 Image: Freepik.com There is a diagnosis at the center of Lutheran theology that is either the most liberating thing you have ever heard or the most uncomfortable, depending on where you are when you encounter it.
Martin Luther called this incurvatus in se — a life “curved in on itself,” bent inward, unable to receive life from outside itself. The heart that has folded its doors inward on itself. The soul that keeps recycling its own air, trying to find life within its own limited resources. The person who believes that if they just try harder, think more clearly, breathe more deeply of their own oxygen, they can save themselves. You cannot resuscitate yourself. That is the diagnosis. And it is not primarily a moral judgment — it is a structural one. The problem is not that you are bad at trying. The problem is that you are trying to do something that is, by definition, impossible. You cannot pump your own lungs back to life. You cannot be both the patient and the physician. I see this in spiritual direction more than almost anything else. People come in having worked very hard on themselves. They’ve done the therapy and the reading, built the routines, cultivated a solid interior life. And then something happens — a loss, a failure, a season of dryness that will not lift, a sin they keep returning to despite every intention otherwise — and suddenly the air grows thin. Stale. Familiar in the worst way. They sit across from me and say some version of: I do not understand why this is not working. I have been doing everything right. The problem is not that they have been doing it wrong. The problem is that they have been doing it alone. The disciples in John’s twentieth chapter are doing the same thing. Locked in a room. Breathing the same stale air of Friday — the air of the tomb, the air of endings, the air of what cannot be undone. They are not bad people. They are simply sealed inside the limits of what they can produce on their own. Fear circulates. Grief circulates. Anxiety circulates. Everything becomes recycled air. And then Jesus walks through the wall. Not through the door — through the wall. Without a key, without permission, without waiting for them to get their act together first. He simply occupies the space where their fear has been circulating. And his first word is not a rebuke. It is not a correction. It is not a to-do list. It is Shalom — peace — spoken as a creative act. Not describing a reality that already exists, but calling one into being. Then he does something even stranger. He breathes life into bodies sealed by fear. Not metaphorically. Not symbolically in a distant sense. Breath into lungs that have been locked against hope. If you were a first-century listener, your mind would go immediately to Genesis — to the moment God leaned over dust and breathed the breath of life into nostrils that had never drawn air. John is telling us this is a new creation moment — the Spirit’s breath renewing what fear has sealed shut. The Upper Room has become a new garden. The Risen One stands in the middle of a room full of people surviving on recycled air, and he gives them what they cannot generate. You cannot breathe in a vacuum. You cannot manufacture the breath. You are the recipient of a gift. This is what spiritual direction is, at its best — not a technique for generating spiritual experience, not a system for optimizing your interior life, but a space in which you stop trying to be your own air supply long enough to notice that Someone else is already breathing into the room. The director’s role is not to supply the air. It is to help you notice that the room is already being filled, and to help you stop holding your breath against it. Sometimes that involves naming what is true. Sometimes it involves silence. Sometimes it involves learning to discern the difference between the noise of your own fear and the quieter, steadier breath of grace that is already present but often ignored. The practices matter — lectio divina, centering prayer, the examen, confession. They matter the way open windows matter. They do not create the air. They simply stop you from sealing the room shut. They make space for what is already being given. If you have been working very hard on your interior life and finding that the air still feels thin, that is not a sign that you are failing. It may be a sign that you have been trying to do alone what was never meant to be done alone. Life is already in the room. The only question is whether you will stop trying to be your own air supply long enough to receive it. If you want a companion for that kind of work, spiritual direction is where I do it. The contact page is the place to start. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack]
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 I came home from a retreat at Mustang Island Conference Center with a bag of blessed St. Benedict medals—and a theological problem I had not expected. The problem was simple: what, exactly, is a Lutheran pastor supposed to do with them? Let me tell you how I got into this strange position. The Anglican Order of Preachers—the Dominican community to which I belong as a life-professed friar—is, as the name suggests, a preaching order. Like many mainline religious communities, we are strongest in prophetic witness and social justice. What we are less practiced at is the simple, one-on-one conversation with people who have never heard the Gospel and have no particular reason to listen. So we decided to address that gap. We invited a deacon from the Archdiocese of Galveston–Houston who practices street evangelism—not the aggressive, confrontational variety, but the kind that begins with genuine human contact and grows from there. He spent a day training us: classroom instruction, some role-playing, and then an hour on the streets of Port Aransas speaking with strangers about things that matter. Afterward we gathered for dinner and a long conversation about what we had experienced. During the training, the deacon explained how his team uses sacramentals—rosaries, medals, prayer cards—as conversation starters and simple gifts. Not as magic. Not as luck. Rather, as physical anchors for a spiritual reality the Church has always insisted upon. He brought samples, and we took them with us onto the street. At the end of the evening there were leftovers. The deacon did not want to haul them home, but since the group was mostly Episcopalians, he correctly assumed we were unlikely to make much use of them. I, however, grabbed a bag of blessed St. Benedict medals and brought them back to La Porte, TX where I live and serve the TX LA Gulf Coast Synod (ELCA) as an intentional interim pastor. My first thought was to give them to my Thursday night Bible study group at Light of Christ—a scrappy, lean, no-frills, refreshingly honest crew made up mostly of recovery alumni and people who know the margins of life firsthand. They are exactly the kind of people for whom a physical object that says you are not alone in this fight might matter. In a moment of craving or despair—when faith feels abstract and distant—the cold weight of a medal in the palm can provide a kind of sensory grounding. Then it occurred to me that they would have no framework for what they were holding. The medal bears Latin inscriptions on both sides, including the potent Vade Retro Satana (“Begone, Satan”). It carries a theological tradition stretching back fifteen centuries. At its core, the medal is a scriptural invocation in metal—the Name of Jesus set against the dark. So I wrote a teaching document—but before I could teach it, I had to work something out for myself: what does a Lutheran do with this? Lutherans are not sacramental in quite the same way Roman Catholics are. We have a more narrowly defined set of Sacraments and a less developed theology of sacramentals. We reject any notion that an object works “by the mere performance of the ritual” (ex opere operato) as a mechanism of automatic grace apart from faith and the Word. We are often suspicious—sometimes rightly—of anything that appears to locate spiritual power in a thing rather than in the Word and the Name. Martin Luther himself was emphatic: it is the Word that makes the Sacrament. Without the Word, the element is simply matter. Yet Luther also blessed things. He retained the renunciations, the exorcism, and the exsufflation in the baptismal rite—a reminder that the early church never imagined the Christian life as spiritually neutral terrain. He wrote and sang about spiritual warfare as a present and serious reality. More to the point, Luther understood that God uses material means—water, bread, wine, spoken words—to deliver real promises. The Lutheran tradition has always insisted that the boundary between the physical and spiritual worlds is far more porous than Western modernity is willing to admit. Given that background, there is a precedent, if not a full theological system, for the careful, non-superstitious use of physical signs, properly understood. The St. Benedict medal is not a lucky charm. It promises nothing automatically. It is best understood as a material confession of Jesus’s victory. Its power is entirely His—invoked through faith and prayer, and grounded in the scriptural commands inscribed on its surface. The medal is not a battery of power; it is a sign that points the Christian back to their Baptismal identity. What the medal does is give the person holding it something to hold: a physical anchor in a moment of spiritual pressure. A reminder, pressed into the palm, that the Name of Jesus has already won the ground being contested—not by residing in the object, but by being confessed and trusted in faith. For someone in recovery—someone who knows in their bones what it means to be pulled toward destruction by something that sounds almost reasonable—that is no small thing. People who have lived close to darkness do not need to be convinced that darkness is real. What they need is a theological framework for what they have already experienced—and clarity about what to do when the pressure returns. The full teaching document--The Warfare of Things: A Guide to the Sacred and the Profane—is available as a free download here. It explores the theology of blessed and cursed objects through a Lutheran lens, explains how the St. Benedict medal may be used as a prayer aid, discusses how to identify and remove spiritual footholds in a living space, and argues—concretely and pastorally—that the Church’s tradition of blessing and consecration is not superstition, but pastoral common sense. If you are working with people in recovery—or serving a congregation that has never been given a framework for this territory—the guide was written for precisely that situation. Because sometimes the most pastoral thing the Church can offer is not a new theory, but an old tool placed back into the hands of people who need it. Image: https://www.freepik.com/ Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area [Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] I've been in enough spiritual direction sessions to know that most people don't arrive hoping for an earthquake. They come looking for clarity. For resolution. For the kind of settled peace that would let them finally exhale. They've already done their grieving, or they think they have. They've made their arrangements, accepted their losses, and organized their pain into something manageable. They come the way you visit a grave — to pay respects to something that is, definitively, over. The women in Matthew 28 show up at the tomb the same way. Spices ready. Grief organized. Operating under the oldest law of human existence: dead things stay dead. Then the earth moves. What strikes me — and what I keep returning to in spiritual direction work — is that the earthquake doesn't stop before the angel speaks. The ground is still shaking when the announcement comes: Do not be afraid. The women encounter the news of the Resurrection while their knees are still unsteady. Matthew is honest about what they feel on the way out: "fear and great joy." Not clarity. Not calm. Both things, simultaneously, in a body that is still catching up to what the soul just received. This is what I often see in people at the threshold of genuine spiritual transformation. They want the trembling to stop before they start moving. They want the disorientation to resolve before they trust what they've been told. But the women don't wait. They run while the ground is still vibrating. They carry the news while they're still shaking. Luther's baptismal theology names this precisely. He says Baptism signifies that the old creature — the one who has made peace with the graveyard, who assumes death has the final word — is drowned. Not reformed. Not improved. Drowned. The stone of the old life is rolled away not because you were strong enough to move it, but because God was gracious enough to shatter it. The earthquake of Easter is not a past event you observe. It is a current reality you inhabit. If you are in a season of disruption — if something you assumed was settled has turned out not to be — you may be living inside the seismos without recognizing it as grace. The disorientation is not a sign that something has gone wrong. It may be the first indication that something is being made new. The tomb is empty. The stone has become a bench. The trembling is not the enemy of faith — it may be the shape faith takes at the beginning. If you're navigating a season like this and want a companion for the journey, I work with people in spiritual direction. The contact page is the place to start. Rev. Dr. Steve Stutz Ordained Lutheran Pastor · Intentional Interim Minister · Certified Spiritual Director La Porte, Texas · Houston Area
[Contact] · [LinkedIn] · [The Marginal Note on Substack] |
AuthorRev. Dr. Steve Stutz is an ordained pastor with nearly three decades of ministry in parish, retreat, and teaching settings. He holds a Doctor of Ministry in spiritual direction and serves as an adjunct professor, teaching courses in spiritual direction and discernment. His work focuses on helping individuals and congregations listen more carefully for the movement of the Holy Spirit in everyday life. Through spiritual direction, pastoral consultation, and writing, he explores themes of discernment, spiritual formation, dreams, and the sometimes perplexing experiences that arise in the life of faith. Steve has served congregations in a variety of contexts and currently offers spiritual direction, pastoral consultation, and retreat leadership. When he is not writing or meeting with directees, he enjoys reading widely in theology, philosophy, and the Christian contemplative tradition. Learn more about his work at stevestutz.com. Archives |
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