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I continually have to monitor my spiritual life. How much of it is form without substance?
Gladys Hunt
January 1, 1993
I continually have to monitor my spiritual life. How much of it is form without substance?
We stood by the casket and looked at what remained-the seemingly premature death of a good and notable theologian.
After weeks and hours attending his brother-in-law, helping him die, Tom's emotional wounds were obvious. "This is terribly wrong," he groaned. He strained for words to express his grief. "It's … it's form without substance."
Those words, form without substance, worked their way into my mind. That is what makes death so awesome. This man should be substance, but we saw only form. The implications seemed outrageous. Form without substance is the essence of sin and its terror.
In the days that followed I was haunted by that phrase-form without substance. I thought of it as we counseled a couple, married some ten years, who had never connected in ways that bring genuine intimacy. The husband's hierarchical definition of marriage demanded that his wife meet his needs. In the beginning she had agreed, but as she matured she became more her own person and a threat to him. He raged against her spirituality; she dug her heels in to protect her identity. The more they talked the more we realized they had the form of marriage but no substance.
The fraternity man who played the role of Lothario, boasting of his conquests, came for help far too late. He had left a trail of brokenness. His own sense of self was fractured. He spoke of "making love," when he knew nothing of love. His involvement with pornography, first found in his father's closet, had led him to see women as two-dimensional fantasies. Addicted to "form without substance," the act without the relationship, the outline without the interior reality-could he understand ...
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