Navigating Anxiety, Therapy, and Spiritual Formation—Balancing Mental, Emotional, & Spiritual Health with John Mark Comer
Episode Notes
Has anxiety ever made it hard for you to connect with God? Do you love God but sometimes struggle with church?
Today's episode is such a breath of fresh air. I had the pleasure of diving into a deep, insightful conversation with New York Times bestselling author John Mark Comer. We explore the powerful intersection of mental, emotional, and spiritual health, uncovering how these aspects work together to create a whole, integrated person.
Here’s what we cover:
1. Misconceptions in the church about true discipleship
2. The benefits and limits of therapy for personal growth
3. What to do when anxiety or past trauma make it hard to engage spiritual practices
4. John Mark’s candid experiences with therapy and what he’s learned
5. The two essential spiritual practices for holistic well-being
6. Our thoughts on the overlapping circles of emotional & spiritual maturity
Resources:
- Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus. Become like him. Do as he did. by John Mark Comer
- Other books by John Mark Comer
- The Practicing the Way nonprofit
- Dr. Alison Cook with John Mark Comer on the Rule of Life Podcast
- The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith after Freud by Philip Rieff
- Freya India’s substack
- Wayfaring by Dr. Warren Kinghorn
- Episode 113: A New Vision of Human Flourishing—A Christian Approach to Mental Health with Duke University Psychiatrist & Theologian Warren Kinghorn
- I Shouldn’t Feel This Way by Dr. Alison Cook
If you liked this, you’ll love:
- Episode 67: The Link Between Faith & Emotional Healing—Gen Z, College Life, & A Hidden Search for Meaning with Cindy Gao
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Music by Andy Luiten/Sound editing by Kelly Kramarik
© 2024 Alison Cook. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Please do not copy or share the contents of this webpage without permission from the author. While Dr. Cook is a counselor, the content of this podcast and any of the products provided by Dr. Cook are not specific counseling advice nor are they a substitute for individual counseling. The content and products provided on this podcast are for informational purposes only.
Transcript:
Alison Cook: Hey everyone, and welcome back to this week's episode of The Best of You Podcast. I am so thrilled you're here today as we round out this series on “Culture and Mental Health” with a guest who is likely familiar to you. My conversation today is with John Mark Comer, the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Practicing the Way, and today's conversation is a fascinating deep dive into these overlapping circles of spiritual formation and mental health.
John Mark has such an interest in the realm of psychology and really sees it as integral to our overall goal of spiritual formation and being made into the likeness of Christ. What he lays out in Practicing the Way is such a nuanced, robust, rich vision of what it means to be formed into the likeness of Jesus.
I loved this conversation. Toward the end, he asked me about a theory he's working on that gets at the overlapping circles of emotional health and spiritual health. It's a fascinating riff there, right at the end of the conversation. We could have kept going for hours. We had to stop because of time, but it was such a fun back and forth, a deep dive into this work of what it means to become a whole person, being formed by a God who loves us and who longs to be invited into deeper and deeper facets of our lives and truly transform us from the inside out.
John Mark Comer is the New York Times bestselling author of Practicing the Way, Live No Lies, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, and four previous books. He's also the founder and teacher of Practicing the Way, which is a nonprofit dedicated to integrating spiritual formation into your church or small group.
Prior to starting Practicing the Way, he spent almost 20 years pastoring Bridgetown church in Portland, Oregon, and working out discipleship to Jesus in the post-Christian West. Please enjoy my conversation with John Mark Comer. I can't recommend this book, Practicing the Way, enough to you and to your church communities if you're longing for a richer, more holistic, deeper understanding of what it means to be apprenticed to the person of Jesus.
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Alison Cook: I really want to go on record saying how much I immersed myself in Practicing the Way. I mentioned to you before we started recording that I can sometimes go into books specifically about spiritual formation with a part of me that wonders, “Are they going to spiritualize everything?”
I could sink into this book. There was something about it that I trusted because you're bringing the whole body into it. And that allowed me to really ping off of these overlaps between what a Christian psychologist does and what spiritual formation is.
And it's not because John Mark, you're necessarily veering into the realm of psychology specifically, but more because I can tell in the way you're so well read in these ways, there's a real integrated quality to this book all the way through. It was really fun for me to read this beautiful book. It’s so loving and so needed and I appreciated it so much. I want to thank you for that.
John Mark Comer: Oh, that is my honor, and that means a lot coming from someone like you. I hold you in great regard.
Alison Cook: We're so thrilled to have you on the podcast today. I want to anchor our conversation. I thought it was fascinating how you describe what it means to apprentice to Jesus in such a robust way. A little bit into the book, you described three of the bad strategies, or the three myths of modern day discipleship that really rang true. It’s part of why my antenna goes up with this idea.
You talk about willpower, you talk about more Bible study being the cure for all things. You talk about the magical zap of the wand, the spiritual bypassing that we talk about all the time on the podcast as being part of the problem. So I want to set that aside for a second for the listener to recognize, that's not where you're going with this.
How do you think about what it means to apprentice to Jesus and how is it different from what a lot of us are getting taught or seeing modeled in the church?
John Mark Comer: Yeah, pretty much all words change meaning over time. Often, we're using the same word in a conversation with another person, but we mean something totally different. Discipleship is one of those words that means different things to different people. And there's a few reasons that I prefer an alternate translation of the Greek word, which is mathetes, or the Hebrew word talmid.
One is because I think it's a better translation of the original language. So a number of Greek scholars, who are much more intelligent than I am, would all argue that, this Hebrew talmid, or Greek mathetes, which is the word that is translated “disciple” in most English translations of the Bible, can be translated as disciple, or as follower, or as student.
The word most literally means disciple, learner, but we don't translate it that way because the ancient near Eastern model of education was so vastly different from the modern Western model of education. A number of scholars think that our English word “apprentice” is the best kind of analog we have to the original language because it taps into a model of learning that is relational.
You can't apprentice under a book, you can't apprentice through an online course; you have to apprentice under a master. He has to or she has to accept you, and you have to be with them. I'm sure you did that after you completed your degree–you have your advisor or whatever. The language used in psychology is a relational process. It's holistic.
In the ancient world, apprenticeship isn't about head knowledge, it's about skill. It's about what we would call character–who you are as a person. It's a long process. It's not necessarily linear. You may follow some kind of curriculum, but it's not like working through the chapters in a textbook. It's this kind of iterative process. It's very unique to the learner, beginning where they began and leading them forward.
So one reason I call it apprenticeship is, I think that along with a lot of other people, that's the best English word we have for what Jesus means by if anyone would be my mathetes–my disciple, my apprentice.
The other reason I use it is because I think a lot of people grossly misunderstand what discipleship to Jesus is. We take this ancient concept, we tear it out of its historical context, and we import into it modern day meanings. They may be really good things, and I name in the book a few of what I think are common misconceptions. Maybe that's too strong of a language.
A lot of people, by “discipleship”, mean one-on-one mentorship, where a younger Christian would meet with an older Christian on a weekly basis. Beautiful thing. But I don't call that discipleship, I would call that mentorship, which is a good and necessary thing.
Some people mean in-depth, inductive Bible study, where you get together with that mentor or group of people and you do in-depth biblical research. Somebody criticized the vicar of our church recently saying, why is our church so weak on discipleship? And when he began to press them saying, what do you want more of? What is it you feel that we're not doing? And they basically said we don't have small group Bible studies. There aren't in-depth, small group studies. So in their mind, small group Bible studies and discipleship were synonyms.
And then for other people, discipleship is like leadership development. So Jesus had the 12, he's raising up 12, who are you raising up? And you get the Amway model of discipleship. Those are all good things that all have a good and necessary place in spiritual life. But I don't think that's what Jesus means when he says, “come and be my disciple”.
Discipleship was a part of Jesus' world. It was the pinnacle of the first century Jewish educational system, which began with our equivalent of elementary school, where you would study the Torah off the side of the synagogue, and then most people would finish their education by about 12 or 13.
Then they would apprentice in the family business or help run the family farm. A small number of people would go on to a second level of education called the house of learning, where they would study the entirety of the Hebrew Bible, or what we call the Old Testament, under a scholar or a scribe or a rabbi. And that was very prestigious.
It was sadly for men only in that patriarchal culture. And it would normally end by about 15 or 16 years old, but then only the best of the best. So this would be our equivalent of people that get into Harvard on a full ride scholarship. Only the best of the best would qualify to become a talmid or a disciple or an apprentice of a rabbi.
Rabbis were like the rock stars of first century Jewish culture. Very hard for us to imagine. We think of pastors as nerdy or whatever, but man, rabbis were all that back in the day. Rabbis would regularly take a small coterie of disciples of apprentices, maybe two or three, maybe six, maybe 12, maybe 70. They would have followers that would literally follow them around.
It was not like you would attend class Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and you would apprentice under them. Apprenticeship in that culture essentially meant you had three goals. If you made it into an apprenticeship program under a rabbi, your first goal was to be with him. You'd leave your family, you'd leave your friends, you'd leave your job, and you would literally follow. It wasn't a metaphor–you would literally follow your rabbi around.
Your second goal was to become like him. You wanted to be formed into the kind of person who was like your master. So this is 2000 years before radical individualism. That's not how people are thinking. That's not the highest value in that culture. You wanted to literally talk and adopt the mannerisms of not the theology and ethics, but the behavioral ways of being of your master, because you saw them as this great luminary, not of mind, but of life and heart. You wanted to embody something of what they embody.
And then third, your goal was to eventually do what they did. You don't call it apprenticeship in psychology, but if you're training under an advisor or whatever, I know there's a period there where you have somebody watching you and watching recordings of your sessions. What's the name for that?
Alison Cook: It's exactly like what you're saying. It's your trainer. It's your thesis advisor. There are all sorts of names for it, but they're exact. And it's terrifying. They're watching you to see if you are ready and then they're going to entrust you. I think about those early years after going through years of training when I saw my first clients, and they're watching your every move and it's terrifying. Oh my.
John Mark Comer: You're recording yourself. I've read about that. The end goal of that process is not for you to be able to read a psychology book off Amazon and know the definitions to terms. The end goal is for you to become a psychologist, for you to become a master, for you to be able to sit with someone and participate in the healing of their soul.
In the same way, an apprentice to a rabbi's goal was to become a rabbi, and rabbis were not necessarily full time vocational jobs in that day. Most rabbis were bi-vocational; most of them would farm or run a business, and then in the off season or in free time, they would travel around from synagogue to synagogue and teach.
If you take this, that's what discipleship is. Period. Full stop. And then if you translate that, if you flip that around and translate that into what does it mean to apprentice under or disciple after Jesus in our world today? It's to essentially organize your life around those three same driving goals.
Whatever your job is, whatever your daily responsibilities are, your three organizing principles are to be with Jesus, to become like him, to be formed into a person who is on the inside, not in your behavior, but on your literal inner woman or man, has taken on the shape to mirror the properties of the inner life of Christ. And then to do as he did, to begin to live as he did, even vocationally in the way that we go about our business to live as Jesus would live if he were us. So that's my basic take.
Alison Cook: It's so good. It begs the question for me as I was reading, I'm going to launch into some of these overlaps. In the book, and again, it's not a critical book, you do a really good job of naming, you're a namer of things, you're not criticizing, you're not trying to shame, you're saying, hey, here’s reality as I see it. I think you do a really good job of that.
But you talk about how some of these “one and done” models of, “I'm saved, and I'm good to go” are in many ways, part of the problem of folks leaving. Because first of all, it's not realistic. It's not how we actually change or grow. You're casting this vision of this model, of a process. It takes a long time. It requires skills.
You talk about the intersection between, it’s not willpower, but we do have some responsibility, and putting ourselves in the position to work synergistically with God's grace, through becoming an apprentice. I thought a lot about my process of becoming a psychologist. It was years, and then again, once you graduate and you're launched…
John Mark Comer: You're still beginning, and you never stop learning. You never want to stop growing.
Alison Cook: You're constantly learning. So I loved that. We have this whole culture of therapy that has developed, this whole world of psychology that has trickled down and become so mainstream, where you can, and I'm not saying this is right or wrong of an apprenticeship model, you can go weekly to meet with your therapist.
You're getting someone attuning to you. You're attuning to those processes of, how do I regulate my emotions? How do I learn to recognize when my nervous system is moving into fight or flight? And it actually makes sense. You're actually getting some of these skills that allow you to do some of these things. There's this practicing of becoming healthier, and that person is attuning it to your uniqueness.
Maybe you've had some trauma. That's why this is hard for me. You're getting all this attunement over here and all this equipping. This is me armchair experting here, but I wonder if a little bit of what happens is church becomes I don't know. I'm not getting that kind of depth of formation there.
I'm getting told to read the Bible more. I'm getting told to pray more, but I can't really do those things because when I go to pray, my mind is racing. Or when I go to read the Bible, my nervous system is still jacked up. But over here, I'm actually learning some of these skills. And I think it's subconscious. I don't think it's happening consciously, but it got me to think, there's this therapized world, and you talk about it in the book, that I think about being part of that world. This is not the end. I think therapy should be in the service of spiritual formation.
I want to hear your thoughts on that, but I do wonder if, because we're getting some of that deep tissue formation in that world, it is setting up a little bit of disillusionment with some of these less robust, less holistic spiritual practices that you're speaking about in your book. I guess that was a whole lot I threw out there. I'm curious how you might respond to that.
John Mark Comer: Yeah. I think you're wrestling with great questions. A vantage point I have come to with a gentle but very firm conviction is that we need to adopt a holistic or whole person approach toward discipleship/spiritual formation/sanctification. There's lots of overlap between those three terms.
This is an oversimplification, but the tragic split between discipleship, or what older generations called sanctification, and the therapeutic world, is devastating for both sides. So there's great disillusionment that we're really in touch with as people that grew up in the church from people that grew up in the evangelical model of discipleship and found it did not produce deep healing and significant levels of spiritual maturity.
But what is fascinating, and I'm sure you see this more than me, but man I am seeing it start to explode, as therapy has gone mainstream over let's call it 10 years. Philip Reif writes about the shift from religious man to psychological man, forgive his male-centric language.
He's writing that in the sixties. His famous line, “Religious man was born to be saved. Psychological man is born to be pleased” is in his book, Triumph of the Therapeutic, about the impact of Freud on Western culture. So obviously this is, at some level, 100 plus years old, this development into a therapeutic culture. But now the TikTok-ification of therapy is actually producing radical disillusionment from Gen Z over the limitations of therapy without God to actually heal the soul.
Alison Cook: Yeah.
John Mark Comer: A female thinker I'm following very closely right now is Freya India. She has a phenomenal Substack. She had an article recently, “Our new religion isn't enough”, that is basically this scathing indictment, not so much of therapy, but of therapy as a new secular quasi-religion without God.
It's interesting, if you separate these two things, if you separate, for example, therapy from Christian discipleship. As a Christian, if you participate in church, and that's one sphere of your life, then therapy is another more secular sphere of your life.
There's so much good about therapy. This comes with the assumption that I, and most of your listeners are fans of therapy. I’ve been in therapy for 14 years, I’m a big fan. But regarding secular therapy, many psychologists have told me, we're taught in school that therapy is to be objective. We're not to have a worldview. Yet that is totally unrealistic.
You cannot give therapy without some level of worldview, some transcendent sense of good and evil. So therapy apart from God is radically individualistic. It's not communal. At some level, it's the professionalization of community. People often confess things to their therapist they would never in a million years say to their family or friends or community.
So it enables this projection, often, of the false self to those people, because we don't actually have to come out of hiding with people where we have accountability and people who see us outside of this context, people who want to attune to us, but also call us on our crap because we're doing life together.
Secondly, it can be ultimately narcissistic. I'm not talking about good Christian therapy, I'm talking about TikTok kind of therapy–some of the new slogans like, “Is this serving you?”. In a secular, pluralistic culture, often happiness or subjective emotional well-being becomes the litmus test of ethical decision making. Do you stay in a marriage or not? Is this serving me? Do I continue to ______? I don't know. Is this serving me? Is it helping me or hindering me?
And then third, it has no transcendent source of moral authority. So I read, I won't name it, but I read a very interesting recent secular book that has some really good things. I was very happy to incorporate some of their therapeutic thoughts, but man, never in a million years would I still be married to my wife if I were to follow that worldview.
There's all this disillusionment, and at some level, naming your wound is different than healing your wound. I still think modern therapy does a way better job at identifying what's wrong than it does at healing the deep parts of the soul. And the good versions of it do a really good job.
But on the Christian discipleship side, we all have a model of discipleship, and the Jesus model is holistic. I think you get all of what you get in therapy and more, but the evangelical model of discipleship that I grew up with is so wildly deficient. It's enlightenment based, it's so Cartesian, it's so head-based, in science language, it's explicit knowledge based, not implicit knowledge.
It doesn't attend to wounding, it has no concepts for trauma and attachment, it's not a super relational process necessarily, unless you get a one on one mentor, it's often one to many, not one on one, it's this very linear process, and it is head up, and it does some aspects really good, so it's not all bad.
It tends to produce, it tends to be most impactful early in the spiritual journey, when your mental maps to reality are so screwed up by the world that remapping through learning Scripture, hearing good sermons, hearing biblical truth, remapping your mental imagination to what's good and true and beautiful produces a significant effect on you, which is why new Christians tend to just, I think by the intuition of the Spirit, consume Scripture and podcasts and books and sermons. It's like they're eating it up.
I think that's the Spirit of God saying, “Your mental maps to reality, your explicit knowledge is so wildly off base that as you refill your mind with truth, your body is going to begin to naturally realign to Jesus' vision of human flourishing”. The problem is, the moment we reach a stage in our discipleship where the problem is no longer that we don't know what Scripture teaches, or we don't want what Scripture teaches.
It's that we cannot get our body, our heart, our will, or our desire to fall in step, the automatic responses of my body. The problems in my marriage are not most likely not going to be solved by a really good sermon on Ephesians chapter five. I know it, I've taught it, I know the Greek. The problem is not that I don’t know what the Greek means by “love your wives as you love your own flesh”.
It's my self-preservation instincts, whether you want to go through evolutionary psychology or the flesh or the narcissistic traits that run so deep in me that when I'm tired, in particular, when I've had a stressful day, the automatic responses that come out of my body toward my wife have yet to take on the inner life of Christ.
So I need something more than yet another good sermon through Ephesians five. I need a way to get this explicit knowledge, this truth, into the implicit knowledge of my body, which goes into all the work and the domain that you work in. Spiritual formation, and I'll end with this, is a newer phrase that started on the Catholic side of the aisle and spread into Protestantism several decades ago.
It has been gaining steam for a few decades. One way to think about what spiritual formation is, is the evangelical model of discipleship, updated with the best learnings of psychology from a Christian worldview. And that's how I think about it. Or you could say it's a whole-person model of discipleship.
You look at spiritual formation, it was mostly introduced to us, not by pastors and biblical scholars, but by psychologists, psychiatrists, spiritual directors, professors, and philosophers. Almost all the luminary voices come from that tradition. And I think they're absolutely updating what's missing in the evangelical world.
Alison Cook: It sounds like you're almost saying spiritual formation is that integrated space where psychology meets the spiritual. It's mental, emotional, spiritual, it's the whole being. It's the nervous system. It's not that one dimensional, pray your anxiety away thing.
There's a bunch of stuff you're saying. First of all, you're so aptly naming disillusionment everywhere. There's disillusionment with the limitations of what my church has offered me. I'm thinking of the listener. There's disillusionment with therapy. To your point, it's so isolated. It's so individualized. It is not an end in and of itself.
John Mark Comer: My therapist said to me recently, people come to me and they think that I will be able to stop their pain. They think I will offer solutions and an end to their pain. And then what you learn is there is no escaping pain. That's actually what growth is.
Alison Cook: Yeah. These are all spokes on the wheel. It's another tool to help you toward the end of what you lay in the book, which is abiding with Jesus, who is the true lover of our soul, who is the true one with whom there is no disappointment or disillusionment. I get what you're saying.
There's lots of room for disillusionment on all sides with all of these fixes. I want to get to practicing the presence. You quote brother Lawrence, and when you're describing this, there's this integrated, don't be fooled into thinking, oh, I'm going to have to go pray my anxiety away.
It's not simplistic. It's an integrated, holistic, whole being, bringing everything into the presence of God. It occurred to me, John Mark, as I was reading, it's so beautifully written, so graceful, so loving, you want to melt into it. I started thinking about the mechanisms by which we can practice the presence of God.
You lay out the practices that we need to do. They're not legalistic, but these are the things we need to do. We need to be alone with God. We need to be in prayer. We need to be in Sabbath. There are some of these really ancient practices that are going to facilitate this. I started thinking, let's take prayer for an example, or when you talk about being with Jesus, I started thinking about where a psychologist comes in, or a therapist comes in.
You talk about every morning going into your room and sitting in silence. As an introvert, you love that. You talk about how your friend likes to go out and walk in the park because they’re an extrovert. I need some external stimuli. There's not a one size fits all. But let's say I'm doing that, and my mind is racing and I can't stop.
There's so much pain that I can't be alone because what's happening actually is I've got some trauma that I've never dealt with. And what's happening when I'm sitting alone is, and this is the kind of thing my listeners will come to me with, that doesn't work for me. It's horrible. I have to leave and then I feel bad.
And then I feel shame because I'm not able to do this and I can't sit with God. And I'm a bad Christian and all this shame fills me. What I'll say is, that sounds to me like your body is doing its job. There's a cue there. This is painful and it's not God. There's shame there. It's that, gosh, maybe I need to, in order to abide with Christ, my nervous system isn't letting me sit in silence.
This is where a good Christian therapist can come in and facilitate that process and help get to the root, like a surgeon, get to the root of what's going on here. In psychology, we talk about bottom up approaches to healing versus top down.
John Mark Comer: Explain that to me.
Alison Cook: Top down–this is also true in psychology, it's true in the church–top down is, we're going to look at cognition. We're going to look at insight. We're going to examine thoughts for someone who has trauma living in their body. It's not helpful. Bottom up approach is, we're going to start with the body.
How do we learn to breathe? And I'll tell you in my own life, learning to attune to my body, my emotional state, was a portal to God's presence. Because I lived in my mind. I can evaporate into my mind and completely disassociate from my body and live there for days and years. And I learned to come into my body and those nervous system interventions that I learned as a psychologist. Suddenly, even now to this day, my best portal to connection with God is my posture.
John Mark Comer: Interesting.
Alison Cook: I'll start bottom up, instead of starting, and this might sound heretical, but instead of starting with going to God, because then I go to my mind and I start thinking about God. I go to my body.
I take that breath, and suddenly, there's God–because God's meeting me right there where I need to be met. It's actually out of my mind, in my body. And that's where I began to be able to practice the present. So what I'm saying is, I think there are different ways. The nuances of the human soul are so different and so intricate.
A good Christian therapist can come in and go, maybe let's start with the body. Maybe let's start with some grounding so you can feel what it is to be in your body, in a calm nervous system. And that might be the path to that experience of God's presence that has been so elusive to you.
And that's how I was thinking as I was reading about this. I was like, this is where some of these therapeutic interventions that we’re trained in dovetail so nicely into this overall goal, but it's still not the end. It’s, oh my gosh, as I begin to attune to my nervous system, to these emotional states, suddenly there, I find God.
I'm sad right now, and I'm with God. Oh, I'm tense. What's that about? And that becomes that prayerful practicing the present. So I'm curious how that lands on you, but that's where I started to see where my work dovetails with this goal that you're laying out, which is practicing that constant presence of Jesus.
It's not giving up on it because man, I can't do it. It's wrestling for how it works for my unique design and my unique history. And again, this is where that individualistic side of me, I was so trained to think about individuals, where if I'm thinking of someone, I'm always going through that lens of, okay, you've got this trauma history. You're disappearing into your mind as an escape hatch. Let's bring you into your body. And that might be where you find God.
John Mark Comer: Yeah. I could not agree more. We're saying the same thing from different angles. The modern mind likes to categorize the human person. So you have your spiritual life and then you have your mental life and then your emotional life and your relational life and your physical life, but nowhere do we experience life in categories like that other than in chapters in a book or points in a sermon.
I'm not right now experiencing my mental life or my physical life or my relational life. I'm experiencing life. Now, I think if you define mind as directed attention, which I find is a compelling understanding of what the mind is, then I think we can bring our direct attention to different aspects of our whole self.
So we can think about the tightness in our chest, or we can think about anxieties that are coming up for us about tomorrow. We can think about another person that we're present to and we can focus our attention on these different aspects of our whole person, but it's all us.
Many people don't even realize that in Hebrew there is no word for spiritual. If you get out a concordance or go to Bible Gateway or Bible Hub and look up the word spiritual, first off, you won't even read it, really, until the writings of Paul. It's not anywhere in the first three quarters of the Bible.
And then in the New Testament, it doesn't mean what most people think it means. It doesn't mean immaterial. It's a relational word. It means in relationship with or in attunement with the spirit of God or with other spirits. You can be spiritual with other spirits besides the Holy Spirit.
And Jesus barely uses the word at all. The quip is, if you were to ask Jesus how his spiritual life was, he would probably look at you really confused and be like, my spiritual life…you mean my life?
Alison Cook: It’s not bifurcated.
John Mark Comer: Yeah, I think part of the problem is that we separate all these things. So we think of beginning and breathing and letting pain come up versus mental prayer versus church. There are different aspects for sure, but we think of them as different categories and that's wildly unhelpful.
This is where a good therapist or pastor or spiritual director is so helpful for knowing what your next step is, or what your doorway into God is. We don't all start from the same place. And what's easy for one is impossible for another. I write a bunch about the practices for a number of different reasons. There's no official list of the practices in the New Testament.
Some people say there's seven, some talk about nine, some people talk about 70 of them. You could argue that there are really two practices. Going into the quiet to be alone with God, and deep relational connection and community. Everything else–prayer, Scripture, worship, Eucharist, gratitude, all of it happens in these two buckets of what you could call the quiet or the deep relational connection.
This is where I think you and I would be on the very same page. The goal of both of those is attunement in modern language. At some level, it's the healing of our attachment filters and our emotional memory that blocks us from trusting love. And I think, the goal of all the practices is attunement to God and to one another and how you get to that attunement.
And you would understand better than I, the many things that often block our capacity to attune, not to God and prayer, but to one another. I'll watch that with certain people. You begin to connect with the person, and then something is said. It happened to me a few days ago, and I could see this person's brain went offline.
They went straight into anxiety mode, and they were no longer emotionally connecting with me. They were marshaling an intellectual defense to try to tamp down their anxiety. It was visible. It was all over the person's face. And I'm sure that's because I mishandled the conversation. But you saw that relational connector; it's almost like there was a switch that turned off, and they went into a different thing.
I think both of those are really tricky for people, and that's where the healing of the soul is incredibly important. And both of those spaces of solitude and community are often more diagnostic than therapeutic. Often they reveal what's wounded or broken more than they heal it, and again, they do both.
Sometimes, if you go into solitude or you get into a deep relationship and all this crap comes up, wounding comes up and fear comes up and shame comes up, that's a gift in its own right. All of that's in you. It's sabotaging your life, your formation into a person of love. Let it come up. And the hope is to get to contemplative spaces where we're experiencing the love of God in prayer and safe, deep, trusting relationships where we're experiencing the love of God through another person's love.
Alison Cook: Yeah, I love that. I think that is where hyperindividualism leads us nowhere good. We do have individual differences. So toward this end of being formed, I love how you talk about in the book, we are all being formed. We are all being formed by something or someone into someone. We are all being formed.
So let's be real clear. We want to be formed by Jesus. And there are a lot of individual differences about how that might happen. One of the things I really appreciated, John Mark, is that you lay out nine practices in the book. Where you and I first met is, you had me on your podcast because you were doing a series on fasting.
You talk about that as a practice. Jesus fasted. And you said, I want a mental health professional to talk about the nuances of fasting for particular groups of people, especially people who have dealt with eating disorders, especially people who have dealt with disembodiment. What you're doing there is so beautiful.
You're saying, and I want people to know, as you read this book, it's not all or nothing. Bring your individual story to the table. If sitting in silence stirs up your anxiety, that's a cue. Don't beat yourself up for that. Don't throw the baby out with the bath. Oh, what is that about? Get some help, seek support, talk to somebody about it.
If your church is fasting and for you, that's dangerous ground, that's a cue. That's another invitation for healing. So I like how you're saying that these practices aren't necessarily prescriptive. They're going to reveal, in a non shaming way, different areas of our souls that might need more attention, more healing.
And a Christian therapist could be helpful in that, a spiritual director, speaking honestly about that. I don't think we have to throw out this emphasis that psychology has brought to us, of the individual nuances of our souls and our stories that matter to God, and also these universal practices that are so important.
We don't have to throw out one for the other. And that's where I really enjoyed reading your book and thinking about how we all are doing our jobs. You're helping remind us of these practices that are so crucial to becoming like Jesus.
My work might be coming in and helping the individual figure out how to tune up or how to heal a specific area in a specific way that this practice is revealing. It brings some heartache or brings some pain or brings some specific issues in a non shaming way.
John Mark Comer: Yes. Which is why for many people, I'm going to hesitate to say this, because they're not mutually exclusive, but the practices are not the place to start, with spiritual formation or discipleship. Relationships are; healing is. This is a clumsy analogy, but if you were to shrink your view of the person down a bit more to the body, I had a great chat with my son last night who's 15 years old, a sophomore in high school, who's an artist.
He's a brilliant artist, and wildly out of shape. Doesn't play sports at all, has not done any working out, and he draws for hours a day and it's actually beginning to deform his body a little bit. He's maturing, he's growing, so he's on this new kick. He wants to start exercising.
He started martial arts. And he was chatting about joining the cross country team at school, running and getting cardio. And it was all a delight to my heart to hear that he's beginning to realize, I have to take my body seriously. I can't sit around and draw.
I'm a whole person. Let's say you are my son, Moses, or you're whoever, and you decide you want to start running cross country or you want to run a half marathon. There is one aspect of that which is discipline, skills, training, effort, hard work, building muscle, building capacities that you don't have through repetitive training in community.
But if Moses has a broken leg, or stage four cancer, thankfully he doesn't have either, or a sprained ankle, then you don't start with running sprints. You don't start with, “drop down and give me 400 pushups”. You start with surgery, or healing, or chemotherapy. Now, these things are not mutually exclusive.
You can do chemo and you're probably not going to be running five miles a day, but you should go for a walk every day at the same time, take a micro step forward toward moving your body. And I think in a similar way, this is an oversimplification, but there are these practices that are, at some level, disciplines and skills by which we open our inner life to grow into people of love.
But often those practices are wildly ineffective if we're living with wounds beyond the normal cuts and scrapes of living through the world. The body self-heals minor wounds, but deep wounds need extra care. So if I nick my hand this afternoon and I bleed a little bit, I can wash it off and leave it alone and it'll heal by itself.
If I get in a car wreck, I'm not going to go home and take some ibuprofen. I'm gonna go to the hospital and have surgery because my body's not gonna heal by itself. It will die without help. And I think our whole person is that way. There are certain emotional wounds that we can heal from. Just give them some time and some healthy movement, and you'll be okay.
And then other wounds where, no, you need some relational attunement to help heal from this in order to not die, but to flourish and thrive. We all have our own starting point. And that's why for some people, the step isn't to go on a seven day solitude retreat and memorize half the book of Psalms. It's to start therapy. We can only do so much at a time,
Alison Cook: To look at those attachment wounds or look at the shame that keeps coming up that keeps you from experiencing God's love because you've never experienced love in your body. So how would you even know what that felt like? Yeah, that's so good. John Mark. I love that. I love that.
Start where there's a wound. Start there. That's a part of that formation. You're taking a brave step toward healing which will move you forward.
John Mark Comer: We don't heal ourselves. We do not, so that's where the therapeutic thing falls down and often people become wildly aware of their wounding and how they got messed up and how their current behavior is tied to their parents or whatever, but then they're not really that different five years later.
They're more self-aware. We cannot self-heal. And again, I have a holistic view of salvation, like I have a holistic view of discipleship. I think salvation is in part about the healing of the whole person, including the body and resurrection eventually. In solitude or in scripture, the real goal is not to control or mechanize or self-engineer our character formation.
It's to set our self before God and let him do for us what we cannot do for ourselves. And therapy often works that way. You can't fix yourself. The insight is wildly helpful, but it is not sufficient for deep healing and change. Woody Allen is a wildly self-aware person who's been in therapy twice a week for longer than I've been alive.
And if you know some of his marital, sexual history, it is shocking that he can walk around in public and be accepted. Self-awareness alone, insight, that's one of the myths of the therapeutic generation. We think that insight alone is enough to change. It's the myth of evangelical preaching and Gen Z TikTok therapy. If I know this thing, then I'll be okay.
But as you're saying, you can know how you're messed up. You can know how you got messed up. And still, what's the Thomas Keating line who was doing work in this vein long before my time? The issues are in the tissues. There is this deep sin in all of us, if you want to call it that. Brokenness, wounding, if that's more palatable language, is in all of us. All of us need to be healed and saved and formed.
Alison Cook: Are you familiar with the Warren Kinghorn out of Duke?
John Mark Comer: No, I'm not.
Alison Cook: You'd love his book, Wayfaring. It's a brilliant book. We had him on the podcast a few weeks ago, but he talks about the seven pillars of mental health flourishing in the mental health community: resilience, emotional regulation, self awareness, all these things. They're great. These are good things.
And they're not ends in and of themselves. He uses Aristotle to talk about actual human flourishing. Even if you are very self-aware, you can regulate your emotions, all of these things, you're still not in the realm of transformation.
John Mark Comer: Can I try an idea on you, Alison? And I want you to genuinely disagree with me if you don’t agree. I'm working a lot of this stuff out. I've been essentially trying to read my way into a Master's degree in psychology. And I think I might know enough only to cause damage at this point. But I've been thinking about Pete Scazzaro, who has done so much good work on this over the years about the link between emotional health and spiritual maturity.
I have been defining emotional maturity and spiritual maturity with the huge caveat that these are not separate categories. We're whole people. The emotional category, emotional health or emotional maturity, I think of as two essential skills. One, it's the capacity to be aware of what you're feeling, of your internal state, to name and notice what's coming up in your body and your heart and ideally even notice maybe where it comes from.
You know what parts of your past, your story, your family of origin, your experience is tied to and how that's mapping onto your present experience.
And then secondly, to not be run by those feelings, to receive them hospitably, to welcome them, to learn from them. But to know they're not inerrant truth. They’re messages, they’re messengers, and they have their own bias. In psychology that would be called emotional regulation, and I think in the New Testament that's called self-control, and I think it's the same.
I think it's the same idea. The ability to have these feelings, to be in touch with them, to notice them, and name them, and listen to them, and even welcome them without letting them necessarily dictate your behavior. Spiritual maturity I would define as the ability to know, and the ability and willingness to know and do the will of God. So it's the ability and the willingness. So you want to do the will of God, and you actually have the ability to know and do the will of God.
Some people don't know what God's will is for sexuality or money or whatever. They're still learning, hence the role of Bible study and sermons. And then the will of God often gets more complex as you age. And then there's the ability. Often I know what God's will is for me as a husband, but then I often don't have the ability, at least not consistently, to follow through on God's will. And that's where I think these two things rise together.
You can only become so spiritually mature if you are emotionally immature. If you lack the capacity to be with your feelings, to know where they come from, to not let them run you, then no matter how well you know the commands of Jesus in the New Testament, you're not going to be able to consistently obey them because you don't have the emotional capacity.
Or on the flip side, I know some people that are quite emotionally sophisticated and have good interpersonal relationships, but frankly, they are living by their own source of moral authority. They're doing their own thing. They're not interested in obeying the teachings of Jesus about marriage or money or you fill in the blank.
For me, I'm wanting to bring these two things together, believing that they're not actually separate categories. They're actually two aspects of becoming people of love in Christ. So how does that hit you? Would you push back on that or interact with that?
Alison Cook: You're speaking right to my playbook. In I Shouldn’t Feel This Way, which is my latest book. I lay out this framework of “name, frame, brave”. Naming emotions, to your point, is that emotional self-awareness, emotional framing. The second step is the least glamorous. It’s that process where those two things come together.
If you are angry, for example, and you're aware of it, “I'm angry, mad at my partner, I'm mad at my kids. That framing step is the liminal place, it's the place in between, where you've named something, but you don't know yet the third thing, which is braving–what am I going to do with it?
Framing is that area for spiritual discernment, knowing the will of God, discerning the emotion and its role. It could be a pause. That pause of discernment, of deeper reflection,might lead you to “You know what? I'm angry for a reason”. And part of emotional intelligence isn't just knowing the emotion, it's actually speaking constructively when necessary. So the anger might be, I need to have a hard conversation with this person because I don't like what's happening here. I'm not going to lash out at them, but this anger is here for a reason.
Part of that framing might be, I'm angry because I'm being a jerk and I'm being selfish. And I actually need to surrender that anger to God. This person isn't doing anything wrong and I'm being petty. So that framing, that discernment, is where I went when you said that it's where those two connect.
We're looking at the emotions while also discerning with God's spirit what to do on behalf of that emotion. The same emotion or the same set of circumstances could lead to a very different framing. What is the will of God, to your point? Is God inviting me to be brave here and actually speak up on behalf in a healthy way?
John Mark Comer: What do I do with this anger? What is it moving my body to do? And is that in line? Yeah, you used a word earlier that I really love. You used the word integrated. I like to say I take an integrated approach to discipleship. And what I mean by that is, for me, my primary sense of self is as an apprentice of Jesus.
My primary sense of the meaning and purpose of life is that I am following Jesus and apprenticing under Him into becoming a person, ultimately, of love over a lifetime and beyond. And for me, Jesus’, commands and teachings that come to us through the four Gospels, and the collection of writings that have grown up around them that we call the New Testament, for me, frames my worldview, my telos, my sense of what's good and beautiful and true, and what's bad and ugly and untrue.
I'm not questioning what marriage is, or what gender is–I'm getting all of that from Jesus. But then, how do I obey the commands of Jesus–be anxious for nothing, do not worry about tomorrow, honor others above yourselves, do not be afraid–these are the commands of Jesus. I am more than happy, because I am a whole person, to take a whole person integrated approach toward becoming the kind of person who can consistently obey the commands of Jesus.
So, do not worry. Great command. I cannot consistently obey that command based on insight and willpower. I'm very happy to go to church every Sunday to listen to sermons, to read scripture every day, to pray. I also do a cold plunge every single day. We have an infrared sauna. I'm on a number of supplements. I take L theanine. I've done the almond clinics, brain scans.
I'm on medication to lower my heart rate because I have a traumatized nervous system from a sudden infant death syndrome when I was three months old where I either died and resuscitated or was almost killed. Working with several clinical psychologists, they basically said that it permanently damaged my nervous system and put me into a kind of fight or flight, all the time.
So my whole body is in need of healing. I'm more than happy to take a whole body approach to discipleship, which is why I'm very happy reading the wisdom of therapists who are totally far from Jesus in their worldview. I'm adapting in attachment filters, sure. Because what I'm trying to say yes to is Jesus calling my life to become a person of love in him.
So that's where I think we have such an opportune moment here with the disillusionment in both the church and in the secular world, to bring back together two things that never should have been separated: discipleship to Jesus and the therapeutic healing and growth and development of the soul through relational connection.
All of it for me is ultimately about apprenticing under Jesus with my whole person.
Alison Cook: I love it. I need to let you go. Thank you for being here, and Practicing the Way is a fantastic, beautiful, holistic read. I can't recommend it more.
John Mark Comer: That's incredibly kind. So grateful for you, Alison, for the work you're doing. I know it must be hard to live inside the contours of the Western Protestant Church with the passions and insight and expertise that you have as a psychologist. And I want to say thank you for staying faithful.
We need pastors to learn about the therapeutic, and we need therapists to learn and stay rooted in biblical orthodoxy. Tragically, the people that are biblically orthodox are very far from this conversation, and the people that are psychologically sophisticated drift theologically. Thank you for holding that together.
I want to honor you and bless you and say, may your tribe increase, may your life be long, and may your podcast be well listened to. May the books be many and may the grace of God continue to be upon your life.
Alison Cook: Thanks. Thanks so much. It means a lot. Appreciate it.