I Want to Talk This Morning About ...
I want to talk this morning about ‘spirituality.’ It is surely a popular topic, one that a wider audience seeks than those who go to church, for sure. It is worth noting at the outset that it is a modern word. At the time of the Reformation it meant the domain of bishops instead of kings, in other words all this, which is certainly not what we mean by ‘spirituality’ today. What do people mean? What books would you find if you typed the word into an amazon book search? Some would have an Eastern tilt- quiet, silence, even forgetfulness (which I am getting better and better at). Nothing wrong with all that, but it’s what Christians try to do before they pray. In other cases it would pertain to an experience, perhaps of the vastness of the world, or its mysteriousness, or a surprising sense of calm, or a sensations of a new kind of awareness. Again nothing wrong with all that. But what are we to make of these? Where do they come from and where do they go? On our own they offer no answer. Spirituality as our culture thinks of it amounts to a big question mark, though questions are good! Finally we can take note of the fact that spirituality makes us wonder how to put all this together with our bodies. Maybe spirituality indicates a full night’s sleep, or genetics, since it is after all a sensation, but how do these parts fit together, body, mind, imagination? We are left to wonder, which after all is a good start. Still, it all could go off the rails. These days everyone is interested in AI, and the story behind it is that we are maturing and outgrowing our bodies, soon we can digitize everything including our spiritualities, and don’t worry you will barely feel a thing…Enough to make one want to unplug it all and head for the hills…
At this point, I want to offer a different story, a specifically Christian one, with the help of a famous eastern orthodox theologian named Alexander Schmemann, if you are interested you could get your hands on a book called For the Life of the World, which is of course a phrase from our Lord in this Sunday’s Gospel. In the beginning, we humans were made by God to enjoy him and have access to his blessed presence. But we were not made to be angels, pure intelligence without bodies. No, we are embodied creatures made for God. The missing piece of the puzzle was the created world around us. We could pick any fruit of the garden, and it would remind us of Him. The world was made to be enjoyed, a world created like us, but whose fruits whispered in their sweetness of the Creator. We had a real but indirect access, so long as we recalled that we were not the Creator himself, hence the rule about not touch the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Beatitude involved both access and boundary. Before the fall all the world was, to Adam and Eve, like a sacrament, something that wasn’t God but invited you into His tangible presence. After the fall, instead of Garden’s fruits, we devour one another in order to satisfy our egos.
At this point let’s take a step, for a moment, back to our first question. Think of a sunset over a lake in the evening, and the brief moment when it became more than a tranquil scene, a moment that borrowed a touch of eternity, and awoke a longing for which you don’t in yourself have the words. A sacramental moment: such was the whole world, for our first ancestors, according to God’s intention for us, until we went and spoiled things.
The world as a sacrament is something we have tastes and glimpses of. Now someone might retort in this way- sounds like pantheism, in which we make of the world a god, though the true God is never a thing. And they would be right. We can turn the experience of the world into just such an idol, as our original forebears did. The taste and glimpse are not themselves God, are they? Make the world a god, and we are really, once more, making ourselves a god! A great deal of what passes for spirituality is really some kind of pantheism of other, and that isn’t what we believe, though you can see how it is a bread crumb on the way to the true answer- what is what that orthodox theologian was on about!
“the bread that I give for the life of the world is my flesh.’
So now we come to the answer, which we find in our Gospel reading .from John 6. The linchpin is the incarnation of Jesus the Son of God. We humans have no answer to the conundrum of brokenness and spirituality. But God breaks the impasse, and gives the answer in his Son. He has entered the created order which He made, and which He never abandoned, though we cannot equate that order with him. Jesus the linchpin, and the centerpiece, Jesus’ incarnation, life, death, and bodily resurrection changing our relation to the created order of which we are a part.
So, it is not the sacraments themselves that take us back to the garden, exiled though we be- it is Jesus bodily risen, who reaches out his own presence to us in Word and Sacrament, really literally bodily spiritually. That being said, you can see what the sacramental life is meant to be for us, a restoration of that relation to God through his creation, for us who are also His creatures- bread, wine ,oil, water, hands, rings, and so forth. Ours is the deepest and most mysterious of spiritualities, and the most material of religions too, as the great Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple famously said.
Of course as soon as we think it is the sacrament itself, and not Jesus here with us ‘in with and under’ it, as the Lutherans, we do astray. The Church catholic will not save you, for it is human all too human, like us, but Jesus who has promised in his reliability to be there, reaching out in human word and physical sacrament, He can, and has promised so to do.
It has become popular to talk about evangelical catholicity these days, which I reckon is an advance from the days in the history of Anglicanism when the two sides were busy suing each other. Evangelical catholic is a good definition of our tradition, confusing though the expression may be. But what isn’t confusing is that the words together point to our true spirituality, for ‘catholic’ means sacramental, creaturely, and ‘evangelical’ means ‘so long as you remember that Jesus the incarnate and bodily risen there is reaching out to you.’
So this morning, with this verse of the Gospel in particular, we celebrate a spirituality as wide as all creation, as earthy as food, but a spirituality as narrow as this one figure Jesus, himself the door through which we creatures are herded into eternal pastures. Amen.
