Stage One — FOUNDATIONS

How should one live?

A Word Before the First Stage

My friend,

Before we begin, I want to say something about the person I imagine holding this book, because if I imagine you wrongly, everything I write afterward will land badly.

I do not imagine a beginner. I imagine someone who has tried before.

I imagine that you have made resolutions. That you have had a season of real seriousness — perhaps more than one — and that it ended, and that you are not entirely sure why. I imagine there is something in your life right now that you would not want read aloud. A habit. A resentment you have been feeding for years. A relationship you have quietly let die because repairing it would cost more than you have. Something you do at eleven o'clock at night that you would prefer no one knew about.

I imagine this because it is the ordinary condition of every human being who has ever gone looking for a way to change, and because it was my condition when I began, and because I have never in my long life met the other kind of person — the one who arrives clean.

So let me say this plainly at the outset, and then not belabor it: none of that disqualifies you. Not one item on the list. This road was not built for people who had already mostly arrived. It was built by, and for, people who kept falling down on it. If you were not carrying anything, you would have no use for what follows.

I want to warn you about this first stage in particular, because it is the one where people leave.

You have come, I suspect, looking for something luminous. Depth. Peace. Perhaps something you would call an experience of God. And what I am going to hand you in these first five chapters is an ancient legal code, a book of proverbs about holding your tongue, a set of moral demands from Jesus that no reasonable person can meet, a letter from James that will make you uncomfortable about your finances, and a very early instruction manual for daily habits.

You will feel, somewhere around the second chapter, that you have been given the wrong book.

I felt exactly that. I remember the feeling with unusual clarity even now — a kind of impatient deflation. I had come asking about the summit and I had been handed a shovel.

It took me the better part of two years to understand that I had not been refused. Foundations are not the alternative to the summit. They are what keeps you there once you arrive. I have met people with extraordinary spiritual experiences and no reliability whatsoever, people who wept in prayer on Sunday and were cruel to their families on Monday, and I want to say gently that this is not hypocrisy. It is a house with a roof and no footings. The rain was always going to bring it down.

So: five chapters of footings. Then we begin to climb.

Be patient with yourself here. Go slowly. And if you find that you cannot do what these chapters ask — that you try the practice for four days and abandon it on the fifth — I want you to know in advance that this is expected, that it is not a sign you have chosen wrongly, and that the only thing that matters is what you do on the sixth day.

Come back on the sixth day. That is the whole discipline. Everything else is commentary.