The Need to Go Deep
It's a phrase I've heard several times lately, that the church doesn't need more activity, more programs, or more new buildings--what we need is to go deep. Deep as in spiritually deep. A pastor recently told me we need to be "more spiritual."
Bear with me here, I'm just going to think out loud for awhile, try to get at something I'm wondering about, the connection of body and spirit, and whether the duality holds up.
We see with half-eyes, eyes that catch only one side of reality. There are no issues in the world that are non-spiritual issues. There is no divorce between physical and spiritual reality. We cannot separate them, focusing on one rather than the other. I know we talk as if we can, that our language seems to function as if we can approach them separately, but in fact, in the actual stuff of living, at what point do our spirits take vacations from the actions of our lives? At what point do our actions emerge from somewhere other than our inner life? Our unseen life of thought, feeling, image, idea--the stuff of mind?
Our spiritual life changes, reflects different orientations, engages in the movement of major and minor themes, but to work on anything is to be working spiritually, spiritually engaged. All stories are stories of spirits, spirits crushed or spirits soaring, with their bodies taking the actions appropriate to that state of being. Bodies can lead, sure, because they are involved in the intimate exchange of energy that is life. But the spirit/body split we worry over is false, an experienced illusion. Perhaps its the speed with which spirit moves, the subtlety of the connections, the mixture of urges that run the gamut from instinct to years-long planning that confuses us, makes us think we are not, in a particular moment, being spiritual. So we need to change, be more "spiritual."
I understand that to say that is a functional way of talking, but the point is that to separate spirit and body in any real sense is to miss the wonder of what God has done in creation.
Isn't what we mean is that we need to be more fully human? What I mean by that is to live in mind and body with a growing cognizance that material is not all there is. That the Biblical picture of reality is not one of physical and spiritual disconnection, but one of connection. Jesus and Paul both draw pictures of sexuality as being a matter of both spirit and body, the body's action revealing the spirit's true urge. What does Jesus say except that the heart will be revealed through the actions of the body? Of course there are divisions within and without--it is the fallen nature of things, our fallen nature. The battles of spirit are battles of body, and vice versa, and to war in one realm is to war in the other. The great foolishness of our time, and any time, is to think that we can act one way and be another way in spirit, when in fact there is a kind of illusion inside us to think that though I act this way, I am really another. We act as we are.
Yet Paul does talk about a division, especially as it relates to the life of our spirit, that our sinful nature continues to work against us, even as we try to live the life that Christ calls us to. Which again, seems to indicate that something or someone else has access to our spiritual lives. It would seem that temptation is to present an action or attitude to the mind of the spirit in orderr that the spirit might take under consideration that particular sinful action or attitude in order to gain a thing for itself. And it would seem that when a surge of energy counteracts that temptation, that perhaps there has been an invasion by another outside force (we usually call that force, that person, the Holy Spirit), so that now we see that there are at least three agents that have access to the inner life. God, Satan, and the individual.
So perhaps what we mean by being "more spiritual" is to pursue actions that address the place of origin of human activity, that inner life that is the seed of all lived, physical life. A long way around I suppose, to come again to "as a man thinks in his heart, so he is."
So spirituality and physicality are linked, relationally positioned so that to touch one is to touch the other. Even so, the unseen side, the inner life, our spiritual nature is primary, a major theme to the physicality's minor. This is not a rank of importance, but an acknowledgement of relationship so that the human can be more fully appreciated, more fully lived.
So take a look at the life of action that surrounds us. This is who we are.
Yes...we need to go deeper if we are to find the heart of the Christ.
6:05:47 AM
