What comes to your mind when you hear the term "spiritual formation"?

I prefer the term “formation” without an adjective attached to it. In such terms, adjectives usually present an implicit idea of disintegration and fragmentation. So people see these terms without realising that the logical conclusion to there being “spiritual formation” is that there is also “academic formation” which is all together separate from spiritual formation because it is quite an unspiritual form of formation!

When I hear the term “spiritual formation”, what comes to my mind (or rather, what is supposed to come to my mind) is a holistic process of life formation which an individual goes through within the context of a community. This process takes place within the context of a common life within a shared space.

It is immediately obvious that the term “spiritual formation”, for me, cannot be divorced from the communal and communitarian dimensions. For spiritual formation to take place, it has to take place within community. This conviction stems from a theological understanding of God’s nature.

Early Eastern thinkers of the church used to explain the nature of God in this manner: in all eternity, God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – have existed in a state of perichoresis. Perichoresis has two indications, being i) the state of interpenetration in which the three person of the Trinitarian Godhead live, and ii) the dance of life that results in their intimacy of relationship. And God so desires that all human persons reflect that very perichoretic nature of his.

In accordance with this fundamental understanding of God’s nature, the whole goal of spiritual formation is the cultivation of the mind, heart, soul, and hands of a person such that he/she reflects the perichoretic nature of God within community.