Hey there! A few pieces of housekeeping before we get to the writing. In the last two years and recent months, I had several new email subscribers from my blog address: jamiesampieriharper.com. I wanted you to know that I didn’t randomly add you to my email list. You subscribed to receive mailings from me. 😀 Thank you!
I haven’t decided if I will move my website to Substack yet, so this is where I am writing for now. I have so much content at my old place that I don’t want to lose it either. If you are new and enjoy conversation, reply and let me know what led you to subscribe!
I recently graduated from Friends University with a Master of Arts in Christian Spiritual Formation and Leadership.
Most people don’t know what that means and are curious about how I will use it. Here’s my summary:
I have studied and have a good understanding of what makes people grow and change. Spiritual formation thinks of transformation through the lenses of theology, philosophy, and psychology. Everyone everywhere is spiritually formed whether they believe in God or not. My degree focused on how Christians grow into Christlikeness, but I’ll discuss more on that later.
Here are twelve surprising things I learned while getting my master’s degree that may or may not have anything to do with formation, in no particular order, although most of them seem to bleed into one another.
I learned how to think.
I also learned how to think as I studied to receive a Bachelor of Civil Engineering degree, but that degree taught me how to think concretely and solve high-level problems. My master’s degree taught me how to think with an open and curious posture about people and relationships. People are not like math problems. Their questions need care rather than fixed solutions. Curiosity provides care.
Reading helps me join the conversation.
See #3.
I write to know, to tell myself what is true, and to participate.
As an amateur writer, I wrote words from personal experience to know something. This is one reason I write. I also write to tell myself what is true when I feel out of sorts.
While getting my master’s degree, I had to write numerous papers and read even more than I wrote. We wrote both academic papers and reflection papers. Reflection papers were easier to write, but writing my academic papers taught me to join the conversation that authors have already begun. I always thought books were about knowing, learning, and enjoying, but I realize they are also about participating.
Teaching, writing, and conversing about a topic you already live, know, or embody is easier.
It’s hard to communicate something you haven’t learned, not just in your head but also in your heart. Often we know something in our heads that we haven’t learned to live in our hearts. We are a knowledge-based society, especially in the Christian world. We think disseminating information makes disciples, but it doesn’t. Living and practicing what we know make us disciples. Performative Christianity makes us think that knowing or learning equals good discipleship. Spotting words in a book that you’ve already lived gives them more weight or authority, and listeners can tell when a speaker teaches from this experiential weight.
I need more time to process information when it’s new to me, but I can process things faster than I think when the material is familiar or lived.
Being a slow processor, I often thought writing a paper immediately after learning a subject would make me spin my wheels. But this was not true if the material had been previously lived or digested. After learning it, digesting the material into writing often produced confidence that I deeply knew the material.
You can’t fake it until you make it, but you can take on a new spiritual practice that shapes you toward who or what you want to become.
What you choose to practice shapes who you become. Maybe you want to be a better writer, so you write a lot. But there are hidden ways of being a better writer. Reading. Paying attention. Noticing. Doing nothing or being still. These things are true of the spiritual life too.
When I am reading, the information that resonates is what I’ve experienced or want to be true of me.
Character matters. To become something, we must pay attention to who and what we want to become. What I say better match what I do!
Formation happens whenever I reflect on why something hits me a certain way.
We used to have to do quote journals when we read. We also had to post three quotes for our classmates and elaborate on one. One teacher made us write about every quote we chose. They were doing this because reflection moves things from the head to the heart, making transformation easier. This helped me learn that reading is a conversation where my voice is just as important as the author’s. It also helped me to value how others are being shaped. Communal transformation shapes the individual and vice versa.
Transformation occurs in the body, the mind, and the soul.
Just learning something doesn’t produce change. It takes the head, the heart, and the gut. If you are an enneagram person, you must pay close attention to how all the numbers bring themselves to the world. The way they move and have their being is essential to you, too, so don’t discount other numbers because you don’t function the same way! Pay attention so that you can learn from all the numbers. It’s like what Paul said about the body of Christ with many members. We’re all hella important.
Reading and listening to podcasts feeds my creativity.
They feed my creativity because I am part of a long-running conversation and stimulate my mind to interaction and synthesis.
Two other things feed creativity: silence and time with Jesus. I may be hanging out with Jesus when he drops an idea into my mind.
The more I write from this place of lived experience meeting information, the more confidently I write.
Just like #4, writing and speaking are more authoritative to both the listener and the speaker (or writer).
All of life is the spiritual life, but often we over-spiritualize our lives, making us live untrue lives.
This often produces a performative Christianity because we misunderstand the weight of the physical world on our psyches. We can’t cast off the body; we must learn how to live in, function in, and accept what it wants to teach us. Yes, even Christians. 😀
In the comments, let me know which ones resonate with you!