If we want to be spiritual, then,
let us first of all live our lives. . .
Let us embrace reality.
~ Thomas Merton
Nineteenth century American poet Emily Dickinson famously wrote “Tell the truth/ but tell it slant.” These days, from where I’m sitting, my angled perspective leads me to believe that—in reality—there is no such thing as the spiritual life. There is just life. Hear me out. I’m not being cute or new agey. Why the modifier? Is it not because so much of what the dominant culture promotes and values actually serves, at best, to cheapen life, at worst, to desecrate it? To live spiritually simply means to live life as it is intended and worthy to be lived ~ as if we were acutely and completely alive; as if we awoke and stepped into each day and in ever new ways were humbled or moved or verklempt or attuned to the exquisiteness and pathos of it all; as if we walked around so intentionally susceptible and undefended that our day was riddled with surprise attacks of radical amazement, sudden rushes of gratefulness, the inner urge to savor, deep swirls of compassionate connection, the inflation of joy, and the unpremeditated desire to praise. After all, all reality is shot through with Spirit.
“The glory of God is the human person fully alive,” wrote St. Iranaeus. That is as good a definition of holiness as you can squeeze out of any ten words strung together in the English language. It is as good a description of what we mean when we put the adjective spiritual in front of the noun life. But, like the word God, the word life—and can there be any bigger words—rolls off our tongue so rotely, insipidly, and unnoticeably that I find it at least a minor cause for concern. We mindlessly mumble the phrase “the way, the truth, and the life” or “God is life.” I sense this has become at once too familiar and is too abstract. I find the word and connotation of aliveness more helpful and evocative when speaking of the spiritual life in general or the Christ-life in particular. Even to refer to God as the Giver of life has become diluted, weak brew, a mere reflex. Instead, I encourage us to think of Jesus as the embodied aliveness of God and God or Spirit as the aliveness of life itself. God is the name of the giver, the gift, and the giving. That’s how Catholic theologian Michael Downey speaks of the Trinity.1
When we speak of our relational or social life, we are referring specifically to the interactive quality of existence and more personally to relationships we have formed and in which we are presently involved. When we speak of economic life, we mean the economic dimension of life and living. When we talk about our academic or school life we are referring to the educational part of our lives. When we mention the emotional life, we are speaking about the affective aspect of being human. But the spiritual life does not refer to the spiritual component of life as if it were just one more feature of life standing alongside all these other dimensions of living. It’s not an aspect, dimension, component, feature, or even an integral part of living. Nor is it an addendum.
The spiritual life is life—in its deepest depth and its “hidden wholeness.” It’s not one aspect of life. It’s the life-blood that runs through each thing and everything and is pumped from the cor dei which is also the cor vitae which is also cor mundi.2 Its what is meant to inform, guide, and integrate all the various dimensions of life.
For people of faith, there is no unspiritual life. Just as Wendell Berry states “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places,” I maintain there is no unspiritual life; there is only sacred life and desecrated life. But still, to speak of the spiritual life feels distant, something out there, external to us. There is a gap in the connotation between life and living, between life and aliveness or being alive. An analogy would be the difference between silence and being silent. By spiritual life I mean the full, active, and conscious participation in life. It is being alive to the aliveness of God. The mystics referred to it as participating in the Divine life. I like to think of it as participating in the Liturgy of Life.
This aliveness is characterized by two central movements at the heart of an authentic spirituality: receptivity and responsiveness. These movements point to the antiphonal nature of all reality, not just one aspect of reality. If we consciously and regularly re-member ourselves to 5 alliterative words we get a more vivid picture of what I mean by the spiritual life: it involves being
Awake, Aware, Awestruck, Appreciative, and Active.
These are words of involvement, engagement, participation. At the end of our earthly days the definitive and revealing question will be: Did you fully, actively, and consciously participate in the liturgy of life.
The spiritual life is the deeply lived life. It is being engaged in life, in being as important here as engaged. It is not something we observe from the sidelines, spectate from the bleachers, or witness from a safe distance. Living the spiritual life necessarily means to be involved in life. Think of a Volvo automobile. In Latin in + volvere means to roll into [life]. Nor is the spiritual life anything other than the human life, the natural (as opposed to supernatural) life. We who are part of an incarnational tradition and spirituality should be intensely aware of this. The incarnation of the Holy One in and through Jesus not only teaches us what God is like, but also what it means to be human. Jesus wasn’t fully human because he flipped on his God-switch. He was wholly human because each day he consciously refused to compromise his dignity or betray his humanity. Sin is not the failure to be godly. It’s the unwillingness to be truly human.
So we learn from Jesus that the spiritual life is the human life, the embodied life, the immediate life, the daily mundane and mystery-laden life lived well. For this reason we can say to become human is to become holy and to become holy is to become human. From the perspective of faith, they are one and the same thing. Sanctification is humanization and humanization is sanctification. We’ve been taught that being holy means being less human when in reality it means becoming more authentically and more fully human. We’ve been taught the spiritual life is some special aspect of life, some altered state of being, often sounding out of our reach rather than the life we wake to each day with the opportunity to make of our lives a work of art. The tools for creating such a life as a work of art, a gift to the world, and a sign of our Spirit-infused aliveness are premeditated and deliberate enactments of humility, wonder, gratefulness, awe, generosity, hospitality, passion, deep sympathy, mercy, compassion, hope, love, and joy.
The spiritual nature of all reality, the intrinsically numinous act of living—as opposed to spirituality being just another aspect of life—was signaled by the renowned Protestant theologian Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and the well-known Catholic monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) who described God as “the ground of being” and “the hidden ground of love” respectively. Our capacity, desire, and choice to thrive by being alive to the aliveness of God is the fruition of being firmly rooted in the ground of all being which is enlivening love.
1 Michael Downey, Altogether Gift: A Trinitarian Spirituality
2 The heart of God, the heart of life, and the heart of the world.
ARTWORK: Moi
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Thank you, walking companions, for stopping at The Sacred Braid and taking the time to read THE ALMOND TREE. I greatly appreciate it. Please pass it on to anyone you think might be nourished by it. ~ djm