THE ACADEMY SERIES  ·  PART 1 OF 3

The Pitcher We Are Becoming

I had been on both sides of that word my whole life and never once noticed it had two.

The Academy for Spiritual Formation is a program of The Upper Room. I am part of Academy #43, and this past week was session five of eight. One of our faculty presenters for the week was Dr. Heidi A. Miller, associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, teaching on prayer and the art of discernment.

I walked into the room not knowing what to expect, and Dr. Heidi was standing there.

Here was this woman with a wonderfully big smile, going around introducing herself to everyone in the room. No pretense. No guile. Just pure personhood — approachable and loving.

By the end of the week she had taken a word I have said ten thousand times without once hearing it, turned it over, and handed it back to me as something I am supposed to become.

The word is just.

She started with an electrician

He had been working for weeks in her brother and sister-in-law’s house, redoing all the wiring after a move. He was from the Czech Republic. At some point they started asking him about himself — who he was, how he was, what he liked to cook. It turned out he loved cooking, and he told them about the spices he put together, the ones he had brought over with him, the aromas of them. Then he started bringing them food.

And he told them: you’re different, because you treat me like I’m human. I’m somebody.

Most of our exchanges are transactions. I know this from thirty years of running a company. I needed the plumbing done, so I heard the plumber. Heidi was careful to say that plumbers and electricians are real gifts, true gifts — the problem isn’t the trade, it’s that the whole of a person gets compressed into what I can get from them. “Rather than the transaction,” she said, “we begin to be seen as human.”

What struck me was that it cost her family nothing. They asked him what he liked to cook. That was the whole intervention. And a man who had been in their house for weeks as a function suddenly became a person with a country and a kitchen and something to give.

A word we use to diminish

That is where she turned to the word.

Just is a word we use to diminish. It’s just me calling. It’s just a passing phase. It’s just in your head — the doctor said to the mother who knew something was wrong with her child. Merely. Only. Barely worth the breath it took. She said it the way you say a word you have been on the receiving end of.

And then she gave us where it comes from. Just traces back through old English and Latin to a juste — a pitcher. There are records of it in the British Isles journals of weights and measures: a vessel of about a gallon and a half, two handles, the thing people carried to be filled with ale or wine. It mattered because merchants kept quietly changing the size of their just so they could shortchange the villagers, and the fines for it were recorded almost daily. So the just became the measure. That’s just enough. That is so just. My just is full.

A pitcher that tells you whether the pour was honest.

“But what about us becoming the just?” she asked. “Us being the vessel. Us being the pitcher who learns to listen differently and pour out what is true.”

My first thought was: crap

Because I have always thought of myself as a just man. That is the word I would have used. In business, in my dealings with people, I was fair. I paid what I said I would pay. I did what I said I would do. The second definition — fair, equitable, guided by justice — I thought I had earned that one.

And then she told us about the merchants. How they quietly changed the size of their just so the pour came up short, and how the fines for it were being recorded almost every day.

Did I shortchange people?

Thirty years. Hundreds of employees. A thousand conversations where I was the one holding the pitcher and deciding what a fair pour looked like. I would like to believe the measure was honest every time. I am not sure I can.

And the other sense of the word came for me in the same breath. Did I ever say just let it be? Did I use that word to wave someone off — to close a conversation I did not want to have, to make a thing smaller than it was so I would not have to carry it?

I know the answer to that one.

I had been on both sides of that word my whole life and never once noticed it had two.

Where the story starts

Then she said the part I keep returning to. She asked where the story starts.

Most of us, she said, live from Genesis 3 forward. The fall, and then everything after.

“Notice where the story starts,” she said. “And notice what the hope of the story is — that I won’t go to hell.”

She brought in Brian McLaren’s observation that the hook which draws a person into Christianity is often the hook that has to keep bringing them back. Which means somebody has to keep making you feel worse about yourself in order to get you further in.

“That’s not where God begins,” she said. “The divine begins with creating. Again, and again, and again. And it’s rooted and dwells in belovedness.”

Original blessing. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning. A rhythm, she said — a rhythm of rooting ourselves in belovedness again and again and again, because we do not stay rooted, and the going back is the practice.

She asked the room what the word belovedness evokes. People called it out. Unconditional. Embraced by Christ. Belonging. A gift. Mattering. Cherished. Acceptance.

And then she asked the harder one, which is the question I came home with: what keeps us from dwelling there?

Because something does. I have sat in rooms where every person could have given the right answer about being beloved and not one of us was living out of it on a Tuesday afternoon in traffic.

Longing at the back of the line

She got at it by having people act it out. One person in a chair — that’s you, the self. Someone standing behind, driving — that’s what’s driving you. Someone behind that, the spirit of it. And behind that, farther back than you would think to look, longing.

Lynette was called up to stand as longing.

I watched my wife take her place at the back of that line, farther from the chair than anything else in it, and something in me went quiet. It is one thing to hear that longing sits underneath everything driving us. It is another to see it acted out with someone you love standing in the part.

Then she layered in the God images, the negative ones people have carried — what are you doing, I’m coming to get you — and had them stand in front, between the person and everything else. Her point was plain enough once you saw it standing up in a room: how a person functions in the world is bound to their image of God, and most of us are working off images we never chose and never examined.

Becoming The Just Reflection Sheet

Spiritual, not religious

That is where something came loose for me.

I have been conflicted most of my adult life about what the right way is to lead a spiritual life. Spiritual — not religious. Those are not the same thing, and I have never been able to say cleanly why they aren’t.

The religious version always came with the starting point already handed to me. You are a sinner, here is the gap, here is the bridge, now pray after me. It worked on me when I was young, the way it works on everybody. But it never settled, and for fifty years I could not name what was unsettled about it.

This talk cleared it up. The problem was never that the religious version asked too much of me. The problem was where it starts the story. If I begin at Genesis 3, every practice I take up afterward is remedial — I am working my way back toward something I am told I lost. If I begin where she says God begins, in creating and in belovedness, then the practice is not a repair job. It is a return to what was already true.

That is the difference I could never articulate. Religion handed me a deficit to close. The spiritual life she was describing hands you a given to dwell in.

I am seventy-four years old. I would have liked to have that forty years ago. I will take it now.

The pitcher I would like to be becoming

What I came away with is not a technique. Heidi was careful about that all week — a spiritual practice is not the thing itself, it is what distills the thing. The purpose, she said, is that we become it. “I can become God’s prayer in the world. I can be a breath bearer instead of a breath taker.”

A breath bearer instead of a breath taker. A vessel instead of a word that means barely.

I wrote down my first impression of her before I knew any of this. I said she was just pure personhood. I meant it the way we all mean it — merely, simply, nothing more than that. But that isn’t what the word does. A just is a vessel, and the measure of it is whether the pour is honest.

She had been exactly that, standing in the doorway, before she said a word about it.

Just enough. My just is full.

That is the pitcher I would like to be becoming.

Part 1 of 3. Part 2: presence, the body, and why we cannot achieve it. Part 3: being grounded when the ground is moving.

Peace and every good.

 

With gratitude to Dr. Heidi A. Miller

Everything of substance in this post is hers. The teaching on just, the etymology of the pitcher, the Genesis 1 and 2 framing, the exercise that put longing at the back of the line, the phrase breath bearer instead of breath taker — all of it came from her sessions at Academy #43, session five, October 2026. The quotations are drawn from recordings of those sessions. What is mine is only what it did to me.

Dr. Miller is associate professor of spirituality and Christian ministry at Mercer University’s McAfee School of Theology, where she directs the Doctor of Ministry program.

About Jim & Lynette Vaive

Jim and Lynette Vaive are the co-founders of spirit of EQ and co-authors of The Mystical Seeker. They are Master Certified Coaches, certified Narrative Enneagram teachers, and Certified Spiritual Directors. Together they hold credentials in Spiritual Emotional Intelligence (SEQ) — a framework rooted in Lynette’s Doctor of Ministry research — and serve individuals, small groups, and organizations across faith traditions. Learn more at spiritofeq.com.

Sources

Dr. Heidi A. Miller, “Prayer and the Art of Discernment,” The Academy for Spiritual Formation #43, session five, October 2026 (The Upper Room). Quotations drawn from session recordings.

Brian D. McLaren on the entry point of Christian formation — a recurring theme across his work.