Grief is a funny thing. As a pastor, I've read about grief, I've studied it and I've watched people go through it. Yet, I am still surprised. I was surprised this morning to find myself in tears after a dream I had about my father. My father died in September. Here it is in May and I thought I was finished with grief. I was wrong.

One of the principles of Adrian van Kaam's Formative Spirituality is appraisal. Van Kaam's science maintains that everything is important. Even the most mundane and boring moments in our lives are pregnant with God's formative potential. So, whenever an event happens, we pause and ask ourselves "what is going on here?" Living out a Formation Theology means not allowing events to pass through our fingers without appraising it in light of formation journey.

I did that this morning. After the dream and the tears I asked myself, "Why?" Why now? What's going on that I would dream about my father who died in September? I thought I was over my grief. I thought it was all in my past. Why would I have such a dream now?

Here's a quote from Susan Muto's work "Where Lovers Meet: Inside the Interior Castle." This work is a companion or commentary to St. Teresa of Avila's "Interior Castle" classic on the spiritual life. Here Muto is discussing St. Teresa's 'vipers' that one encounters as he or she seeks to draw near to God:

The viper's trick is to deceive us into thinking that temporal affairs escalate in significance to the point where they almost seem the eternal. They try to deceive us into believing that worldly success will grant us at some point ultimate satisfaction. This illusion blinds us to the inherent finitude of earthbound affairs. However splendid our accomplishments may be, their outcomes pass away over time if we do not give the credit to God. The way of the vipers is to hold before our mind's eye the esteem in which the world holds us when we exercise this kind of activism. They make us secretly relish people's praise. Our pride-form allures us into thinking that our worthwhileness rests on the works in which we are engaged rather than in the God we serve. These clever devils also try to convince us that any kind of withdrawal to worship God in solitude is a big mistake. What will the other "worker bees" think of us if we take time to "Be still and know that I am God" (Psalm 46:10)?

I believe these comments stand on their own. For me, it is a point of reflection as I seek to live out my faith as true significance only comes from resting in God.

Our life may be imprisoned in functional dispositions. They dim the vision of the spirit. Most harmful in this regard are those of ascendancy over others. To prove our functional potency, we may strive vigorously to outshine other people. This competitive attitude engenders inordinate strife and self-exertion. As a result our bloodstream may be polluted with overdoses of glandular chemicals. Arteries, brain, heart, and other organs may suffer from such surfeit. Disorder results. Problems like these multiply in functionalistic cultures because they are dominated by social form traditions that neglect the unfolding transcendent dispositions. - Adrian Van Kaam (From Formative Spirituality Volume 2: Human Formation pg. 99)

Dispositions are the habits of our life and heart. Some might even say that our dispositions define us. Here van Kaam makes a distinction between transcendent dispositions, or the "more than" part of who we are, and the functional dispositions, or the "what we do" part of who we are.