Richard J. Foster - Streams of Living Water: Celebrating the Great Traditions of Christ

To L YNDA L. G RAYBEAL
who believed in this project from the beginning and has been its
most faithful and steady advocate. Lynda and I have worked together
professionally for well over a dozen years now, and I dedicate this
book to her in gratitude for her perseverance, patience, and
resilience.

Chapter 1
Imitatio: The Divine Paradigm

Chapter 2
The Contemplative Tradition: Discovering the Prayer-Filled Life

Chapter 3
The Holiness Tradition: Discovering the Virtuous Life

Chapter 4
The Charismatic Tradition: Discovering the Spirit-Empowered Life

Chapter 5
The Social Justice Tradition: Discovering the Compassionate Life

Chapter 6
The Evangelical Tradition: Discovering the Word-Centered Life

Chapter 7
The Incarnational Tradition: Discovering the Sacramental Life

N O ONE WRITES in isolation. Always we stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before and hope against hope that present and future readers will give attention to our efforts. When a work gives special attention to history, the debt increases doubly and tripley. And so I must begin by expressing profound gratitude to all those through the centuries who have lived so faithfully and to all those who have so faithfully recorded the experiences of their lives.

In addition, many people have helped me think through the issues and structure of this book. In particular, the early members of our RENOVAR team have worked with me by teaching, preaching, and clarifying the themes of this book. I thank them each one: Edward England, Marti Ensign, Roger Fredrikson, James Bryan Smith, Donn Thomas, William L. Vaswig, Dallas Willard.

Editors are indispensable members of the writing team. They encourage, guide, prod, console. I thank Patricia Klein of HarperSanFrancisco, who has been the editor for this project. As a labor of love several individuals read through the entire manuscript, sharing their thoughts, insights, and corrections. I thank them for helping to make this a better, more readable book: Bruce Demarest, Carolynn Foster, Lynda Graybeal, and Gayle Withnell. Special thanks to Joan Skulley for caring for many office details during the last months of writing. In addition, Tim Boyd with his expertise in church history, Bill Griffin with his understanding of Roman Catholicism, and Warren Farha with his knowledge of Eastern Orthodoxy helped make the appendices more accurate than they would have been otherwise.

I must add that Carolynn was far more than just a reader of the manuscript. She has lived with my obsession of many years with the ideas of this book. In the pressured final months of writing she took over literally all the responsibilities of home and family. Whenever I was convinced the project was too daunting, she urged me on. Whenever I was convinced the writing was so bad that it would be a mercy to consign it to the fireplace, she said it was good and would be better. Whenever I got too cocky, thinking I was producing a magnum opus, she found the words to bring me back to reality. (Actually, words often were unnecessary; a quizzical look or a slight lift of the eyebrows was sufficient.) She is the most precious person in my lifeI thank her.

I am keenly aware that words are, at best, frozen thought and cannot adequately express the life of the streams of devotion described in this book. Only Jesus, the living Word of God, transcends this limitation. I can only pray that he will take these words and use them to breathe life into your soul.

Richard J. Foster
Ash Wednesday 1998

I hate organized religion. Ive moved way beyond it.

I despise the institutional church. I dont need institutions to depend upon.

I dont believe in communities of worship. I am strong enough to be on my own.

I dont like religion at all. Hypocrites and selfish people invent it to serve their own purposes.

However, Im very spiritual.

You will hear such language over coffee in the browsing rooms of the giant bookstores. It is commonly voiced when celebrities chatter about themselves on late night television. College students will flock to religious studies courses but avoid chapel before they go off variously on their own to find the meaning of life or to commune with the spirit in the woods or get connected with the energy in the universe or be touched by angels.

Helping you become very spiritual no italics, please, for the word very this time is a goal Richard Foster has set for himself in Streams of Living Water. But every page shows that he means something different than do authors of the best-sellers found on bookstore shelves marked Spiritual-Occult-Metaphysical-Holistic-Wholistic-Alternative-Ancient-New Age. Too many pages show that he and those authors only coincidentally use the same wordsSpirit, spiritual, and spirituality as they attempt to convey very different things.

Think of the self-acquired, self-advertised spirituality as a kind of vapor: thin, particled, almost invisible, shapeless, hard to grasp. Whoever boasts the possession of it can escape criticism or judgment. You cannot make congregations out of the clientele that buy into it; they despise concrete community. Think of the kind of spirituality Foster is encouraging as thick, rooted, concrete, always seeking shape, graspable by anyone who would appraise it and reject or improve it.

What are the differences between the two sorts? Many, of course, but at the core is the fact that the first kind is unmoored and the second is moored. The unmoored makes up reality as it goes along; it flits and is fleeting, leaving one at sea. The moored sort, on the other hand, has a harbor and an anchor, a home port from which one heads forth into the storms or to outlast the calms and to which one returns for replenishment.

Moored spirituality is responsible to textual traditions and the communities that attempt to live by them. Those who relate to it may come from any number of religious traditions. They spend their lives studying the Quran or the Upanishads or living in connection with communities that derive from Torah. In the present case, the texts and the communities are Christian, rooted in the Bible and, especially, in Jesus Christ. Foster is not ungenerous to others, but this is the place he knows and advocates, having no choice in the matter because he has been called there.