By Kat Silverglate © 2026
A small group of writers from various parts of the United States got together to encourage one another in, what felt like, a call to figure out how to release hope-filled words into a world smothered by information overload. We were strangers before the group came together. One of the participants often shared her progress through this lens – "can I just tell you that's saving my life right now?" While she didn’t coin the phrase [it was popularized by writer Emily P. Freeman] she clearly embraced it as a filter through which she saw God’s constant help in the regular din of life.
Sometimes it was an artistic endeavor that reminded her that God gave her agency to form beautiful things out of scraps of raw material. Sometimes it was a new tea that gave her an excuse to be unapologetically introverted and pull away from the chaos of kids or home renovations. Her “saving me right now” things, in some way, both formed impressions of God’s constant presence with her and informed her writing. Her personal formation frame of reference seemed to be securing a portrait of a woman being rescued all… the… time…
The words “spiritual formation” first appeared on my radar screen a few decades ago in connection with a book recommendation: Celebration of Discipline: The Path to Spiritual Growth by Richard Foster. If you research “must read Christian classics,” it will show up every time. Based on my respect for and admiration of the not-of-this-world steadiness inside the recommender, I bought it right away. It landed on the “must read this classic one day” spot on the bookshelf where it gathered dust until we boxed it to move with us a few years ago. It sat on a similar shelf in our new home until a few weeks ago. Familiar scribbles and underline marks on the yellowed pages indicated a careful reading of pages 1-37 and nothing after that.
Looking back, I’m guessing the association between the word “discipline” in the title and the more inviting concept of spiritual formation automatically lowered a blackout shade between me and my desire to be shaped by more effective means than the ones pressing at the time. Discipline evoked, for me, the notion of force. Harshness. Bending to the will of the disciplinarian or being broken in the attempt to resist. The inner voice that sometimes talks me out of things I desperately need sounds more like a drill sergeant than a loving Father: "Hey you, Silverglate, get back in formation, or..." Or what? I’m not sure what the “or” was at the time. “Not pleasant” is perhaps a good umbrella for the vibe discipline’s personification gave off.
Here’s what made me pick the book up again. And not just pick it up but really want to digest it like a meal that would satiate a gnawing hunger pain. I entered a group formation dynamic similar to the hope writers I’d come to love – strangers from different states who gathered through a tour organization around a passion for travel combined with athletic movement [think hiking and biking and the like].
At the start of the adventure, the organizers arranged a few welcome dinners so participants could get to know one another a bit before the week unfolded. The chatter was lively and mixed with the sound of clinking glasses and silverware scraping yummy food from plates. “Have you ever done an adventure like this before?” “Where are you from?” “Do you know anybody else in the group?” “What do you do for a living?” “Do you have kids?” “Are you nervous? You look like a serious athlete. I’m just a poser hoping to keep up.”
In a rare moment for this extreme extrovert, I found myself feeling awkward in the new group dynamic where everybody else seemed to have found a talking partner. Scanning the table for a lifeline, I spotted a gentleman who seemed to be in a similar boat and made eye contact. “So, what’s your story?” I blurted out before he looked away. His response came with, what seemed like, a deep ‘here we go’ breath and the words, “well, that’s a loooooong story.” I quipped back while my hands and eyes moved to the left and the right toward the other pockets of conversation, “looks like we’ve got some time… let’s give it a shot.”
His story quickly turned toward a kind of formation talk – almost like a TED Talk about one of the major circumstances that formed who he was becoming. He took me on what felt like an epic adventure from the darkest night of his soul to his current profession – the owner of a pottery studio. I had a front row center stage ticket to his unscripted, unrehearsed, from the heart in-formation story. And it was riveting. The best I can do as I recount this is to give the gist since it was offered in a lively social setting across a very loud public table. What landed so profoundly in my heart is no doubt what the Lord intended me to be moved by, so it’s hard in the retelling to know whether I’m remembering with exactitude or holding on to the way my heart interpreted it. Either way, my hope is that you'll receive this story in that spirit.
With a loving family and no reason to be depressed, he fell into a dark place emotionally. So dark that he had trouble functioning. He did many of the advisable things one does when depression lands. He saw doctors and counselors and went on various medications, but his darkness didn’t lift over an extended period of time. He’d force himself out of the house when he needed to buy groceries or do some necessary thing or another, but when he’d spot a person he knew, he’d do all he could to avoid them. “I didn’t want to answer the question, ‘how are you?’” He wasn’t well.
Eventually someone, maybe his counselor or a friend or family member, suggested that he take a class at a local college. Perhaps they were suggesting something, anything, that would shift his focus from escaping darkness to figuring out what might ignite a spark? After scanning the adult education offerings, he landed on a ceramics class.
I wish I could do justice to his description of what happened to his heart in that class. The teacher began by teaching the students to make a pinch pot; a simple clay pot formed with human hands. It’s a rudimentary form of pottery that has been used by civilizations for thousands of years. As he listened to the instructor and used his hands to form the clay, everything else seemed to fall away. He was, in that moment, completely present. He was, despite depression, through the gently guided encouragement of the teacher, able to form something useful from a blob of formless clay. He couldn’t explain why the activity gave him the first moments of relief from his darkness, but he pinpoints the pinch pot as THE moment the darkness started to lift and continued to lift as he fell in love with pottery. And that was just the appetizer.
The second course featured the death of his beloved ceramics teacher. Sitting with people from all over the town, the eulogizer asked if anyone, affected in some meaningful way by the guidance of this special teacher, wanted to speak. He knew as soon as the invitation hit his ears that he was the one. But he’d never publicly shared the story of the dark-night-of-his-soul. Many in the room knew him or his family, but not this. I’m paraphrasing here: “I got up and I told the story. The depth of the darkness. The class. The teacher guiding me to form something useful from clay.” That was many years ago. Still, he says, he runs into people from his town who stop him and ask, “do I know you from somewhere?” He describes one of his responses this way: “I don’t know. I own the local ceramic studio. Perhaps that’s it?” And then they say something like, “You’re the guy who spoke at the teacher’s funeral.” He nods knowing that something in his story stuck a chord, maybe helping someone who needed to know they aren’t alone.
The dessert portion of his condensed epic began with the way he now welcomes kids for camp and adults for corporate events to his studio to try their hand at pottery. To learn that they, like him, have been given agency to make beautiful things out of raw materials. Paraphrasing again, he shares it something like this: “But I’m not creative,” they say. “We all are,” he responds. “But I’ve never done anything like this before,” they say. “I’ll guide you,” he responds. “But I don’t want to mess up,” they say. “We’ll do it together,” he says. Mostly, people who enter the potter’s studio exhibit a paralyzing fear of failure and judgment. These fears, he says, are the most pervasive reactions to the first day in the molding room. He concluded his story with a thought, or maybe it was a question: It seems like there is something primal in us that wants to emerge if we can just shed those fears.
When he finished, I simply said “He is the potter and you are the clay.” He nodded as if he knew the biblical reference.
“I wonder if God was meeting you where you were. Empty. Having done all you knew to do. Showing you that verse that talks about how He set eternity our souls. I wonder if that primal thing is discovering that you were formed from nothing for a purpose? To be picked up from what felt like a lifeless lump of clay and gently handled by the Potter? Allowing you to feel your own value to Him through the agency He gave you to mold clay into useful vessels?”
He responded with a nod that I interpreted as “perhaps.”
I came home full of a zillion formation thoughts and a central question. How much of formation is an act of the will. An act of discipline. We know we need help in some area or another or that we are called in a direction and we set a target and do all we know to do to hit the mark. We define goals, set benchmarks, aim as best we can, for the actions that will bring us closer to the bullseye. Yet, He is the potter and we are the clay. He is doing the transforming. How much of formation is the invasion by a loving Potter who holds us in His grip and convinces us He is there in the dark and in the “what’s saving us right now” moments?
Turns out, Richard J. Foster had the same question when he wrote Celebration of Discipline. The moment we grasp that all good and righteous things – including our salvation and desire for spiritual formation -- are the work of God in us and not the result of our own strength or striving, Foster suggests:
“we are tempted to believe there is nothing we can do... [I]f righteousness is a gracious gift from God, then is it not logical to conclude that we must wait for God to come and transform us? Strangely enough, the answer is no."
Foster, Celebration of Discipline
The word discipline, in Foster’s framework, refers to the deliberate choice we make to place ourselves before God so that we can be transformed. Spiritual disciplines like prayer, study, service, confession, worship, guidance, celebration and the like are means of grace – placing us with the Potter in His studio where our active engagement with Him and His active engagement with us forms us as He intends. He is the bullseye. Being in intimate relationship with Him is the transformation. That primal thing my biking friend referenced – that thing that we would run to if fear and judgement were released – that urge to emerge – is the Potter’s poke, prod and nudge to trust that He sent His son to take the judgment we fear upon Himself so that we can, without fear, sit face to face with the Potter as He works in and with us.
As Paul assures us in 2 Cor 3:18, those who deliberately put themselves in a place to contemplate the Lord’s glory, “are being transformed into his image with ever increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit.”
Our Responsiveness Mission:
In your mission pack, you will find a bullseye sticker, an up arrow and three “To/From” stickers. We’ve all attempted to move TO a good or righteous or healthy place away FROM a difficult or unrighteous or unhealthy place. Take those 3 To/From stickers and write three areas where you are moving away from something and toward something else good.
Whatever transformation you pine for. Whatever goal you've set. Whatever you are waiting for. His presence in it with you, guiding and leading you, is the prize. His presence transforms. Place the up arrow on the bullseye as a reminder.
Consider looking at the “spiritual disciplines” and exploring where you are in your deliberate choice to place yourself with Him in prayer, meditation, study, worship, and the like. If these are places where the Lord says we will find intimacy with Him which leads to transformation, is it reasonable to see these as visits to the Potter’s studio where we can expect formation?
Epilogue: My tour-loving athletic friend told some stories about the kids in pottery class. He reminds them that when they are making something like a cat or an animal with ears, they must "score and slip" the clay. It's a fundamental ceramics technique used to securely join two pieces of clay together. Scoring means scratching hatch marks into the surfaces being connected, while slip is a watery clay mixture used as glue. Together, they weld the clay pieces so they won't crack or fall apart as they dry. In our suffering… our rough patches… our scored places… we are ripe for attachment. Thirsty for the living water of the Lord. The spiritual disciplines, in a way, act as a glue joining us to the One who holds and forms us in the fire.
Amen? Amen!
