I love Pierre Teilhard de Chardin's words: "We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We
are spiritual beings having a human experience." With the
Quakers, I believe that there is a
part of each of us that is more than human, a divine spark reaching out to the
rest of the universe and to God. Some Unitarians believe in the
Holy Spirit as “the active divine presence in individuals and communities, as
the divine breath that gives us life, as … the divine mystery moving among us
and within us as we work and worship.”
The belief in God as the Spirit working
through human beings is one which many Unitarians, including myself, are
increasingly warming to. While we may have rejected the concept of an
omnipotent, omniscient God, we still believe that God definitely exists, as
that "active divine presence" that Cliff Reed refers to.
Many, of course, do not believe in any divine being at all, and so will
not agree with my belief that the Spirit does dwell in each one of us, in our
hearts, waiting to be listened to. I love Quaker Stephen Allott's description
of the Spirit: "What manner of spirit are we of? have we any connection
with the spirit which descended on the upper room, sounding like a 'mighty,
rushing wind'? Do we look to be swept out of our comfortable existence by an
invading power which comes, as Jesus said, no one knows whence? Or do we look
rather for a gentler movement within? Do we say, it was this Spirit of God
which breathed into our human clay to make us living souls? It is there, in our
humanity, but mixed with passions which confuse its purpose, limited by the
tunnel vision of the self. Occasionally a blinding flash may come from without
and someone is jolted forwards; but the Spirit's normal method is a quiet
insistence, a still small voice barely audible amid the turbulence of
earthquake, wind and fire."
Two lines of this particularly speak to me: "it was this Spirit of
God which breathed into our human clay to make us living souls" and
"the Spirit's normal method is a quiet insistence, a still small voice
barely audible amid the turbulence of earthquake, wind and fire."
"It was this Spirit of God which breathed into our human clay to
make us living souls." This is something I have come to believe in the
last eighteen months or so, through reading the works of the great Celtic poet
and theologian, John O'Donohue. He wrote, and I have come to believe (because
it makes sense to me) that our souls come from elsewhere, and inhabit our human
bodies, and go elsewhere after death. Our souls are animated by the Spirit - it
is the Spirit that enables us to respond to the divine in the world.
One of the most obvious ways in which the Spirit works within us is when
we respond to something beautiful. I am sure that you have felt your heart lift
and your levels of joy soar when contemplating a majestic mountain, or the
endlessly changing sea, or the intricacies of a flower, or a man-made work of
art, or the face of someone you love, or when you are listening to uplifting
music or the songs of birds or to a beloved voice. I believe that this is the
Spirit within us recognising and responding to the beauty of the world around
us.
How can we learn to listen to the Spirit, and to
recognise her at work in the world? I think that this may be attempted by what
I would call 'sacred living'. The Christian author John Macquarrie believes
that we live in a sacramental universe. Rather than the Divine presence being
limited to either two or seven sacraments, Macquarrie believes that God has so
arranged things that the material world can “become a door or channel of
communication through which he comes to us and we may go to him." For this
reason, “man’s spiritual wellbeing demands that he should recognise and cherish
the visible things of the world as things that are made by God and that provide
access to God.”
In other words, God / the Spirit / the Divine other
is present everywhere, all the time. The trick of sacred living is recognising
this.
No comments:
Post a Comment