Show Notes
In this episode of Peaceable and Kind, Derek Vreeland continues exploring what it means to be a hybrid creature, both body and soul. While the previous episode focused on practices for the body, this episode turns inward to the soul. We are physical creatures, but what we see in the mirror is not all that we are. We are also spiritual beings with the capacity to commune with our Creator.
Drawing from Romans 8 and Eugene Peterson, Derek describes Christian spirituality as an embodied experience of life in the Holy Spirit. Our culture can reduce us to what we produce, accomplish, and project to others, but Christian spirituality reminds us that there is more to us than usefulness and reputation. We have an interior life that requires our attention.
Derek then explores four practices for tending to the soul: silence, stillness, Sabbath, and Scripture reading. These practices help clear away the noise, motion, misplaced identities, and competing stories that can shape our interior lives. Ultimately, each is a form of prayer because prayer is more than the words we speak to God. Prayer includes the practices through which we intentionally attend to the presence of God.
Key Takeaways
Human beings are hybrid creatures, both physical and spiritual.
Christian spirituality is an embodied experience of life in the Holy Spirit.
We are more than our usefulness, productivity, appearance, and reputation.
Our interior life can easily be neglected in a culture focused on performance.
Silence prevents noise from cluttering our souls.
Stillness interrupts the constant motion that allows us to ignore our souls.
Sabbath helps prevent us from confusing who we are with what we accomplish.
Scripture keeps us rooted in God’s story rather than allowing competing stories to shape us.
Narrative is a way of knowing ourselves, one another, and God.
Jesus is the central character of the biblical story, a story upon which we can build our lives.
Silence, stillness, Sabbath, and Scripture reading are all forms of prayer that help us attend to God’s presence.
Books Mentioned
Eat This Book — Eugene Peterson
The Deeply Formed Life — Rich Villodas
Scriptures Mentioned
Romans 8:5–6
Genesis 2:7
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Transcript
Welcome back to another Episode of Peaceable and Kind. I am your host, Derek Vreeland. Glad you have joined me. If you are new to Peaceable and Kind, welcome. Maybe you have found our podcast from a friend. Maybe it was something I posted on social media.
Maybe you’ve read one of my books. Whatever has brought you here, I am glad that you’ve joined me. for this episode. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe to Peaceable and Kind wherever you’re listening to this episode. And also leave us a rating. Or a review that helps others find what we’re doing here at Peaceable and Kind. And on this episode, we’re going to talk about spirituality. So we are committed to sow seeds of peaceableness and kindness in our world.
A world that is filled with acrimony, with antagonisms, with division and anger and turmoil. We want to empower you. We want to equip you with ways in which you can become a peaceable person and sow seeds of peace and kindness in your world. And so today’s topic are the what I have found to be the core practices for our souls that really drive the peace of God deep within our hearts.
And before we jump into today’s episode, let me give you a little bit of a life update. As you know, I am writing a new book, Recovering Hypocrites. discarding image management for wholehearted integrity. So I’ve been talking about this on the podcast. If you follow me on social media, you know this is happening. And as a Vreeland, let me just say that we are obsessive by nature So I like to call my grandchildren little obsessive vrelin frecozoids because they have inherited this obsessive trait.
And so this book, Recovering Hypocrites, I’m obsessed with it. I’m thinking about it all the time. I wake up in the morning thinking about it. I got on my laptop. Last night at 10 p. m. which is late for me. I go to bed early. But I got on my laptop, 10 p.m. because I was reading a book, and I’m like, oh, this is gold. Gold, Jerry, gold.
So I had to get on my laptop and and add some thoughts into a chapter. But yeah, uh night, day, I’m just thinking about this book all the time when Jenny and I are in the pool. Sometimes I grab my phone while we’re in the pool and I’m just thumbing in thoughts about this book. So very excited about the book. It’s not about hypocrisy per se. The book is about the harmony of being and doing, which is at the heart of the virtue tradition. And so you can go back to previous episodes and hear me talking about virtue.
I have spent the last couple years studying, reading, researching, writing. about the virtue tradition. And I think it’s what we need for our spiritual formation, for our character formation. There was a time in which character mattered, and I see it mattering very, very little. So when people talk about the moral collapse or the moral decay of uh Western civilization, of American society.
I uh join in their critique, but not as a bandwagoner. I have been concerned about moral decay, particularly in the church, for over 20 years My doctoral dissertation, which I wrote 20 years ago in 2007 , I explored some of the leadership failures, the moral failures.
among Pentecostal charismatic leaders and and talked about in that dissertation uh what they can do to to grow in spiritual formation, spiritual transformation. So for 20 years, I have been very concerned that particularly the church in America has experienced moral decline. But I don’t even know if decline is the right word because I think we’ve always been a mess in recovering hypocrites in the first chapter.
I start by just announcing my own hypocrisy. Like I’m a recovering hypocrite too. But at least there was a value for character 20 years ago that I just don’t see as much today. So I’ve spent the last couple years reading about the virtue tradition, and now I’m writing a book around it.
And and and hypocrisy is the is the the framework. Um, there’s a lot of reasons why I think we need to grow as virtuous people and hypocrisy, religious hypocrisy is just one. So here I am rambling around about this new book because I am obsessed. Super excited that it’ll come out next fall, but there’s more I have said in my, I think, Instagram stories that I’ve been working on three different writing projects this summer, and it’s true.
I’ve been working on recovering hypocrites during the summer. But in an interview on the Created in the Image of God podcast, this podcast was released last month in August. I announced that I am the project editor for NAV Press for a new study Bible, a new devotional Bible that they are working on.
I’m the project editor for the Message Men’s Devotional Bible. So you know I love the message. My three Bible studies were built around the message. And Nav has put out a wonderful, beautiful women’s devotional Bible, highly recommended. Also a really, really helpful student devotional Bible.
And next up is they want to uh produce and publish a men ‘s devotional Bible using the message. And so they’d reached out to me, oh man, maybe like oh, February or early spring this year, and asked if I want to serve as the project editor. So we have a writing team and uh of some really talented men, uh good pastors and thinkers and writers.
And so this writing team is going to write 300 to 350 devotionals. And I essentially, as the project editor, give it the first read. So I’m doing the back and forth with our writing team. Right now in my inbox, I have uh emails from two writers that tomorrow on my day off, I get to work through what they’re writing. So there is uh a lot happening with that.
I’m very excited, but that’s not it. That was just writing project number two. Writing project number three is a holy convergence. Seven Traditions Shaping One Church. So this summer I’ve been developing a small group experience around the seven traditions. shaping our church.
And so I wrote a reader’s guide. It’s like, I don’t know, 30,000 words, about 100 pages. And it has the teaching material, discussion questions. And that was a passion project I was also working on. uh this summer, but we just started. We have an online group that meets and two in person just started this week.
It’s going great. And If you want to join the online discussion group, there is time , you can still join us. I just did the introduction this week Uh starting next week, we’ll jump into the actual seven traditions.
So if you reach out to me and say, hey, I want to be a part of the Tuesday night online group. Just reach out to me. I’ll send you a Zoom link. You can still join. Well, that really wasn’t supposed to be a commercial. I just want to talk about things I’m thinking about. Um, and that is uh juggling all these writing projects.
But the Holy Convergence, that’s done. I’ve finished that. Um recovering hypocrites in the the message men’s devotional bible I’m still working on. All right, well, I said we were going to talk about spirituality, so let’s do it. And I want to share a little bit about my prayer life.
I think for Christian spirituality, we we can’t talk about spirituality and not talk about prayer. And so before I start Praying, at least in a technical sense, I make three confessions. Actually, what I do is once I sit to pray And I got my daily office lectionary.
I got a pen. I got my Bible. And I got a cup of coffee. Gotta have coffee for morning prayer. Faith without coffee is dead. If you’re not a coffee drinker, uh well you can just go ahead and repent right now and start drinking coffee. It’s God’s gift to us. So when I sit down With that warm cup of coffee, Bible, lectionary, and a pen.
I take a deep breath And then I make a confession, take a second deep breath, second confession, then I take a third deep breath. And make a confession. And the third confession is this: I am a hybrid creature. Now, I I say that right out loud, and it’s it’s the third confession.
So I’ve already taken three deep breaths. And I think deep breathing helps to calm us. For me, it does. Calms my mind, calms my heart. And so when I take that deep breath and slowly exhale, I can really feel myself slowing down And so the third confession again is I am a hybrid creature.
Each of my three confessions is then followed by a negation. So after saying I am a hybrid creature, I then say, I am not all physicality. I am spirituality with the capacity to commune with my Creator. Now, I came up with those words years ago, and there’s this playful alliteration with capacity, commune, creator.
But each of my three confessions, um, it has an affirmation, negation, and another affirmation. And these are three things that I just want to give attention to. I’ll talk about the other two confessions later, but in terms of A discussion of spirituality. I want to emphasize this. We are hybrid creatures. I want to remind myself, before I begin prayer formally.
That I’m not all body. I’m body and soul. I’m not all physicality. Because, I mean, for me I tend to focus a lot on my physical body, and I would imagine you do too, right? So I’m like, well, how does my body feel today And most mornings I wake up, my body does not feel good.
I don’t know what happened turning 50 years old. I’m 52 now, but ever turned 50. Like I wake up, I don’t feel energized. So, you know, I focus on my body. How how does my body feel today? Is that a new ache? Oh man, ow, what is that in my lower back? You know, these things happen as you get older.
Um, I’m just constantly checking in with my emotional life. I spent too many years suppressing negative emotions. So I’m often kind of feeling things out like How does my body feel? How am I feeling emotionally? I mean, I’m concentrating on what I’m eating. Am I eating the right things? Which often I’m not. Need better habits in that regard. Uh but am I well hydrated?
Am I drinking water? How’s my exercise routine? I mean What does my body look like in the mirror? Do I need to trim my beard? You know, so I need before prayer a reminder. That what I see in the mirror is not all that I am.
I’m not just a body. I am body and soul. I am physicality and spirituality And I know that word spirituality can mean different things to different people. I mean, it’s pretty vague. But from a Christian perspective, spirituality is a human life lived in a way that is intertwined with the Holy Spirit.
It’s the life in the spirit. I think that’s a good way to speak of Christian spirituality. It’s the lived experience of life in the spirit. Hey friends, I want to pause this episode for just a moment to let you know that Resurrection, 8 Lessons on How God Restores Us, the third and final book in the God in the Neighborhood Bible study. study series is out now.
Go to the show notes for ordering information. And so Paul beautifully describes this in Romans chapter 8. This is verses five and six. Paul writes, For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit. set their minds on the things of the spirit.
To set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the spirit is life and peace. So but first let’s be clear here what Paul is doing. When he uses the word flesh, he’s not using the word for body. The Greek word for body is soma, he uses the word sarks. So flesh here is Talking about a way of living according to the dictates of broken humanity that is sick with sin That’s what the flesh is.
To live according to the flesh is to live according to the standards of broken humanity. And he contrasts this with what I believe Christian spirituality is, and that is living according to the spirit, living according to the new identity. We have been given as children of God, regenerated, born again by God the Holy Spirit. So for me to claim that I am spirituality, again, it’s not to deny my physicality. Again, the confession, you know, I am a hybrid creature, I am not all physicality. Right.
So I’m not trying to deny my physicality, but I do want to focus my attention on the fact that I am more than a body. That eats and sleeps and interacts with the physical world. I’m also a living soul created by God to encounter an unseen world. I think Eugene Peterson has been really good over the years in what he says about spirituality because I think for Peterson, spirituality was always embodied.
It wasn’t a matter of focusing on our souls to the neglect of our body. I just spent a whole podcast episode talking about practices for your body. I think that’s important. But there are also practices for the soul. And so I love what Peterson says in the little book, Eat This Book. He says, spirituality means, among other things, taking ourselves seriously.
And that’s what I’m doing with my confession before prayer. Taking ourselves seriously Taking for account that we have a soul, that we are a soul, that we are a hybrid creature, body and soul. Anyway, back to Peterson He says, spirituality means taking ourselves seriously. It means going against the cultural stream in which we are increasingly trivialized to the menial status of producers.
performers, constantly depersonalized behind the labels of our degrees or our salaries Now that’s classic Peterson. You know, he for example I heard Peterson one time at a conference say he doesn’t like the adjective dysfunctional. um in like talking about dysfunctional relationships or dysfunctional families.
He said he doesn’t like the word dysfunctional because it’s it depersonalizes us. So when he is talking about spirituality taking ourselves seriously, he’s saying we’re more than, you know, the degrees at the end of our name, if you have multiple degrees or your job or your salary or your zip code or your neighborhood.
We’re we’re more than that. And Peterson goes on, but there is far more to us than our usefulness and our reputation, where we’ve been and who we know. There is a unique Eternal image of God me, a vigorous assertion of personal dignity is foundational to spirituality So spirituality doesn’t make us less human, makes us more human God created us as human beings from the dust of the earth and the breath of heaven, from things that are seen and things that are unseen And God designed these two dimensions of our humanity to live in harmony, our bodies and souls.
We need an active body and an active soul to be a full human being. If your soul is no longer active , If your soul is somehow divided from your body, we call that experience death. We were created to have these active bodies and active souls where doing and being dance together as we cobble together a life.
So we have our external life, and we’ve talked about that, practices for the body, things that we do. We have our external life. And you know, that’s focused on our appearance, our our actions, our words, our deeds, all these things that are visible to other people. But we also have an interior life. And our soul belongs to that.
It’s a life hidden beneath the skin. Now it’s equally real, but it’s often ignored There are some people that just sequester their soul. They completely ignore their interior life.
And it’s easy to do that because we live in a world that rewards bodies that can get things done when we produce or perform, like Peterson said. But God fashioned humanity, both body and soul, that our bodies and soul would be in rhythm with one another, harmonized in a in a beautiful harmony.
Now, I use the word soul, which throughout the scriptures is used differently, but when I talk about soul, I’m thinking about our soul as that which gives Form to our body. So our body and soul is inherently connected The soul is what gives animation to our bodies. So just as we need practices for our bodies, we also need practices for our soul. Now, I want to talk about four key practices, and these key practices are nothing new, particularly if you spent time Exploring spiritual formation, nothing new here.
But these are the four that I think are the most important. Four practices for the soul. And they’re all S’s. So maybe you can remember them. You know, I like a little alliteration, but here they are. Four practices for the soul.
They are silence Stillness, Sabbath, and scripture reading. And if you followed me for any amount of time, you are not surprised by any of those. These are four practices for the soul that I have emphasized in my life to a higher degree or a lesser degree for 25 years. Silence, stillness, sabbath, and scripture reading.
Let me say a little bit about each one. Let’s start with silence. I remember Dallas Willard years ago saying, when you practice silence and solitude, the first thing you will recognize is you have a soul. Remember listening to that lecture. I listened to that lecture on cassette tape, I don’t know, twenty, twenty-five years ago. It still sticks with me. If you practice silence and solitude, the first thing you’ll recognize is you have the soul.
We need silence for our soul to expand. We need silence to prevent noise from cluttering our souls. Because we live in a noisy world. And listen, I am not exempt from my own teaching.
I still have to battle and fight for silence because I like input. I am listening to podcasts and music and YouTube videos as much as anybody. But I recognize the value of silence. And some people get freaked out by silence. Because in recognizing that you have a soul, in recognizing you have an internal life, an interior life, it can really freak you out.
I know that firsthand. I’ve experienced that and people I have pastored over the years. Where they begin to practice silence. It’s hard and it can be scary to just be left with your thoughts, to be left with damaged emotions. Um one of the things I think is helpful when you’re practicing silence is to have uh pen and paper near.
I mean, I know everybody’s going to their phones and everything’s digital now. And I get that and, you know, I’m on my phone as much as anybody. But I think when it comes to spiritual practices, um, we need to put our phones away. Because it’s just I’m just so easily distracted by my phone. So in any of these practices of the soul, I try to do it without my phone for the most part. So yeah, you can jot it in the notes of your phone.
But I think it’s better to have pen and paper uh near you and when you’re sitting in silence, whatever’s troubling you, just jot it down. ‘Cause some people will be in silence and they’ll be in there twenty seconds and then all these memories or thoughts or Anxieties float to the surface. So there is a there is a process there.
But let me encourage you to practice silence, to carve out moments of silence, even if it’s just a couple minutes I think you can go on retreats to practice silence. I know if you are a mom with young kids, silence is extremely difficult. But even if it’s a few minutes a day, I think you’ll see value. So with silence comes the second practice, and that’s stillness.
We need practices of stillness to prevent constant motion for making it easy to ignore our souls Sometimes we can ignore our soul simply because we’re staying busy. Now, in practices for the body, I talk about keeping your body in motion.
And we need that because I think most of us live a pretty sedimentary lifestyle. So we need our bodies moving. But our bodies also need rest Constant activity, that can become a temptation for us simply to ignore what’s happening on the inside of us. You know, John Mark Comer wrote the book.
uh the ruthless elimination of hurry. And if we are going to advance in spiritual formation and become more like Jesus, we have to eliminate hurry. We have to slow the pace of our life down And to me, silence and stillness goes together. You can’t just be silent and keep your body moving.
You can’t slow your body into stillness and then let your mind be cluttered with noise. So these first two really go hand in hand, but we need stillness. The third practice is is the practice of Sabbath. Sabbath is an ancient Jewish tradition, which starts sundown on Friday till sundown on Saturday.
That’s the traditional Jewish Sabbath. And I know some Christians that that practice that, but for me, the tradition and practice of Sabbath is having a twenty-four-hour period where you are not working, not doing your normal work. So for me, Friday is a day of Sabbath rest.
And I think we need this practice for our souls because Sabbath prevents us from misidentifying our souls. Because if you struggle with With being a workaholic, which I can be that way, I just open this episode by telling you three writing projects that I’m working on on top of serving as a pastor.
So I tend to be a workaholic. I tend to take on too much, but I’ve learned, for example, small habits like so Friday is Sabbath rest for me. Now it’ll start with a long run or a long bike ride, and that’s a whole different story. Um But Sabbath means I’m not doing my normal work. So on Fridays, I won’t do pastoral work.
I don’t set appointments. I don’t answer emails, phone calls. I take a 24-hour break. My friend Rich Velodis writes in uh his first book, The Deeply Formed Life, Sabbath is not just resting from making things. It’s resting from the need to make something of ourselves. Oh man.
I mean, hello. When I first read that, I was like, Rich. Bro, you are speaking directly to me. You know, Rich has become a friend over the years, and he’s a voice that I really, really respect. And there’s a number of things I’ve learned from Ridge, and this is one of them. That Sabbath is not just this rest from from making things resting from your work.
It’s a rest from the need to make something of ourselves You know, it it it speaks to me because I think I I still fall into those traps of of trying to make myself something that I’m not. Into a false self. And Sabbath is a reminder that, uh, yeah, I don’t need to do that.
It’s not important. And then the fourth and final practice is scripture reading. We need scripture reading to prevent our souls from being shaped by other stories. I am a Bible lover, as you know, and I just never want to be very far from the story of Scripture.
I just want my life Intertwined with this holy text. And the spiritual practice of scripture reading as a practice for your soul is reading not necessarily for information, but for formation, that we would be formed by the story of Scripture.
I think we cannot underestimate the power of Scripture as a narrative. Because narrative Is a way of knowing. By narrative, I mean story. Narrative is a way of knowing.
Story is a true epistemology. It’s it’s how we it’s how we know ourselves, right? So if I meet you for the first time, I’m gonna ask you, tell me your story. When you tell me your story, you are telling me what you know of yourself, your real self, who you really are. When I meet someone for the first time, I don’t say, now what color are your eyes? How tall are you?
How much you weigh? I mean, I can get facts about you, but just the facts doesn’t tell me who you are. The stories you tell about yourself shows you and other people what you know about yourself. So we know ourselves. through story, through narrative. It’s how we know each other, and it’s how we know God.
We know God because God has chosen to reveal the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit to us. And we know God primarily through story and sacrament There’s other things that there are things to learn about God from nature and creation, but primarily in the church, we know God through story and sacrament and the scriptures.
The Old Testament and New Testament are given to us as a story. The Bible is telling one Cohesive story from creation to new creation, from Genesis to Revelation. Now there’s different books of the Bible. And there are different books that are different kinds of literature. So the Bible itself is not a book.
The Bible is a collection of books. but it’s telling one story, and Jesus is the main character. The reason that we invest ourselves in reading the story is to get to know Jesus, who shows us what God is like So Jesus is the main character of the story. But the story told in Scripture, it is. It is a meta-narrative. It’s a framing story. It’s the kind of story that we can build our lives on. And regular scripture reading.
keeps us close to the story of God. And it’s a it’s a fascinating story. It’s a weird story. There’s times That I find myself in in the Old Testament, and it just is weird. Weird things are happening, weird things are done. There’s a lot of weirdness in the story. But to me, the weirdness is what is what makes it So inviting and so interesting.
So we’re not building our lives on individual verses that we pull out and try to apply to our lives. Rather, Scripture is given to us as this framing story with Jesus as the main character, and as a story that we can have our lives shaped by. And so by regular scripture reading, we keep our souls from being shaped by other stories.
Because if you don’t have a framing narrative, if you don’t have a story shaping your life, let me tell you what There are plenty of other people and groups that are happy to give you a story. Most often there is political stories, right? Or nationalistic stories. There’s lots of stories. But for our souls to flourish and for us to become all that God has called us to be, we need to be shaped by this story.
of love and redemption and failure and new creation. It’s all made possible because of Jesus And so these four practices, silence, stillness, Sabbath, and Scripture, are really all forms of prayer. You know, that’s where I started saying, hey, if we’re going to talk about Christian spirituality, we’ve got to talk about prayer.
But all four of these are a kind of prayer. Prayer is not just about the words we speak when addressing God. Prayer is about all of these activities that we do that cause us to attend to the presence of God. That’s what prayer is about. Prayer is about Being with God.
Prayers about being intentionally in the presence of God, who is presence itself. So silence brings us into the presence of God if we can keep the noise out.
That’s why you gotta turn your phone off or put it on silent, do not disturb. Stillness lets us encounter God if we can slow down. Gotta slow down. Sabbath gives us space to feel the presence of God. And we can practice that if we clear out our calendar.
If you do not plan for a Sabbath rest once a week, your calendar will get filled up with activity. And by the way, Sabbath doesn’t need to be legalistic. I mean, I have my habits for my Friday Sabbath, but there’s sometimes work happens in there, and that’s okay. And then finally, scripture reading focuses our minds on the story of God inspired by the Holy Spirit of God, who is the presence of God on earth.
So when we talk about encountering, experiencing, feeling the presence of God, we’re talking about an encounter with God, the Holy Spirit. The same spirit that inspired the holy text is the same spirit we encounter. And this, my friends, is the essence of Christian spirituality. Well, that’s probably enough for one episode.
Take one of these four practices and go do it. You know, don’t be like one who is a hearer of the word only. Be a doer of the word. Pick one of these four practices, either silence, stillness, sabbath, or scripture reading. Just pick one. And say for the next week, I’m going to give real attention to one of these four practices.
And then watch how your soul will start to expand. Well, again, thank you for joining me for this episode. Go in peace and be kind.
This transcript was generated with AI and may contain errors.