New Places

It’s unlikely you’ve noticed (because that’s the nature of dormant things) that there hasn’t been any activity here since 2017.

While this space has been dormant, I haven’t been. Well, that’s not to say I’ve been overly productive, but for those who subscribed here at some point along the way and might be interested in following along with some other endeavors, I figured I’d point you there.

To follow along with me these days, here are two audio options and one written one:

1. For the last several years, I have been podcasting with Aaron Antoon (and others) at my church – the topics are varied, but revolve around faith, life, and the many curious things about the church. Hence the name: The Curious Church Podcast. There’s a healthy back catalog that would keep anyone listening for some time. If you want a taste, check out this episode with Father Chris Flesoras, a Greek Orthodox priest who talks with us about Lent – it has both depth and accessibility, and has ideas I still return to on an annual basis.
2. My latest podcasting endeavor has just begun, so with this one you can get on the ground floor! It’s called the Timms Take Podcast (subscribe in your favorite podcasting app to keep up along the way). I’m particularly excited about this because I get to do it with Rachel, my wife. We just began our parenting journey (8 days ago as of this writing), and are going to podcast along the way, for an undetermined amount of time. You might like it!
3. Finally, I’m still writing occasionally (well, certainly more occasionally than in this space). I’ve started a newsletter called the Timms Take – look at that consistent branding! It has flavors of this blog but I found there is so much in this world that is fascinating to think about, and I wanted a space to not only reflect on spiritual formation (which does come up!) but how that integrates with so many other things. It’s 21 missives in, and while you can’t read from the beginning, you can read a couple of the most recent ones if you’re interested.

I’m grateful to all of you who have read here in this space along the way – maybe I’ll see you in another internet space down the road – these three are the ones you’ll catch me in these days.

Grace to you,

Matt

Skilled Faith?

In Joshua Foer’s book Moonwalking with Einstein, he discusses the work of Paul Fitts and Michael Posner, who did research in the 1960s on how we develop skills. They broke the process into three stages: 1. The cognitive stage in which you intellectualize the task, defining its parts to work out what to do; 2. The associative stage in which you concentrate less and make fewer major errors; and 3. The autonomous stage in which the skill no longer requires great concentration (think the way most of us experience typing on a keyboard or driving).

For this third stage, Foer offers additional nomenclature:

“As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the ‘OK plateau,’ the point at which you decide you’re OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving.” (p. 170)

If you’re like me, the faith analogy springs out of that quote. How often have I settled for less in my level of intimacy and relationship with God? How often have I stopped at the OK plateau?

A lot of us feel the sting of the OK plateau with respect to our faith. But with it comes a sneaky assumption – that faith is a skill and that it’s something in which we should always be improving.

It’s not surprising when you think about it. Culturally, most elements of our lives can be converted into some form of “expertise.” We want to be better. We watch the Cooking Channel and wish we could make crème brulée. We read blogs about parenting and want to start 15 new traditions every holiday. We watch people whose faith we admire and conclude that we just need to _______ (pray more, read more Scripture, attend church more often, fill in the blank).

Expertise, having the skills, is a comfortable idea. We’re familiar with all manner of ways to measure it (return on investment, accurate predictions, sheer output).

So it’s easy to forget that faith is not about expertise. It’s about experience.

Intimacy with God poses problems; it’s not always linear or “up and to the right.” It takes twists and turns, as our lives do.

Faith as experience invites us not to develop more “Christian skills”, but to enter mystery, to enter the very life of God. Jesus reminds us that to enter that life, we have to give up on becoming better.

Ultimately, our goal has nothing to do with surpassing some kind of OK plateau; our goal is far richer, deeper and truer than that because it’s found not in a skill set, but in God himself.