I suggested last week that much of our spiritual journey depends on awareness, specifically the awareness of the intertwined essence of our physical-spiritual nature. Our embodiment in human form and participation in a material world is not a problem to be solved by escaping into the spiritual, but is rather the location for our actual spirituality and is absolutely necessary.
If our ambition is to strive toward a disembodied spirituality in which we essentially reject the earthly lives we are given, we are not spiritual. This would be to reject the Creator and his good and beautiful desire for us to be human, to be in this earthly existence. Jesus, who is our model of the spiritual life, is incarnate.
Our embodied condition is not keeping us from spirituality, but the belief that the material and physical world is an impediment is a real barrier to spiritual life. Such a mistaken perspective leads us to think that we must look for spirituality somewhere other than where it is to be found and lived.
Unless we can overcome this tendency to divide physical existence from spiritual progress, and begin to see our lived context as where God intends the spiritual to flourish, we will struggle because we are neglecting the very place God is meeting us. God comes to us in the flesh, Christ’s and ours.
By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God. 1 John 4:2
The incarnation, if telling us anything, proclaims that the proper expression of our physical life is in union with the divine. Jesus is the God-man who is the image in whom we all were created. To look at him, to see the real and indivisible unity of what is divine and human, is a vision of our destiny. We are to grow up into his stature.
Spirituality is that blossoming of potential that is Christ in us, the hope of glory. Our experience is our humanity being united with God in Christ, and spirituality is the growing and fuller embrace of our physical and lived reality. Our human nature can be one with the transcendent and immaterial. We need this vision of who we are, the children of God.
As John states, we know the Spirit, and those who are speaking truly about him, by the affirmation that Jesus indeed has come, and continues to come to us, in the flesh. This radical claim is that spirituality is necessarily physically expressed, and so any teaching which denies Jesus’ full and genuine humanity, or which envisions a spirituality that involves the rejection of our own physical existence, is not of God.
Spiritual people love and accept the “now” in which we are, for it is in God we live, move, and have our being. They learn that this earthly existence is full of sacred beauty and the presence of God. Those who walk by the Spirit do not long for a far-off heaven to be entered someday because they have found it on earth now. The divine completely envelopes everything, permeates it, and can be enjoyed as we once again walk with God, and God with us, in the garden of paradise.