohort for the Doctor of Ministry program starting in June 2011. Click here for cohort description.

In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer writes,

“The subjects we teach are as large and complex as life, so our knowledge of them is always flawed and partial.”

That’s especially true when the subject is Christian spirituality and the teacher is me.

In fact, though I feel woefully inadequate to teach the spirituality of our faith to others, there’s nothing I’d rather teach. And that’s because the very subject itself is going to force me to examine the patterns of spirituality in my own life, to read books that I’ve not yet read — and re-read books that I’ve not yet fully absorbed — and to dive more deeply into the life of the Spirit.

Christian spirituality is one of those subjects that is at once profoundly simple and boundlessly complex. While there is a history and even a theology which can be taught, there is no formula, no list of axioms that illuminate it. It is, by its very nature, a journey. A journey for the teacher and the student.

Again, Parker Palmer,

“When I do not know myself, I cannot know who my students are. I will see them through a glass darkly, in the shadows of my own unexamined life—and when I cannot see them clearly, I cannot teach them well.”

So, as a teacher, I will have no choice but to lead an examined life as I prepare myself to teach on this most vulnerable subject.

And in that way, I’m not so unlike the pastor, who climbs into the pulpit every week knowing that he has not fully absorbed the text on which he is about to preach, who crosses the threshold into a hospital room knowing that her mind is unduly engaged with the mundane workings of her church rather than the dying parishioner lying in the bed before her.

But I suppose that’s why many of us enter vocational ministry, because without it, we might not challenge ourselves with the text, with the dying parishioner, with the vulnerable subject. But if we make it our job, well, then we’ve got no choice.

We are all, each of us, inadequate to the vocation to which we’ve been called. Every great mystic in the Christian tradition has known this, and embraced it. It’s why there is both comfort and solace in reading what they wrote. They remind us that others have walked this journey before. And, what I think they’re saying, is that there is no better journey to walk.

So, although I’ve accepting this daunting task of teaching a DMin cohort for Fuller starting in June, 2011, I know that my work begins much sooner. It begins now. For I must redouble my efforts to live an examined life so that I might be better able to lead a 3-year journey into the heart of Christian spirituality.