Soul Enterprise Growing through giving up

Author calls for self-denial as a pathway to God

The Way Up is Down: Becoming yourself by forgetting yourself, by Marlena Graves, (InterVarsityPress, 2020, 192 pp., $22 US)

At one level, The Way Up is Down is reminiscent of Richard Foster’s devotional classic Celebration of Discipline.

Both books contain multiple important spiritual truths and complex ideas that are not always easily digested in a single reading.

But Marlena Graves’ book combines calls for full surrender of self in pursuit of relationship with God with passionate social critique.

Graves is a writer, pastor, adjunct professor, and activist whose sometimes blunt and prophetic denunciations of injustice may not sit comfortably with all readers. Born into poverty and lived experience of racial oppression, she writes from a place of righteous anger.

Her life journey includes a commitment to living extremely modestly even while raising three daughters, in occupations as diverse as advocating for the rights of marginalized farm workers, teaching at a seminary, working for a non-profit and as a minister of pastoral care at her church.

She calls the reader to selfemptying and true humility. Fasting and prayer are key to relationship with God. Repentance is held up as an important spiritual task that involves learning not to judge anyone, a journey that she admits to still being on.

For her, true generosity requires not only counting ourselves dead to our possessions, but also being lavish in giving of time and having a commitment to “dismantling systems that induce poverty.”

In a chapter on gratitude and contentment, she asserts that “Hell is laser focusing on what we don’t have, refusing to take our eyes off of our deprivations.”

Only when we give up on having it our way and having an eye “solely accustomed to focusing on what’s wrong and what we don’t have” can we get past feelings of ingratitude and lack of contentment, she writes.

Giving it all up includes re- nouncing our society’s denial of the reality of death, and daily remem- bering that we have a date with death, she writes in a chapter en- titled Memento Mori (which is Latin for remember that you must die.)

Living the life Jesus commands “means remembrance of death will be part of the normal rhythm of our lives, as it should be,” she writes. Paradoxically, that recognition will allow for more joy in the little things. “Practicing memento mori trains us to take off our shoes on the holy ground of the daily Kairos moments. We slow down enough to notice them. And discover that our lives are full of them. Joy.” Graves’ voice is thoughtful and grounded in a mature spirituality that draws from numerous theological wells in both Western and Eastern Christianity. She is a rare author who speaks as easily about the importance of social justice as she does the meaning and practical implications of wholistic Christian piety. She gives credit to learnings from the Christian Reformed, Catholic, United Methodist and Eastern Orthodox traditions.

In the end, it all comes down to trust, she writes. “…Perfection is not possible in this life, though I do heartily believe we can come to a point where our lives are mostly characterized by a perfect peace because our mind is stayed on God and all that flows out from him.”

The pathway to this peaceful outlook is far from being either simple or easy. But for people who commit to the kenotic (selfemptying) life that she describes, “we will see glimpses of the kingdom now in the land of the living.” .