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The Cultivated Life: From Ceaseless Striving to Receiving Joy
Dallas Willard Center Book and Research Award Finalist Hearts Minds Bookstore's Best Books of 2015, Spirituality and the Devotional Life "This is a book written specifically for those of us who are assigned the task of developing an imagination for living the Christian faith with insight and skill in and for a society that is disconnected from the biblical revelation and the Jesus incarnation," writes Eugene Peterson in the foreword of The Cultivated Life. "But it is equally useful for all of us who are committed to following Jesus with our families and coworkers and neighbors." Sociology professor and spiritual director Susan Phillips walks us through the "circus" of our cultural landscape to invite us into a cultivated life of spirituality. If we want to accept the invitation to return to the garden, then we must face down the temptation to live life as spectators of the circus that plays on around us. We want to be rooted and grounded in Christ, but are pushed toward constant work, alternating between performance and spectacle. Cultivation requires a kind of attentiveness that is countercultural to our age of distraction. These pages unfold the spiritual practices that can lead us into a new and delightful way of living. Are you ready to leave the circus?
256 pages, Paperback
First published June 22, 2015
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167 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews
March 24, 2019
It's a good meditative read, and I really appreciated her overall perspective. I found a number of the themes quite relevant for further reflection and application in my everyday life.
January 20, 2016
Contemporary life is a circus like existence. We balance priorities, juggle demands, jump through hoops as we strive to tame our schedules. Or else we are distracted by the performances of others with little attention paid to our souls. Susan Philllips, spiritual director and professor of sociology and Christianity at New College Berkeley asks, "How can we participate in the cultivation of our souls in a ceaselessly striving, circus-like culture that pushes us to be performers and spectators?" (15). The Cultivated Life: From Ceaseless Striving to Receiving Joy is her answer to that question. She unfolds the spiritual practices which cultivate fruitful living.
Phillips's prose awakens a hunger for the deeper Christian life. In her introduction, she shares this story from Matt who came to her for Spiritual direction (not his real name). Matt said to her:
If you have ever felt like this, you know the frustration of not living with Christ as your center,vnot maturing, and feeling unfruitful. Phillips describes this numbness and spiritual malaise as a circus--this place where we are either performer or spectator:
Phillips helps us move away from these roles by pursuing nurturing practices which cultivate our inner life.
There are several types of practices Phillips commends. She asks us to pay attention to our own life and the things we do which we find life-giving (chapter two). She advocates a contemplative listening posture-- a posture of receptivity toward God and others(chapter three). She invites us to 'stop' and practice Sabbath by turning away from the circus toward God (chapters four and five). In chapter six, Phillips calls us to a cultivated attention, a form of Christian mindfulness informed by "texts, communities, tradition, teachers and guides and the all-surrounding presence of God" (116). She also advises praying scripture (chapter seven), and developing relational attachments which nurture us, such as spiritual direction and friendship (chapters eight through eleven). These practices promote and help us live into a fruitful and complete life (chapter twelve and conclusion). An appendix gives guidelines for the practices of contemplative listening, sabbath living, lectio divina, finding a spiritual director, and cultivating friendship.
Eugene Peterson writes in the forward, "Susan Phillips has been for many years my writer of choice in matters of spiritual direction and maturing a robust Christian life" (9). He describes Phillips deft use of metaphor, her self-implicating naming and her skillful story telling (10-14). I could make a similar statement about Peterson, whose own books have been my go-to books for spiritual insight and pastoral advice. His commendation of Phillips is true, and I can see her quickly becoming a favorite author. This book made me hunger for a deeper, fruitful life. It is well illustrated by examples drawn from Phillips's life and from her role as a director and professor.
There are no shortage of books about spiritual disciplines. Some of them are mediocre, others quite good. However, the notion of spiritual disciplines often fraught by a too privatized and consumeristic picture of what it means to live the Christian life. Often we are given something new to try out as an addendum to our own over-full lives. What I appreciate most about Phillips's approach is the way she calls us to relationship--to finding a director or spiritual guide, and friends who will share the journey. Phillips focus is on personal, spiritual growth, but she sets this within a communal context.
Phillips's metaphors and images are organic and relational. She is wise guide, and there were no shortage of passages I underlined, mulled over and re-read.I give this five stars and recommend it for anyone else frustrated with life in the circus. May God use this book to enliven you with his life! ★★★★★
Note: I received this book from InterVarsity Press in exchange for my honest review.
Phillips's prose awakens a hunger for the deeper Christian life. In her introduction, she shares this story from Matt who came to her for Spiritual direction (not his real name). Matt said to her:
I have been a Christian for decades. I try to live the right way, but I am not sure I made much progress the way forward, you know, the way of growth even flourishing. . . . I feel, spiritually the same way I did when I became a Christian as a teenager. I haven't grown but I'm older. . . . I'd like to end well, if you know what I mean. I am not sure what way of living would make a change, a change to the rut I am in spiritually. (16)
If you have ever felt like this, you know the frustration of not living with Christ as your center,vnot maturing, and feeling unfruitful. Phillips describes this numbness and spiritual malaise as a circus--this place where we are either performer or spectator:
There are physical sensations, or the lack of them associated with the circus experience of 'vegging out,' 'pedaling faster' and 'jumping through hoops.' As we're thrown into shallow places of performing and spectating, we are bereft of feeling and sensation (an-esthetic= without feeling) in both circus positions. Yet people long to see, here and feel. (25)
Phillips helps us move away from these roles by pursuing nurturing practices which cultivate our inner life.
There are several types of practices Phillips commends. She asks us to pay attention to our own life and the things we do which we find life-giving (chapter two). She advocates a contemplative listening posture-- a posture of receptivity toward God and others(chapter three). She invites us to 'stop' and practice Sabbath by turning away from the circus toward God (chapters four and five). In chapter six, Phillips calls us to a cultivated attention, a form of Christian mindfulness informed by "texts, communities, tradition, teachers and guides and the all-surrounding presence of God" (116). She also advises praying scripture (chapter seven), and developing relational attachments which nurture us, such as spiritual direction and friendship (chapters eight through eleven). These practices promote and help us live into a fruitful and complete life (chapter twelve and conclusion). An appendix gives guidelines for the practices of contemplative listening, sabbath living, lectio divina, finding a spiritual director, and cultivating friendship.
Eugene Peterson writes in the forward, "Susan Phillips has been for many years my writer of choice in matters of spiritual direction and maturing a robust Christian life" (9). He describes Phillips deft use of metaphor, her self-implicating naming and her skillful story telling (10-14). I could make a similar statement about Peterson, whose own books have been my go-to books for spiritual insight and pastoral advice. His commendation of Phillips is true, and I can see her quickly becoming a favorite author. This book made me hunger for a deeper, fruitful life. It is well illustrated by examples drawn from Phillips's life and from her role as a director and professor.
There are no shortage of books about spiritual disciplines. Some of them are mediocre, others quite good. However, the notion of spiritual disciplines often fraught by a too privatized and consumeristic picture of what it means to live the Christian life. Often we are given something new to try out as an addendum to our own over-full lives. What I appreciate most about Phillips's approach is the way she calls us to relationship--to finding a director or spiritual guide, and friends who will share the journey. Phillips focus is on personal, spiritual growth, but she sets this within a communal context.
Phillips's metaphors and images are organic and relational. She is wise guide, and there were no shortage of passages I underlined, mulled over and re-read.I give this five stars and recommend it for anyone else frustrated with life in the circus. May God use this book to enliven you with his life! ★★★★★
Note: I received this book from InterVarsity Press in exchange for my honest review.
August 31, 2020
Some good nuggets in here, but it just seemed a bit all over the place and disorganized. I have no doubt I would love to spend time with the author and would learn immensely from her. I think maybe she just tried to do too much with this book, and as a result didn’t do enough. Some topics were so kind of 101 level and others she went down rabbit trails. I was also confused by her defining a spiritual director as essentially someone helping you listen to the holy spirit, but then she sought a director outside the faith? I had a hard time sticking with this one. My least favorite of a bevy of books on spiritual formation and/or direction I’ve read in the last year.
October 15, 2020
This book leads you through spiritual disciplines to move toward or stay close to God your entire life, no matter the circumstances. What I loved was the stories of her parents and other regular, unknown people that have fostered these disciplines and worked through struggle. Maybe we need a fire now and then to burn away what we have wanted to make way for the new and this book lovingly leads us away from the circus and into the garden.
December 9, 2017
Is a good book in helping us thinking about how we live our lives for God. It seemed to lose a bit of shape in terms of how the thinking develops.
March 6, 2017
Really enjoyed this book -- helpful to think through spiritual disciplines and spiritual direction.
July 17, 2017
This was definitely an effort to finish because it took time to digest and contemplate as I read.
December 4, 2017
Spiritual disciplines and practices for growth in communities
September 17, 2019
Awesome book!
July 6, 2015
Return to the Garden
Proximity to the land, awareness of seasonal patterns of frost and heat, rain and shine: these are among the chief benefits of a garden, and in my ongoing cultivation of the beautiful mess where my veggies grow, I am continually renewed and inspired by the metaphors that spring forth from every aspect of life in the garden. Susan S. Phillips has captured this peaceful fruition for those who are committed to following Jesus. In The Cultivated Life, the garden as a metaphor for the life of spirituality is contrasted with the life of the circus where our souls “ceaselessly strive,” and we are pressured into assuming the role of “spectator” or “performer” in our three-ring world of anesthetized frenzy.
In garden-living, spiritual disciplines shed their associations with the guilt of toxic do-lists and become row markers, holding space in which our desire for God “can be kindled and in which we might notice God.” The cultivated life is both free and rooted. As Paul instructed believers in Colossae, we “walk in Him, rooted,” (Colossians 2:6,7), a journey that is firmly planted in truth and yet proceeds forward through steady seasons of prayer, listening, sacred reading, and spiritual friendships. The author draws on her interactions as a spiritual director and her mentoring relationships with students to breathe life into her words, drawing her readers into intimacy with the radical stop of Sabbath keeping; the healthy effort of listening and of cultivating attachment; and the mindful bending forward of ordered attention. In the embedded memoir of Susan’s experience of grieving her parents’ deaths (within three months of each other) and her celebration of their fruitful lives, there is heart-stretching truth to enhance genuine worship and holy love for a God who enriches our soil through the harsh realities as well as through the times of flourishing.
Personally, I was left breathless reading Susan’s gorgeous prose, and I frequently stopped in my tracks to ponder and apply her images:
•” . . . we would slam on the brakes as we came upon the stop sign, [and] all our kids’ sports gear catapult[ed] forward from nether regions of the car. When we stop for Sabbath or in fallowness, we discover our baggage.”
•“In prayer, as in Sabbath keeping, we turn from so that we might turn toward.”
•“Countering strong forces in our culture, spiritual disciplines increase our capacity to choose ordered attention and attachment. Attention helps us notice what’s real, while attachment connects us to all that matters . . . It’s a circular truth: attention (for instance, noticing hints of grace) begets attachment (love), which aids attention (knowing God, the other and ourselves better), and the spiral continues.”
I read these words and then delight anew in my sunflowers, still in their leaf-forming prelude to days of attentive leaning toward the sun. With my bare hands, I pile up the rich garden humus around the bean plants and recall that I, too, am sustained by significant soil with its buried nutrients. With thanksgiving, I uproot the volunteer radishes, a pastel palette of offspring from last year’s long-forgotten root gone to seed, and I pray for my grandson, for his parents and his uncles, and for all his future siblings and cousins. They are my dear “cathedral of redwoods,” (Susan’s rich metaphor for generativity), and through reading The Cultivated Life, I am encouraged to trust for grace to enrich their lives; to pray that they will find Life in the living of it; and to believe that they, too, will choose “garden living.”
This book was provided by IVP Books, an imprint of Intervarsity Press in exchange for my review. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
Proximity to the land, awareness of seasonal patterns of frost and heat, rain and shine: these are among the chief benefits of a garden, and in my ongoing cultivation of the beautiful mess where my veggies grow, I am continually renewed and inspired by the metaphors that spring forth from every aspect of life in the garden. Susan S. Phillips has captured this peaceful fruition for those who are committed to following Jesus. In The Cultivated Life, the garden as a metaphor for the life of spirituality is contrasted with the life of the circus where our souls “ceaselessly strive,” and we are pressured into assuming the role of “spectator” or “performer” in our three-ring world of anesthetized frenzy.
In garden-living, spiritual disciplines shed their associations with the guilt of toxic do-lists and become row markers, holding space in which our desire for God “can be kindled and in which we might notice God.” The cultivated life is both free and rooted. As Paul instructed believers in Colossae, we “walk in Him, rooted,” (Colossians 2:6,7), a journey that is firmly planted in truth and yet proceeds forward through steady seasons of prayer, listening, sacred reading, and spiritual friendships. The author draws on her interactions as a spiritual director and her mentoring relationships with students to breathe life into her words, drawing her readers into intimacy with the radical stop of Sabbath keeping; the healthy effort of listening and of cultivating attachment; and the mindful bending forward of ordered attention. In the embedded memoir of Susan’s experience of grieving her parents’ deaths (within three months of each other) and her celebration of their fruitful lives, there is heart-stretching truth to enhance genuine worship and holy love for a God who enriches our soil through the harsh realities as well as through the times of flourishing.
Personally, I was left breathless reading Susan’s gorgeous prose, and I frequently stopped in my tracks to ponder and apply her images:
•” . . . we would slam on the brakes as we came upon the stop sign, [and] all our kids’ sports gear catapult[ed] forward from nether regions of the car. When we stop for Sabbath or in fallowness, we discover our baggage.”
•“In prayer, as in Sabbath keeping, we turn from so that we might turn toward.”
•“Countering strong forces in our culture, spiritual disciplines increase our capacity to choose ordered attention and attachment. Attention helps us notice what’s real, while attachment connects us to all that matters . . . It’s a circular truth: attention (for instance, noticing hints of grace) begets attachment (love), which aids attention (knowing God, the other and ourselves better), and the spiral continues.”
I read these words and then delight anew in my sunflowers, still in their leaf-forming prelude to days of attentive leaning toward the sun. With my bare hands, I pile up the rich garden humus around the bean plants and recall that I, too, am sustained by significant soil with its buried nutrients. With thanksgiving, I uproot the volunteer radishes, a pastel palette of offspring from last year’s long-forgotten root gone to seed, and I pray for my grandson, for his parents and his uncles, and for all his future siblings and cousins. They are my dear “cathedral of redwoods,” (Susan’s rich metaphor for generativity), and through reading The Cultivated Life, I am encouraged to trust for grace to enrich their lives; to pray that they will find Life in the living of it; and to believe that they, too, will choose “garden living.”
This book was provided by IVP Books, an imprint of Intervarsity Press in exchange for my review. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255 : “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”
May 11, 2016
This is a stirring book that captures your thinking in a unique way. Seldom have I read a book where the pace of the narrative is so closely attached to the subject matter.
Phillips writes with deliberation by sharing her ongoing personal reflections that help the reader to also stop and contemplate the subject matter. At the core of the book is a splendid use of metaphors to communicate spiritual dynamics. She draws repeatedly on the competing images of the circus (i.e., frenetic life driven by activity) and garden-life (organic, cultivated living).
Among the benefits of this book is the opportunity to capture some of the writer's approaches to spiritual direction. Particularly salient for me is how she interprets "friendship". Through select propositions and biographical references, Phillips portrays a lifestyle that focuses on our connectivity under the larger scope of God's design for human living.
Each of the twelve chapters ends with reflection questions. These help the reader to retain basic concepts and to process his/her own interpretations. There is a engaging combination of careful analysis (e.g., ample sociological referencing and numerous footnotes for further exploration) and well-reasoned conclusions. Yet, at no time does the writer press the reader. You genuinely sense that you have discovered a written conversation between a spiritual director recuperating from the loss of both parents (often referenced) and holding a mutual desire to escape activity-driven living for something more profound.
If reflection and contemplation are values for you then I highly recommend you taking the time to walk through the pages of The Cultivated Life.
Phillips writes with deliberation by sharing her ongoing personal reflections that help the reader to also stop and contemplate the subject matter. At the core of the book is a splendid use of metaphors to communicate spiritual dynamics. She draws repeatedly on the competing images of the circus (i.e., frenetic life driven by activity) and garden-life (organic, cultivated living).
Among the benefits of this book is the opportunity to capture some of the writer's approaches to spiritual direction. Particularly salient for me is how she interprets "friendship". Through select propositions and biographical references, Phillips portrays a lifestyle that focuses on our connectivity under the larger scope of God's design for human living.
Each of the twelve chapters ends with reflection questions. These help the reader to retain basic concepts and to process his/her own interpretations. There is a engaging combination of careful analysis (e.g., ample sociological referencing and numerous footnotes for further exploration) and well-reasoned conclusions. Yet, at no time does the writer press the reader. You genuinely sense that you have discovered a written conversation between a spiritual director recuperating from the loss of both parents (often referenced) and holding a mutual desire to escape activity-driven living for something more profound.
If reflection and contemplation are values for you then I highly recommend you taking the time to walk through the pages of The Cultivated Life.
March 21, 2016
This was a good and helpful book for my days set aside for spiritual reading. Susan is my spiritual director and a generous source of wisdom and grace.
I was struck by the chapters on friendship, which is a neglected topic in writing on Christian spirituality. I want to spend more time reflecting on what healthy, life giving friendship can look like for me.
I was struck by the chapters on friendship, which is a neglected topic in writing on Christian spirituality. I want to spend more time reflecting on what healthy, life giving friendship can look like for me.
November 1, 2016
This is a great book by a professor and spiritual director on the journey from living the "circus life" of today's chaotic culture to the "rooted" life of cultivation. She covers prayer, listening, friendship, rest, stopping, spiritual direction, sabbath, and other topics using eloquent language and great word pictures. If you are feeling frenzied, this is a great place to go!
August 14, 2015
The book reads just like a conversation with Susan herself would: rich, intelligent and full of metaphors. While the metaphors may be a bit overkill at times, it's completely her, in a cyclically weaving literary sense.
August 21, 2016
This book is packed full of so many insights. Instead of underlining, I marked passages with sticky notes - most likely 50+ - I will be digesting the wisdom herein for a while. Thank you Susan Phillips.
October 28, 2021
This is a book for those who want help to take Christianity beyond the Sunday morning service. A second read deepened what I got out of the book like true Christian friendship in a Spiritual discipline. I very much recommend reading it with care.
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July 22, 2016Review forthcoming.
November 1, 2016
Good. A challenge to leave the circus, be still and allow for the long slow work of cultivation.
Displaying 1 - 18 of 18 reviews