Spiritual. The word means different things to different people. It can have various understandings in different places and times. Studies and polls agree: many in our culture today identify as “spiritual but not religious.” In fact, this is the fastest growing group of people often referred to as “ The Nones”, as in no religious preference. The word religious, too, we see, can take on varied understandings.
What I often do see in many instances where the word spiritual is used whether inside or outside of church and the Christian faith, is that when one is being spiritual, the understanding is they are somehow being transported away from the life of this earth. In so doing, they hope to encounter an experience with God.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and a martyr for his role in a plot on Hitler’s life for which he was later hanged in a concentration camp, had something to say about those trying to find God by escaping the world. Bonhoeffer said, “Whoever evades the earth does not find God, they only find another world.”
It may be both helpful and healthful to take a break from life and the world from time to time. However we cannot evade the fact we do indeed live in the world and we are part of the world’s “stuff”. We contain many of the same elements listed in those 10th grade chemistry periodical charts; elements found in both living creatures and inanimate earthly objects like rocks.
In addition to those elements we also share in the joy and heartbreak of life and living. We are born and we die. We rejoice and we suffer. Like all God’s creatures and people we were created for life on this earth. The Garden of Eden was not some spiritual locale. It is specifically and geographically located in Genesis, smack dab near the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Adam and Eve were not called to escape it or spend their time there in prayer, but to till it and care for it. They were called, in other words, to live in it.
Spiritual is a good word. Retreat, solace, reflection, prayer, contemplation are valid and often necessary activities, or, in some cases, in-activities. Their purpose is not to escape, but to regroup so that we might re-enter that in which we are called to live and serve. We don’t need another world. We need our world to be a place where God’s children live as God calls us to live.
Faith is not to be surreal. We are not to somehow be able to get above or apart of life and live in some spiritual atmosphere. Faith is to be real. It is to engage and encounter, even at times confront life; it is to be used to relate to real people, navigate through real events, and live in real times and places.
That’s the wonder of the incarnation, God in human flesh. This too is where God is found. God chose to not be surreal and float around in some heaven in some spiritual body. God chose to be so close as to look us in the eye. God neither evades nor avoids earth. Faith calls us to do the same.