Hey friends, welcome back to the Pastor Talk podcast.
Glad you’re here.
Thanks for joining us again for another episode of Jesus Jargon.
Today we think about a word that may be one of
those that if you’ve been in the church for a while,
you think you understand.
But it’s an interesting word and it represents,
I think, some interesting conversations.
So today we take a look
at the word “spiritual.” And historically,
I think especially in the western part of the world,
this has been attributed to the church.
And spiritual and Christian kind of went hand in
hand.
But what we’ve seen over the last several decades is that this word has kind of moved off
and in many circles now stands on its own.
Right.
So the problem with a word like “spiritual”
is that it both invites extreme specificity.
You can talk about one particular denomination and
their ways of expressing their spiritual life.
And on the other side,
it’s so unbelievably broad.
It’s almost unhelpful to try to talk about what we mean by “spiritual.” In America, for instance,
sort of this western larger culture that we have,
you know,
today you have people who
think about spirituality from within the faith.
They think about prayer practices and devotional readings of scripture.
And then, you know, maybe even right next to them in the pew or a family member,
you have someone who’s compelled by Buddhist ideology and the idea of the spiritual
among us.
Or you have people who really askew more traditional religion writ large and they’re just
spiritual but not religious.
The idea that that I see God in nature.
So I think you have these
incredibly different broad spectrums.
You have this specific and we could dig deep into what we
mean by a particular kind of spirituality.
And then you have this very sort of broad cultural
spirituality where people seem to be comfortable about talking about being spiritual people,
but they don’t seem to believe that that’s connected to any form of communal practice or institutional connection.
And so we sort of enter the conversation that way.
I think it’s helpful to
the conversation by saying that for the historical sort of western church,
it’s been expected that
the church did have something to say about spirituality,
about what was inbounds, what wasn’t inbounds.
The church very much encouraged people throughout all history to practice spiritual
practices in one way or another.
And so I think we enter the conversation with a lot of different components in it.
But it’s worth saying that this is a highly relevant topic in the world
in which we live if we can tease out how it’s connected to the substance of our faith.
I think for me the change is best represented by looking historically.
The word spiritual would
have almost always been tied to a particular faith or a particular set of practices within that faith.
So in the western world that would have largely been Christianity.
In the eastern world it might have been Buddhism or Hinduism.
But when people talked about spiritual,
they generally talked about representing a specific faith tradition and implementing the practices of that tradition.
So not long ago Michael and I did a podcast series on spiritual practices,
things like prayer, things like fasting, things like gratitude and generosity and giving,
and that’s seen within a Christian framework.
I think what we see more and more lately,
and I would say lately the last 30, 40 years,
is a willingness to talk about spiritual
disconnected from a faith tradition or even a set of practices.
So there’s an increasing number
of people who will call themselves spiritual.
But if you ask them what it is that they practice,
they would struggle to say this,
that, or the other.
It would be a more generic kind of spiritual.
It would be the idea of being happy.
It would be the idea of doing things that seem to fill the
tank and things that you enjoy.
But it would not generally encompass the historic language
of a particular faith tradition or maybe those historic spiritual practices.
Though
possibly meditation might sneak its way in there,
but even then I think in my experience it would
be likely that you’d be talking about something not really recognizable as a classic or historical spiritual discipline.
So I don’t want to get too historical here,
and so I’ll be very brief,
but when we talk about spiritual today in the church,
especially the western church,
we are very much
shaped by the reality of being post-Pentecostal.
In the early 1900s we had a movement here in the
United States that spread rapidly around the entire world,
and we even in the mainline
denomination have a charismatic movement,
whether that be Presbyterian or Episcopal.
There’s this sense in which when you turn to scripture you see all of what we would call
spiritual things.
Jesus cast demons out of people and into swine.
You have these stories
of people being miraculously healed,
food miraculously multiplies to feed a crowd.
I think
within our imagination we have these ideas of things like post-Pentecost,
people speaking in tongues.
These are the images of spiritual to us,
and especially since the early 1900s that has been
lived out in our culture by some really Christian families that have taken it literally.
So if you go to a Pentecostal congregation you might see people speaking in tongues.
There are faith traditions of people who lay hands on the sick for supernatural healings and even farther than
that like holding snakes.
There’s a whole bunch of sort of these practices written in the idea of being spiritual.
The reason I mention that is only to say that I think that’s a relatively
short blip on the historical radar.
The church has thought about being spiritual for hundreds
and thousands of years,
and there’s some really rich writing and reflection and guidance that
we receive from the church mothers and fathers,
and I think that as we think about being spiritual,
I want to just warn us from the outset,
don’t immediately get into your mind the Hollywood stuff,
right?
The demons and the fighting spiritual warfare and all of these other kinds
of things, which I’m not,
they are certainly biblical.
We certainly could have a conversation
about how they fit,
but I want to just point out there’s a much,
much deeper root system than that
in the history of the church.
When we talk about things being spiritual,
we actually have this
long history of this connection between prayer,
meditation,
of course, reading the scripture,
and that transforming our behavior and practice in the world such that even the physical things
that we do can be a form of spiritual practice.
This is the sort of rich history that we have,
and I’d hate to get locked in from the beginning of this conversation on maybe one particular
imagination of what we mean by spiritual.
Yeah, I do think that as that category has
broadened, at least as the word spiritual has gained a wider usage,
there has been a curious shift historically,
and check me on this, Michael,
spiritual in faith traditions has largely meant
to kind of disengage with the world.
So the Christian spiritualists often went and lived in
small communes, or they moved out on their own.
Even in the Eastern religions,
there’s this sense of practicing a withdrawal from the world,
of fasting, of giving up your possessions.
I think interestingly enough,
the later usage of spiritual that we’ve seen in the late 20th and
21st century has to do with a kind of engagement with the world.
So it tends to be very nature oriented.
It tends to be very much the idea of being connectional.
I appreciate the earth,
I connect with things that are in need,
the environmentalism and spiritualism have had an
interesting partnership in some circles.
And what has happened as that has been the case
is that we now have people who can use this phrase that Michael mentioned a minute ago,
spiritual but not religious.
In other words, people who claim for themselves a spirituality
but do not claim for themselves an identification of it belonging somewhere to some tradition,
to some denomination,
to some religion, so that I can consider myself a spiritual person
in whatever that means,
but not a religious person.
And that’s a distinction that has really
not existed in that way.
We’ve always talked about not simply going to church.
In other words, Christians have always been concerned about people who were only religious,
but we’ve never separated the two and said you could be spiritual apart from the practice of a faith.
And I think that does put us in some kind of new territory.
Yeah, and I think it already exposes some of the
danger of that language,
Clint, is because notice when you start thinking about particularly those
sort of naturalistic forms of spiritual expression,
the only way that one can participate in that
is through a personal encounter.
It’s all self-referential.
So, you know, the person who goes on nature walks or nature hikes and they consider that their soul or their most important
sort of spiritual practice.
The only thing in that is that it has to be done by you,
and often alone, right?
It has a very sort of self-centered sort of orientation to it.
And the danger in thinking of spirituality that way is it puts us at the center of the universe.
It means that everything else serves the purpose of us having that spiritual encounter.
So people go off
in search of their spiritual experience,
and that fits our cultural milieu.
It makes sense to us as a people,
but that is actually counter the Christian gospel.
People, of course, went on crusades, and there was a kind of individualism,
but not in the stripe that we have in our current
moment.
There was a sense in which you practice time-honored things,
like praying the Psalms would
be a great example.
The Psalms have been historically a kind of liturgical movement
that people did in their lives,
a return to it daily,
and it was out of that practice that one
expected to be participating in this spiritual thing.
It wasn’t about manufacturing an experience
or trying to create an emotional feeling.
We get so much guilt of that in the modern Christian
church, this idea that I don’t feel God’s presence enough.
I didn’t hear God’s voice.
Well, that’s the reality of the Christian faith.
We don’t often feel it.
We don’t often hear the
voice, but yet we’re called to be faithful.
There are real things that we are called to be
discipled in, and I mean that,
to literally practice regularly, to have discipline.
And sometimes I think we miss that aspect of the spiritual for the very sort of individualized
and emotion-heavy version that we sort of bear with us in our modern times.
Historically, within Christianity at least, and I think,
I couldn’t argue this,
but I believe it to be true,
in the Eastern religions as well,
spiritual is typically not
a label one would apply to themselves.
It would have been said about someone,
but others would have said it.
He or she is spiritual.
It seems increasingly spiritual is a label we apply to ourselves.
I claim for myself that I am a spiritual person,
and the danger in that is if you start digging,
well, what does that mean?
Do you spend some time meditating?
No, I just appreciate everyone.
Do you practice charity?
Do you volunteer time?
Do you help with soup kitchens?
No, I just try to treat everyone equally.
And the danger is that the way we use the word sort of
roms spirituality of its deeper meaning,
and as those who exist in the church and the world,
as we hear the world use the term,
we can forget what it actually means,
which is to embody the spirit of Jesus Christ in the way we live,
not simply as some label we apply to ourselves,
but in our actual practices,
in the way that we pray,
in the priorities that we set,
in the way that we manage our time and money.
And these are the markers of what it means to be spiritual.
And it is important in the church that we don’t forget those.
That’s a very, very helpful word, Clint.
And, you know, it’s kind of funny that two
Presbyterian ministers are talking about spiritual because a critique labeled against the
Reformed tradition writ large,
but more, I think even more specifically against Presbyterians,
is that we tend to be relatively thoughtful,
and in some ways less expressive as a people.
That’s not always true,
but I think broadly,
that’s sort of perceived.
And, you know, I want to make it very clear that Presbyterians,
as we come to this,
we do have some skepticism,
particularly about really sort of emotion heavy kind of expressions of the faith.
Presbyterians have historically not been against,
but they’ve cautioned that they’ve sought some
real sort of careful steps within those seasons.
I think of someone like Jonathan Edwards,
who was probably one of the preeminent Presbyterian thinkers,
if not of all time, certainly in America.
And his theological writings were very much written to explore and understand the Great
Awakening, which was one of the greatest sort of spiritual movements in the history of the United States.
And so Presbyterians have engaged in these things,
and we’ve generally said,
you know,
that we should seek to be people who live out this kind of spiritual walk,
that there’s more to life than just the physical that surrounds us,
that there is an experiencing of the divine,
that this is a good thing.
That said, Presbyterians have been generally a little cautious,
we’ve generally warned not to put too much stake in emotion and feeling,
and to recognize that
sometimes those things cloud us from seeing things that are true for our own biases or for
our own desires for personal experience or personal expression.
So I just want to say that
there’s some irony that we talk about it,
but there is history of us engaging these things
seriously as a people of faith.
Yeah, and I do think that on the flip side,
another interesting change that has happened in regard to some of those realities is another word that we use,
religious.
And we’ve mentioned it,
spiritual, but not religious.
And I think almost in my lifetime,
though there’s been a sense in which it’s true prior to that,
but almost in my lifetime,
the word religious has gone from a compliment,
you would say, about someone to nearly an insult,
the idea that religious almost now implies a lack of spiritual rather than an embodiment of spiritual.
And I think that has worked its way into the church.
I certainly would hesitate to
call myself religious or to call others religious as it’s currently used in our language,
because I think that it carries a negativity right now.
As we’ve tried to elevate the idea of spiritual,
we’ve simultaneously, it seems to me,
perhaps lowered the idea of religious,
which simply historically meant engaged with a faith tradition,
one who was serious about
the tradition in which they practice the faith.
But it now almost means someone who is kind of
critically involved, but not spiritually directed.
I think some people do have this image of the
spiritual that lies very close to what we see the Apostle Paul talking about in the epistles,
about this idea of that our body is like a tent and that we will cast away that tent,
and that the spiritual self will be the one that is revealed in the end,
the one held in the eternal vision of God’s love.
What is interesting about that is if we overemphasize
sort of that duality between the physical and the spiritual,
what we’re going to end up missing is
the ultimate truth of the gospel,
that Jesus Christ unified those two things,
that incarnation literally means God who is divine, the ultimate spiritual.
I mean spiritual capital S underlying italics,
bold, right?
I mean Jesus is God,
but yet fully human.
And the binding of those two together into one,
this faith that we proclaim, this mysterious gospel,
this is the thing that
transforms our understanding of what it means to be spiritual people.
So I very much push against
and hesitate to speak about sort of those dual understandings when people say,
you know, “Oh, I just can’t wait to cast off this flesh.
I can’t wait to get rid of this life and go on to the
future spiritual life.” Well,
I mean that’s a good gift,
right?
That’s the hope of resurrection.
And we as people of faith celebrate that,
but we sometimes overemphasize the spiritual in our
imaginations such that it does keep us,
to your point Clint,
from really living out the faith in
real meaningful and practical ways if we devalued religion so that we want to be people who are spiritually pure,
but religiously nothing,
then that may result in us being a whole bunch of
belief with zero action.
And that is incoherent with the faith that we proclaim.
Yeah. By definition of being human, our spirituality and our religious practice of it are flawed,
but religion historically
is the structure in which our spirituality gets enacted.
We go to worship.
We give.
We volunteer.
We read scripture.
We pray.
We fast.
These are the tools to develop that interior spiritual life.
And therefore, I think what we see in Christ is a man who is both religious,
a practicing Jew, and deeply spiritual.
And those two things work together.
They inform one another.
They strengthen one another.
And that brings us to the third word that I consider important in this conversation,
which is faithful.
I think faithful for me is currently perhaps the best expression of the
target we aim at because spiritual is very unclear as to what that means culturally.
Religious has this sort of negative connotation with some people.
And so I find myself drawn to
the idea of being faithful,
of being true to my beliefs,
of being true to the gospel,
of being spiritually nurtured and spiritually developed in real ways that are in keeping with
the things I profess in my faith.
And so just as a personal discipline and as a personal reality,
I find myself drawn far more to the word faithful than either probably the word spiritual or religious.
Yeah, you know, some of the disciples that I’ve had the privilege of walking alongside
who have exhibited some of the most wisdom,
in my estimation, are the ones who see absolutely no
distinction between the spiritual and the physical.
Their faith is for them a unified
reality so that when they’re reading the scriptures,
that’s informing them and enriching them for the
graciousness that they will show to others,
the patience that they will choose over frustration,
the love that they will show when they’re serving at the food pantry.
You know, I think we sometimes strive to make one thing great and in doing so fail to recognize the importance of doing both.
But real spirituality,
I would argue, Clint, is the kind of life that unifies the
deep faith in God and the practices that nurture that faith.
That a person who is spiritual is
also going to be religious.
I mean, and I don’t mean that in the negative sense,
but they’re going to live that out with real people and in real ways.
And so in some ways,
as we come to the conversation of spiritual,
we have to sort of define what we’re not talking about.
But then ultimately,
and as in every conversation we should,
we land on Jesus Christ and we say,
ultimately,
everything that will make us more like him,
everything that will form us into the image
of who he was,
of what he taught and makes the kingdom that he proclaimed a little bit more real
in our life.
That is what we’re called to be as people of faith.
That is spirituality at work.
That is the spirit living within us.
And that’s this sort of beautiful gift that we’re invited
to participate in.
It’s not necessarily easy to pin down,
you know, and I think that’s maybe where
Presbyterians sometimes spin our wheels.
It’s not easily put on a whiteboard with graphs and charts and lines.
It looks far more like just faithfully living.
It looks far more like waking up with a
determination for that day,
the gospel to be made more true in our hearts.
And in that way,
it’s less about the head and it’s more about our gut.
It’s more about our heart.
It’s more about walking into the day and allowing God to do with us as God chooses.
In some sense, the simplest way to think about spiritual is that we set our compass on the heading of Jesus Christ,
that Christ becomes the bearing by which we navigate our life.
And what that means is that
we use those tools,
spiritual practices,
prayer,
worship,
community, etc., on and on and on, gratitude.
We engage with the world.
We engage with the people of the world,
but we do so to the end
that Christ will be known in us and through us, by us,
and by others in the way that we live.
And spiritual in that sense, I think,
doesn’t have to be mystic.
It doesn’t have to be
sort of amorphous.
It doesn’t have to be this thing that’s hard to pin down.
It simply means that we seek to live lives in which we set aside the things that get in the way in us and pursue
being faithful to Jesus Christ.
And the tools that we use to get there are varied and they are rich.
But ultimately, when we call the tools spiritual,
we miss the ultimate point of being spiritual,
which is to be faithful to Jesus.
So there’s a podcast that we both listened to,
or I think it was a TED talk where a person asked the group of people gathered there,
“How do you know when you’re wrong?” Or rather,
“What does it feel like when you are wrong?”
And people described feeling guilty, feeling really bad,
feeling really upset.
They said, “No, that you only felt that way once you realized you were wrong.” When you were wrong and didn’t know
it yet, it didn’t feel like anything.
And it’s interesting.
I think a lot of people, especially
people seeking to live as Christians,
they live with a lot of guilt.
They live with a lot of shame.
They live with a lot of feelings of regret because they have an understanding of what it would mean
to be spiritual.
They sort of imagine it as to be one thing.
And if you believe
that being a spiritual person means you always are living on the mountain top,
you’re just going to be in for a brutal kind of life of upsets and letdowns.
I mean, realistically,
I point to youth mission trips that we take.
They’re an amazing gift to youth as they’re
forming and as they’re developing.
Anybody, even if you’re an adult,
you’ve taken a mission trip.
These can be some very high moments,
moments of real spiritual connection.
We feel close to God.
And if that was the measure that we use to determine how close we were to God our entire
lives, we would feel lacking most of the time.
Being spiritual is not about experiencing or
feeling a particular thing.
It’s far more rooted in the practices,
habits,
tools,
and convictions that we have as Christians.
It’s not just something rooted into sort of our internal feelings.
And I don’t want to overstretch that point,
but I think in conversations that I have with people,
when they talk about being spiritual,
they often speak of yearning for more feeling of connection,
that they want more of that sense that God is with them,
that they are in this close,
vulnerable relationship.
And that’s a good and beautiful thing.
And there are moments of life
that lend towards it.
But for those who may not be going through that season right now,
the promise of the Gospel is that the Spirit lives in us regardless of whether or not we are
personally feeling connected to it.
Whether or not you feel spiritual,
the Spirit of God lives in you.
And that’s the reminder,
the promise, the covenant that we hold on to even in difficult times.
So spiritual,
I just want to make it very clear and I want to encourage you to move away from some of
the feeling language, at least exclusively,
because I don’t think that helps us see the
full richness of what’s intended as being spiritual people.
Yeah, there is a danger in defining something based on how I feel about it.
And the danger is
that if I aspire to be spiritual and don’t feel spiritual or do feel spiritual,
that may or may not be accurate.
And so there is a sense of spiritual being not just something we aspire to,
but something we choose.
When we choose in Paul’s language or in the language of the New Testament,
the Spirit over the flesh,
when we pick the Christian way over the worldly way,
when we find ourselves in these choices,
we seek to take the path that is the path of Christ,
that is the spiritual path.
Now, there are times we will feel great about that.
We’ll feel nurtured and blessed by that.
We will feel enriched.
And there will be other times where that will feel
exceedingly difficult and probably we may even do it if we’re able to grudgingly.
But that too is a part of our spirituality.
A very wise pastor once said in a sermon,
“There is no spiritual
life.
There is only life.” And what he meant is not that there isn’t spirituality,
but that everything we do incorporates it.
And we do not tend our spirituality separate from the rest of who we
try to be and what we do.
The idea of being spiritual is the person who incorporates our
life and our faith together as one.
And ultimately, that’s what Christians have meant at our best by this word.
And it’s what we aspire to as best as we seek to be spiritual.
Right.
There’s a sense in which that movement that you’re describing,
Clint, that kind of integration is connected directly to that theological idea of atonement.
That very word itself has atonement in it.
The idea of being made one because of the work of Christ.
Well, that that theologically is about what happens when Jesus Christ gives up his life.
For us, we are at one with God.
We’re brought into this relationship that we couldn’t have
had on our own merit.
But there’s also a sense in which as that unifying happens,
it also unifies ourselves.
It brings us into a relationship with the one who is fully God and fully human.
In Paul’s language, it’s being in Christ.
And I think that’s really,
really powerful because at one hand, it just sounds like a theoretical idea.
But I think as you really chase that down,
what that means is that as people,
we always live in a kind of redemptive possibility.
There’s stuff that’s happened to us in our childhood.
There’s experiences that we’ve had.
There’s decisions that we’ve made.
There’s so much baggage in our lives that can weigh us down.
And ultimately, the hope and promise of spirituality is that God is able to rework and
remake even on this side of eternity.
Now,
does that mean we’re ever going to be left
stainless and without the realities of our lives?
I mean, consequences have long arcs,
but there’s a sense in which God is able to do amazing things.
And recognizing our spirituality
is on some level the gift of recognizing that God can do some things within us that transforms our
behavior and character and person that we couldn’t have done by ourselves.
So for me, sometimes when I have conversations with people who want to talk about spiritual truth or spiritual realities,
I get the sense that what they mean is that there’s this good,
real stuff that’s true,
that’s invisible and imaginary,
and you have to find it.
And I don’t think that’s as rich or true
as the faith would lead us to believe.
I think it’s rather that that invisible to our eye,
yet true thing is joined in our heart and soul by the mysterious work of God within us.
And that we begin to actually physically see that reality lived out in our lives,
our community, our family of faith, our families.
I mean,
the mystery of what God can do within our spiritual hearts
is lived out in beautiful color when we see it lived out on our hands and feet and with
the words that we speak.
It’s this beautiful sort of marriage at oneing of these things that I think
really leads us forward as people of the faith.
I think maybe that’s why historically wisdom has
been considered the sibling of spiritual.
But because wisdom is the ability to discern,
it’s the ability to look past the noise and see the truth,
it is the ability to separate
what is false from what is true.
And as we grow spiritually,
the hope is that we are
better able to connect more often with what is true,
rather than what appears,
to see the truth
behind the things that we may be looking at,
and to see the truth in people,
that they’re more than
the collection of their failures or their frustrations or that they are the child of God,
to see the opportunity in the midst of adversity,
to see the hope in the middle of despair,
that as Christians grow spiritually,
we increase in our ability to stay connected to those truths
in moments where it would be easy to lose sight of them.
And this is, I think, part of what we
mean when we use a phrase like spiritual growth.
It’s not the idea that some have portrayed that
I become a spiritual giant.
In fact, just the opposite.
I probably,
as I become more spiritual, become more humble.
I become less assuming.
I become more gentle, more meek.
It is that
idea that growth is growth toward Jesus Christ and to embody what he portrays,
what he examples, what he shows us in his own life.
And so spiritual growth is never simply about us.
It is about what it looks like to be fully Christian and to move toward that goal,
which we will never fully accomplish here on earth,
but we are better off every time we move towards it.
You know, we talked about this way back when we did our series on some of the heresies of the faith.
But the church has always wrestled with,
from its earliest days,
this sort of over-emphasis upon the spiritual.
One of the versions of it was given the name Gnosticism,
but the short version of that is
that we all become fixated on the secret knowledge and that if we have that knowledge of the way
that spiritual things work,
then we’re participating in this kingdom of God.
And, you know,
that temptation lives on,
I mean, all times and places,
and certainly in our own.
We should resist the
temptation to believe that being spiritual means that we have some kind of Rosetta Stone
that only we have access to or that a select few of us have access to.
And that if you could hold
it and you could see it,
then you can see all of the secret meaning in the universe that surrounds
you.
That the church pushed back against that and said that ultimately this isn’t about secret passages.
It’s not about secret societies or special codes.
It’s not about trying to
figure out the Rubik’s Cube and then when you do that,
you’re suddenly a spiritual person.
When we talk about wisdom,
the scriptures are consistent in that being practical and it being
lived out in families and communities.
It’s never talking about sort of like,
you know, if you knew this special thing, you could win the lottery gamble that day or you could go on and that’s not
what the church has emphasized when we talked about being spiritual people.
Yet,
there remains this idea that,
you know, if you have this special secret Christian teaching,
then you’ll be lifted up and you’ll be made more perfect or you’ll be part of a super Christian
group that there’s that you’ll be more pure or I just want to sort of resist that temptation that
we sometimes have to say that the spiritual is good.
So it should be sought at all costs and the
physical and the lived life stuff.
That stuff’s just nasty and bad and that we need to avoid at
all costs and this idea that if you could figure out what those spiritual things were and do them
more, you’d be a better Christian.
That’s an unhelpful sort of splitting of these things
and the church has consistently historically repudiated that said,
no, that that’s not what
it means to be people of faith.
We’re not looking for secret decoder rings when we’re talking about being spiritual people.
We’re talking about being aware of the indwelling spirit who already lives
in us.
It’s not about unlocking your potential,
though that’s the language of our culture.
It’s actually about our awareness being enabled because the spirit of God opens our eyes in years.
I think that’s a much more helpful image for us moving forward than sort of this figuring it out or
cutting a path through the bush.
I mean, that that’s not a very scriptural understanding of what
means to be spiritual people.
Yeah, and on the other side of that coin is the mythology that
spiritual is reserved for select few,
that there are people who are simply spiritual as if I can say, well,
that person,
they are spiritual and I’m not.
You know, Paul regularly refers to all Christians as saints,
not particular Christians who have accomplished certain things or checked off certain boxes,
but all believers,
Paul is comfortable calling saints.
And the idea, and you can see how it would happen.
If I say, well,
I’m not as spiritual as so and so, well,
why is that?
Well, I don’t spend any time in prayer.
I don’t go to church.
I don’t get my Bible out very often,
but it’s not my task to be spiritual.
And that’s simply not true.
Spiritual is synonymous
with being Christian or being faithful.
Those are all words that we can use interchangeably
about what it means to grow in the life of following Jesus Christ.
We are all called to grow spiritually.
Churches are called to grow spiritually.
None of us are called to simply stay
where we are in regard to our life of faith.
And so spiritual is not something that some select
few aspire to be and go off and become monks.
It is our calling each and every one of us in Jesus
Christ to integrate and to integrate more fully our spiritual life and our earthly life in such a
way that we reflect Christ both internally and externally in a world that by and large doesn’t
understand that and doesn’t help the process.
Right. Yeah.
That’s really helpful, Clint.
And I think we need to return to this idea that ultimately being spiritual doesn’t look like
what you are probably tempted to think.
I mean, I’m not saying that a time in prayer and scripture
devotion.
Yes, that those are spiritual acts and we need to participate in those things.
But it’s funny because many of you are going to be watching this and joining us here on Facebook.
And it’s funny.
Most of us wouldn’t think of going and commenting on someone else’s post with kindness,
gentleness, forbearance, as a spiritual act.
Friends, it is a desperately needed spiritual
act or that you wouldn’t say something that you want to say because you hold your tongue.
That’s a spiritual act.
Now, it doesn’t look or maybe even feel like a spiritual act,
but that is participating in a spiritual life,
having a spiritual discipline.
So we really need to allow
our imaginations to be,
I think, widened here,
broadened.
That being spiritual does not look
like getting accolades or certificates or awards or getting books written about us after we’ve died.
But spiritual lives in the muddle of every day.
In fact, that is the place where spirituality
grows.
That’s the dirt in which spirituality is nourished,
is in the common experiences of our lives.
And I would say without exception,
I’d say just confidently push back,
Clint, if you disagree,
the great men and women of faith,
the saints that we would lift up as being exemplars of spirituality,
their practice lived in the daily.
I mean, that is where their great stature,
whatever,
however we might define that or consider it,
it grew out of those small experiences.
And so we must therefore ourselves invest in those same places.
Yeah, I would go further,
Michael, and to say that in the world to come,
some of those who are going to be recognized as saints are
virtually unknown in the world as they live their lives.
They are janitors who pray for students
and who kindly and gently do their jobs.
They are teachers.
They are nurses who encourage in the midst of struggle.
They are people who go about what looks from the outside like a very regular life,
and yet who do it sharing the presence and the fragrance of Jesus Christ in most of what they say and do.
And I think it’s in that sense that we aspire to an idea like spiritual or saintly.
Saint Lisa,
that’s a tough word for us to digest as Protestants and Presbyterians,
but I love the idea that some of the most spiritual people we will recognize one day
are people that we don’t recognize right now.
Yeah, absolutely.
And the fact that many of us
have to think about that and do a double take,
I think is just evidence of your point that
ultimately we need to double down on the things that to us often don’t feel important.
They don’t feel effective.
In fact, we get tired of practicing forbearance or we get tired of dealing with our
jealousy or our gossip.
But these are the places where our spiritual practice transforms who we
are.
And it’s in these places that we’re being faithful to the call that we’ve been given.
And I just want to sort of add at the other side of this,
this does not in any way mean that we should
run from the mystery and the joy that comes from spirituality.
And, you know, we call especially
some particular groups in the early church,
the mystics, though they’ve always existed in the church,
I would just encourage you instead of thinking of the mystery as being something only
available to a few,
I’d really just encourage you to find the places in your life where there
lacks mystery and look a little closer because upon closer inspection,
mystery surrounds us.
In fact,
mystery holds our universe together.
Yes,
science is advancing.
Yes, we learn more every day about the worlds that we live in.
But even a relationship between two people,
it does not matter how deep and vulnerable your relationship becomes.
There will always be moments of mysterious discovery.
Like, oh my goodness, I didn’t realize that part of you
existed or that you’ve changed or our lives,
even the things that seem so common to us, so wrote,
so taken for granted.
Friends, there is mystery in it.
And that’s a spirituality that I think
is once again available to all of us.
So, so don’t foreclose on it.
It’s not just about doing
things that are practices of the faith,
both the traditional things, the reading scripture,
the prayer,
but also the serving of others.
It’s not just that.
It’s also recognizing that our
vision should be expanded,
that God is at work in places where we don’t often see,
and there comes the prayer, Lord God, open my eyes nears that I might see and hear you.
And God will answer
that prayer.
And when God does,
do not be surprised when you discover the world has far more happening
in it than what meets the eye.
I think C is a perfect concluding word for this conversation,
Michael, because if we start with the assumption that God is everywhere and God is working everywhere,
then ultimately what we would attribute to spiritual people is their ability to recognize that,
their ability to look for that,
to be less distracted by the things that take our vision
away from our search to see where God is working and what God is doing.
And spiritual people are
those who maintain their focus and their ability to spot God in places where some of the rest of us miss Him.
And I think that that’s a wonderful,
that is for all of us, a wonderful challenge,
a wonderful invitation,
a wonderful goal,
to seek to be more aware of God,
to use the tools of our
faith tradition to do that,
but to have our eyes open,
to have our ears attentive,
that we may see
and hear what Jesus Christ is doing in us and around us,
both our lives and the lives of others,
and the opportunities to do,
to join Jesus in that work.
And this is, I think, the simplest and the best expression of what we can mean when we use this word spiritual.
It is not an elevation of self,
it is an assimilation,
a joining with God in His work and purpose in the name
and in the person of Christ.
Well, a few minutes into a conversation,
it’s easy to see
that being spiritual but not religious is a gross oversimplification of what we’re called to be.
And we hope you’ve been encouraged in the conversation.
Friends, we’re glad for all of
you who join us weekly.
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And we hope to become people who really live into the best of
these words, these church words have deep meaning behind them.
And we hope that you’re being
encouraged as we study this together.
Thanks for listening.