Follow-up Question on the Nature of Spiritual Life: On Being Embodied Spirit

[[Sister Laurel, I always thought that spirituality had to do with our spirits and flesh had to do with the material "stuff" of our bodies, but you have turned all of that on its head with the way you talk about Paul's language!!  If you are right, then where does the practice of dividing people into spirit and flesh come from? And then to hear Paul doing the same thing, I mean, where does the idea of spirit as the non-material in us and flesh is the material in us, come from? Were you taught the same division into flesh and spirit as this or were you taught the Pauline sense of these terms? What about our immortal souls, aren't they the spiritual part of us?]]

I think the way you have summarized things is the way most people think of spirit and flesh. It is also a seriously distorted way that we have to get over when reading St Paul. If we read his Letters aright, not only with regard to these two terms, but also in regard to his understanding of the change in reality Jesus' death and resurrection bring about, and the way he understands God's project for the future of both heaven and earth together, we will be much farther along. The Scripture scholar and historian doing the most focused work on all of this today is NT Wright, and those interested in this should read his 1) Surprised by Hope, and 2) his new sequel, God's Homecoming, the Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal. I am reading the second volume now, and am really grateful Wright has done this sequel. Similar work has been done by Gerhard Lohfink in, Is This All There Is? On Resurrection and Eternal Life.

The tendency to divide reality into the spiritual as the "more real", and the material as the "less real" (or unreal) and dispensable part of us is Platonic, that is, it comes from Plato's notion of forms or "ideas" as the most real, and it gives us a dualistic notion of the human being. Sometimes people will add the notion that the material of our world is evil and needs to be separated from the spirit or the spiritual. This even more radically dualistic approach is Gnostic. Further, some people think that some have a special kind of knowledge (γνωσις, gnosis) that makes them more spiritual than other folks, or that is the key to salvation. That too is Gnostic and has been with us since the days of the early Church. Finally, the notion that human beings have an immortal soul that will and should one day be separated from the body and exist disembodied in heaven is neither Christian nor Biblical. The eschatology (theology of last things) present in Scripture is vastly different than this.

I was raised mainly in a Christian Science church until Junior High, so I heard this stuff in its purest, contemporary form quite regularly. Christian Science is Platonic through and through, and also profoundly Gnostic (Mary Baker Eddy's "principles" qualify as a form of gnosis, γνωσις, or "knowledge") --- though I doubt any Christian Scientists would admit this. Every Sunday, we recited Mary Baker Eddy's "Scientific Statement of Being" (SSB) and discussed it and our lives in light of it. We also read Scripture in light of it, which, I didn't realize at the time, ensured we misinterpreted Scripture during each class. When I return occasionally to Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures today, what is most striking about the way Christian Science reads Scripture is its complete failure to take historical existence seriously. Historical persons are analogized as abstract "principles". The SSB that drives this approach goes like this (and yes, I still know it by heart all these years later), [[There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite mind in its infinite manifestations, for God is All-in-all. Spirit is immortal truth; matter is mortal error. Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal. Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness. Therefore, man is not material; he is spiritual.]] Emphasis added.

While I had a basic, nagging conviction that "this just can't be right" and looked elsewhere from Junior High School on, I did not have the theological sophistication or categories necessary to understand how un-Christian this "theology" (and Platonism itself) is, nor to truly counter its errors until sometime after graduate school. Yes, I was given the most important pieces necessary for doing so in both my undergraduate and graduate studies, but it all really came together as I spent more time reading Scripture and exegetes who reminded readers of the Pauline meaning of terms like flesh and spirit (ψυχή, psyche) and who also began to take on the theology of a new heaven and new earth. Part of this "coming together" also came through presentations of the Lord's Prayer and the petition that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven (God's domain), and further work of my own on prayer and the will of God, always involving God's commitment to be Emmanuel, God With Us. The background to all of this included chronic illness and disability, with their challenge to take my entire self, both physical and spiritual, seriously in spite of limitations and obstacles --- something Platonism (or Christian Science) could never have done.

There were some really pivotal theological lessons throughout my schooling that made Christian Science and its "Scientific Statement of Being" impossible to accept. The first was a lesson on the distinction between Christianity and other religions, where I was taught that Christianity is the only faith that has God coming to us rather than us trying to get back to God!! The corollary to that was a lesson on the historical nature of Christianity and the Christ Event; this lesson reminded me that the Incarnation and any truly sufficient theology of the sacraments support a deeply positive evaluation of materiality, but also underscored that God comes to us in history and transfigures all He touches. 

Another lesson occurred in a graduate class on grace with Kenan Osborn OFM. Kenan was trying to get across the idea that human beings are not dualistic. We are not platonic soul/body dualisms, but instead embodied spirit (or inspirited bodies); that is, we are unities of body and soul or spirit, he affirmed.  During this class, Kenan (a really diminutive man), picked up a chair and clutched it tightly to his side; then he walked up and down several rows of students, repeating, "I don't just HAVE a body, I AM my body!!" (Not that this is ALL we are, but it is an integral part of who we are and, especially, how we possess ourselves! In other words, embodiedness is integral to being truly human.) At the time, I didn't really understand the whole lesson he was teaching, but I never forgot the example nor ceased being challenged by it and its urgency for Kenan. Eventually, I came to understand it as I continued to read and do theology.

During ThD work, but especially thereafter, I read more Scriptural exegesis, pointing out God's will to create a new heaven and new earth, and in Christ, as well as in those who are baptised into Christ, God would be Emmanuel in our world. I went back to consider sacramental theology (especially in the Eastern Christian Churches) and came to recognize the way God's presence sanctifies even the most fundamental material reality (think sacraments here). It was combined with Christianity's most foundational belief in bodily resurrection (Jesus), with Catholicism's affirmation of bodily assumption (Mary) --- these both imply new forms of embodiedness --- with the affirmation that the intimate, dynamic love that flows between the Father and the Son is present to us in the Holy Spirit and, of course, with the theology of the New Testament that affirms that in Christ, God is in the midst of creating a new heaven and new earth, and science's discovery of our evolutionary universe.

What does all of this mean? Very briefly, it leads to a theology that allows us to take our whole selves and our world entirely seriously because, as it says in the book of Genesis, we are to be stewards of God's good creation. (Think how differently everything would be if we simply lived up to that vocation!) At the same time, this is a reality suffused with the presence and Spirit of God. "Heaven and earth are full of the glory of God!") Spirituality does not allow the denial or denigration of the material or the historical (the spatio-temporal), but rather, requires the affirmation of its potential in God. After all, taking the fundamental goodness of creation and the essential embodiedness of the human being completely seriously is what the Incarnation and affirmation of bodily resurrection demand of us. 

This is also what a theology of Sacraments and the sacramental demands of us, including our sense that the Church, flawed as it is in some ways, is "primordial sacrament". The world (God's good creation) is an evolving reality, and the Sacraments point to creation's potential to be transfigured and transformed by the Holy Spirit. Similarly, our belief in Jesus' "Coming Again" makes sense within this theology. Further, escapist mentalities that allow us to disengage with our Church and world as we focus on "getting to heaven" are entirely disallowed. (Also disallowed, then, are ways of seeing the world that allow us to begin wars to try and bring about Armageddon, a rather timely piece of wisdom regarding a particularly bad way of reading Scripture!!) 

Whatever you take from this post, I hope you will remember the fact that we are embodied spirit, and we neither can nor will remain disembodied. This is one lesson of the bodily resurrection of Jesus. (Following Thomas Aquinas, Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI) once wrote that the soul is the form of the body (not the other way around!), and, reflecting on the future fulfillment of all creation, when God will be All in All, opined that even though disembodied at death, our soul or spirit yearns to build a body about itself once again! (Dogmatic Theology, Eschatology, vol 9) This is exactly contrary to the way so many have been taught to think of the relationship of soul to body and anticipates some New Testament eschatology. I also hope you will take with oyu Fr Kenan Osborne's lesson with the chair clutched to his body and his assertion that, "I do not just HAVE a body, I AM my body".

P.S. I realize I haven't really answered your last question, so I will do that in a separate post as possible. (If I can't do that, I will add a paragraph here later and let you know either way by email. Peace!)

Defining "Spiritual Life"

[[Hi Sister Laurel, I wondered how you define "the spiritual life". Did you become a hermit so you could live a spiritual life when it was not possible otherwise? I know you are asked to embrace "stricter separation from the world" so I wondered if a spiritual life is not possible in the world. Though I have that question I also wonder if that isn't elitist because it seems to say ordinary people can't live spiritual lives. Does your definition of spiritual life accept that ordinary people in the world can live spiritual lives or is that ruled out? How do we recognize that? One final question, and I don't mean any insult, but do you think you are at a higher level of spiritual growth than those who are out and about in the world? Are you more spiritual than others you know?]]

Important questions, so thank you for asking. One of the real strengths of Vatican II was its recognition that every person is called to holiness, no matter their state of life. Of course, this is rooted in Scripture. Every person is called to (learn to) abide in God and allow God to abide in them. Every person is made for this. It is actually what it means to be truly human. This "abiding in God/Love-in-act and letting God/Love-in-act abide in us" is what holiness is all about. We sometimes speak of wholeness and being made true and the way this all happens is in the power of the Holy Spirit. All of this points to the fact that we are essentially spiritual beings. That is our truest nature. What we often live are wounded and even distorted versions of our truest selves insofar as we are estranged or alienated from the ground and source of life and love we know as God.

With all of that said, I am in a position to answer your first question and probably a couple of the others as well. I define spiritual life or spirituality in terms of "living and learning to be our truest selves in the power of the Holy Spirit." To be a truly spiritual person means to live an authentically human life in the power of the Spirit of God. It is nothing more nor less than that, though it is true that because of the richness and dynamism of this experience, we can describe it in terms of dialogue with God and a number of other ways as well. This also means that spirituality or "the spiritual life" does not refer to the life of the human spirit disembodied or otherwise divorced from the rest of the person, but rather to the life of the whole person under the power of the Holy Spirit. Because of this, I believe that any person in any state of life, especially if sufficiently loved and supported in this journey to union with God, can learn to allow God to love them "into" their own deepest truth and potential. After all, Jesus calls all of us, though we are in the world, to not be of the world!

This is also the profoundly Pauline meaning of the term "spiritual life" just as "life of the flesh" means the life of the whole person under the sway (or suasion) of the powers and principalities of this world. Folks reading Scripture often fail to understand what Paul means by terms like person of the flesh or person of the spirit, or even just references to flesh vs spirit. It is important to remember that almost all of the time, Paul is speaking of the whole person, and then, under what power or spirit they live their lives, either that of the flesh or the Holy Spirit.  When hermits speak of "the world," they are to be more strictly separated from, the meaning is similar. We are called to stricter separation from the world that is under the sway of the powers and principalities that are resistant to Christ, or resistant to truth, life, and wholeness. We are not called to be more strictly separated from the world that is God's good creation, except to the extent that our time learning to abide in God and allow God to abide in us is better spent in the hermitage.

I became a hermit because I felt called to spend my time in prayer, study, and the silence of solitude to truly become my truest and best self with and in God. This is also to say I became a hermit to glorify God, since in becoming our truest selves in the power of the Holy Spirit, we reveal God at the same time. Hermit life gave me the space and time to do this in spite of limitations and outright obstacles. Others are called to do this in more active and less hidden ways, and while I consider hermitage a great gift of God. I recognize others' paths to wholeness are an equally great gift. The key to understanding what constitutes a spiritual life is that it is always a life empowered by the Holy Spirit, God's own Spirit of love, truth, and wholeness. 

That means that, in light of the crucified and risen Christ, there is no place or reality from which God's Spirit is now cut off, no godless place or realm, no part of ourselves the Holy Spirit does not and cannot embrace and transfigure with her presence. In Jesus' crucifixion, death, and resurrection, the whole world is transformed with God's personal presence, and as a result, there is no longer any place we can call godless or even entirely profane. Learning to see reality in this new way, however, requires practice and conversion of mind and heart. This is what Jesus called coming "to see with new eyes," and it is the mark of the truly spiritual person, a person empowered by and able to recognize the Holy Spirit wherever and in whatever surprising way that Spirit "shows up" in our world.

How then, you ask, do we recognize this? (I think this is what you are asking!) Chapter 5 of Galatians has Paul reminding the Church in Galatia of the answer to this same question: the fruit of the Spirit (meaning the Holy Spirit) is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. (Gal 5:22-23) What Paul is describing here is not only the way those empowered by the Spirit behave, but also the way those who have "crucified the flesh" exist. It is not the case that these persons are disembodied or have left their materiality behind somehow. They no longer live under the spirit of the world or of the flesh. They are no longer marked and marred by the fruit of this spirit, and are free of things like enmity, strife, jealousy, fits of anger, rivalries, dissensions, and envy, etc. (Gal 5:19-21). They are, that is, free to love.  A "spiritual person" is marked by the fruit of the Holy Spirit. A "worldly (or fleshly) person" is marked by the fruits of the spirit of the flesh.

Regarding your last question and what I believe about myself, I don't tend to compare myself to others in those terms. Secondly, I have no way of knowing how spiritual anyone is (myself included) unless I can see the fruits of the spirit of their lives, and even then, I think, it is impossible (and likely worldly or fleshly) to compare ourselves with others in the way you describe (cf rivalries, envy, and jealousy above). The ability to "see with new eyes" is the ability to see someone's deepest potential, to see God in them, to see them, in fact, as God sees them. At the same time, when I listen to or watch the news, I do see people today who yet leave wreckage and ruination (enmity, strife, dissensions, idolatry, divisions, and rivalries) in their wake, and who appear to be motivated by the spirit of this world (fits of anger, rivalries, jealousy, envy, drunkenness, (sexual) immorality, etc.). 

More and more, I see these persons as "unanswered questions" (where God and the love of others in God are the answers they yearn for and need so desperately), or I see them as people who are tortured by homesickness (as in my last post), and who lash out and hurt others as a result of their own suffering. My prayer for these persons is the same as Paul's was when he spoke to the Galatians regarding those disrupting their faith community: [May they] live by and keep step with the Spirit. [May their flesh] with its passions and desires be crucified in Christ, and, as persons of the Spirit, "Let (the rest of us) not become conceited, provoking one another, or envying one another."

I do know people who are profoundly loving and are marked by the other fruits of the Spirit. Some of them are Christians. These persons are deeply committed to this world and seek to be those who mediate God's presence to it in Christ. Like any expression of the Church and its Eucharist, they allow themselves to be broken open and poured out for the life of this world just as Jesus did and as baptism calls us all to do. As they live their lives in this way, the world is gradually transfigured and transformed. They work with (and belong to) a great "cloud of witnesses" (the Communion of Saints) just as do all Christians living their faith on the way to God's still (relatively) incipient or nascent new creation, --- what the New Testament calls a "new heaven and new earth". 

While these persons do not focus on their own holiness, their commitment to this world as God's own and on God's will to be Emmanuel implies that, in and with God in Christ, they do work towards being themselves more and more fully, more and more authentically and exhaustively. Their lives are marked especially by their capacity for compassion and self-giving love in relationships and in ministry. These are people I recognize as profoundly Spiritual. Paradoxically, the greater this spirituality, the more profoundly they are also rooted in their own psychosomatic truth and in the physical world in which they live, thus affirming the sacramental realities we each and all are called to become in Christ.

On What Spirituality Really Means

[[Dear Sister Laurel,
       When you write about the inner work or "growth work" you have been engaged in, how important is it that you work with someone else? Doesn't this mean you are not living solitude? I was bothered by your saying you thought the Church had "implicitly commissioned" you to do this work. Could you say more about this? I am asking because I don't understand how some sort of pseudo-psychological work can be considered part of the hermit's life which is supposed to be a spiritual life and I really doubt the Church would support it much less commission it! Can you explain this?]]

Thanks for your questions. I don't know if you have misunderstood me but you have made it apparent that I have not been clear in recent posts and need to say a bit more to clarify. Thank you for that as well. I have answered similar questions in the posts, Followup Questions and Objections on Inner Work as well as Sources and Resources for Inner Work. I do recommend you look at those; they were written just a year ago and allowed me to outline how it was I saw this work as intrinsic to the life of a hermit. In those posts I discuss asceticism, the desert Fathers and Mothers, the importance and appropriateness of working with another, and several other topics. Without repeating everything there let me touch on a couple of topics raised by my last post and your questions which I may not have dealt with explicitly in those earlier posts.

The first issue I think is that I am called to a spiritual life but that that seems to you to disallow attention to psychological, emotional, and similar health or growth. My own understanding of spirituality does not cut those things out of the picture. Spirituality primarily has to do with the Life of the Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and where the Spirit is active nothing is (or should be!) untouched. A spiritual life is a life in which the Holy Spirit is allowed to act as she will; it is one where the person embraces this action, prepares for its continuation, and acts from it. It is one where the Holy Spirit is allowed to touch, heal, and empower every dimension of the person so that she grows in wholeness and/or holiness. In other words, spirituality is not merely about matters of my own spirit or soul, it is about what God's Spirit does with my whole Self.

When a client tells me about their spiritual lives they pay attention to where the Holy Spirit has been allowed to act, where she has been resisted or ignored, and just generally where the Holy Spirit seems to be moving in her/his life. When I work with my own director, especially in the PRH work we are doing together, we work through all those forms of woundedness which, over the years, have prevented the Life of God which resides deep within me to truly inform, empower, inspire, transfigure and transform my life. It may be that Spirit has been unable to adequately inform and move my will, or my intellect, or my sensibilities (including emotions. sensations, and feelings).

What I need to become is vulnerable to the Holy Spirit, vulnerable to Love-in-Act, and this vulnerability (from the L. root vulnus for "wound") only comes from working through my own woundedness and the scarring that has "hardened" my own heart! We all know people who can't feel their feelings, or those who are incapable of acting on what they know, or even those who are incapable of showing the curiosity, creativity, or critical power of their intellect. Whenever these things happen, and in whatever degree, it means a truncated, relatively impaired human life which is unable to respond adequately to the movement of the Spirit. Even when significant or deep healing is unnecessary we have to learn to respond fully, exhaustively.

Too often I hear about notions of spirituality which involve a limited dimension of the person (their spirit or soul) and leaves the rest as though it is uninvolved in spirituality. Thus, there are all kinds of dualism involved in these: the temporal vs the eternal, the bodily vs the spiritual, the spiritual vs the ordinary "profane" world, etc etc. But these notions are antithetical to genuine spirituality which begins with the Spirit of GOD -- not the spirit of the person per se -- and then attends to that in ways which allows the Holy Spirit to move where she will! The corollary to this kind of division is that only some parts of us and only some activities are seen as "spiritual" while others are not (e.g., praying is spiritual, playing in an orchestra supposedly is not, etc). 

Excursus:

Laura Risk (friend
 and renowned fiddler)

As part of this, we must remember that human beings are embodied Spirit, that our souls (the very breath of God which literally inspires our bodily existence) "builds our bodies around it". The soul, as Aquinas reminded us so well, is the form of the body and works towards this embodiment always and everywhere. (This, by the way, is one reason "heaven" will ultimately never be about disembodied souls; the soul yearns for embodiment, yearns for resurrection, and that is what we ultimately hope for!)  But the upshot of all this is a spiritual life cannot avoid attending and paying attention to the WHOLE of our lives. (And here I will note that the act of playing a violin can be one of the most prayerful acts in my entire life because it is a fairly sophisticated form of the Holy Spirit's embodiment. There are times, of course, it does not rise to that level, but the yearning to play and the empowered act of pouring myself into the instrument to produce music is the very definition of the Holy Spirit at work in me and in our world.)

Embodiment, quite obviously, involves our whole selves. That means the psychological or emotional as well as the physical. It especially means paying attention to anything that stands in the way of the Holy Spirit's activity in our lives. During Advent we hear the admonition to "make straight the paths of the Lord!" We are to make our lives ready in ways which allow the Spirit of God to fill the valleys and level the mountains. And now during Pentecost we cry out in both supplication and great joy, "Come Holy Spirit! Enkindle the hearts (the deepest core) of the faithful (those who trust you, those you will set afire with your love!)" In all of this the Scriptures affirm that we seek and are sought by the God who wills we allow the Holy Spirit (the Life and Love of God) to inspire every part of our being: body, mind, heart, spirit, sensibilities, emotions, ordinary and extraordinary dimensions of our lives. Everything is meant to be shot through with the power and love of the Spirit of God. When I speak of  everything being potentially sacramental this is part of what I mean. With the Resurrection, Ascension, and Pentecost God affirms actively and effectively that NOTHING will be left untouched, unembraced, unloved, unreconciled or not wholly taken up into the very life of God himself.

The work I have been doing with my director is meant to allow the Holy Spirit to move freely within and through me --- as She is meant to do. It is meant to allow me to be the person in whom that Sprit lives and moves freely, a person who is whole, coherent, and holy --- a person in other words, who is truly inspired by the Spirit and who "holds together" in Christ and the love he and His Father share -- just as we are each called to do. For that reason we work through everything that stands in the way of that. We work through woundedness, both old and more recent, allowing love to heal these. We work through memories, allow for the experience and expression of emotions, and at every point reappropriate these from the perspective of God's unceasing presence and love --- as these are present not only in my hermitage, but in my deep Self and in my director as well. (It is the role of my director to mediate God's love in all of this and this means this love's critical, attentive, challenging, consoling and empowering character!) There is literally no part of my life that goes untouched in all of this. If spirituality means a praxis which leads to holiness then this is how it must be. After all, God has been at work during the whole of my life and in this work we [[lay it all out and trace the hand of God that somehow ordered all things. . .]]

On Being Commissioned to do this Work:

My consecration and commission by the Church has charged me with living my Rule, canon 603, and solitary eremitical life in the Church's name. She has given me permission to turn from other things including active or apostolic religious life, family life, and any number of other things to live with, from and for God alone in the silence of solitude. She has provided me the freedom to turn from the world's definitions of success, etc, and has allowed me the space and time to attend to God in all the ways God calls me to. This means I do not have to justify my life in the same terms most of those I know have to do.
But, the Church has also prayed that God would bring to completion in me what was begun on that day of consecration. When she granted me the cowl she prayed that I would carry out the ministry of prayer she had entrusted to me. Both of these mean the Church expects and prays that I would fully allow God to be God within and through me in my contemplative solitary eremitical life. I am free to do whatever is necessary to allow this to happen and become the truth of my life. I am free, in other words, to "put on Christ" and to do so as a diocesan hermit --- to allow my mind and heart to be remade in his image by the Spirit. I am obligated in the same way.

This means I am responsible for doing whatever I can to fulfill this obligation. I am responsible for working toward my own conversion in the power of God. My director and I decided together on the kind and degree of work we would undertake because while entirely complementary, it also goes beyond the usual work or commitment of spiritual direction --- though now it is entirely integrated into spiritual direction in our work together. What must be clear is that the aim of our work together is everything I have described throughout this post. It is about allowing the Holy Spirit to work in and through me as exhaustively as possible. Both of us are committed to God and to allowing God full reign in our lives and the lives of those we touch. Both of us are consecrated by God through the mediation of the Church for this purpose. Both of us are committed to holiness --- to the life occasioned and brought to fullness by the Holy Spirit. That is what spiritual life is about and I think when you ask questions about the wisdom or prudence of this work for a hermit it is important that you consider we both act with all of this in mind.

Addendum: sorry, I missed a couple of questions, so briefly: the work I have spoken of requires the assistance of another who is trained to accompany persons in this way. The majority of the work is done on one's own but meetings with the accompanist are absolutely essential and often critical since part of healing often requires speaking one's truth to another who will really hear this. (Being heard in this way is a complex dynamic of love, trust, and acceptance, but it also means trusting, accepting, and expressing one's own truth in a way which might not have been possible before.) To summarize, this kind of work must be done with another person, a person who knows how to listen deeply, to respond compassionately, and to speak the words of truth and love which can cut through our personal "deafness" and incapacity to empower a full and loving response to God and to those whom God holds as precious.  It is especially important to remember that the work we are doing together (and with the grace of God!) increases my already-established capacity for healthy solitude. It does not detract from this.