Faith is not the clinging to a shrine but an endless pilgrimage of the heart.
We must not mistake training and instruction for experiential transformation, salvation, or sanctification. One can be continually informed with more data, facts, and in terms of that thought world, develop certain skills and abilities in calling forth those bits of information and principles. As this process relates to the religious, it becomes confusing and confounding for most often those desiring positions of honor and esteem in religious communities put forth their “giftedness” as a sign of true piety.
But the real education of the heart is painfully known, held by grace and difficult to merely articulate as technique or spiritual intelligence. Real wisdom is rooted in an appreciation of mystery. Western collegial setting for the transformation of skill and knowledge suit many types of epistemologies (i.e. ways of knowing) the way of the heart, the holy longing that drives us towards all desire is not a type of knowing so easily compartmentalized and held away or part from the self in abstraction. Faith is a first order engagement. Faith, real faith is only manifest in the real. The seemingly mundaness of everyday life is the very crucible in which this type of knowing is felt and embraced and made manifest as true, good, and beautiful.
Faith, birthed and graced by mystery beckons us towards holiness of place where all actions are sacred. Not as some stiff and outwardly pious form of religious behavior but through the imagination’s need to “see” more. When our knowing is not merely intellectual but embedded and present in our daily lives, we begin to see the futility of living life for the self. The soul, the deeply felt awareness of being made in God’s image, now informs us daily. Now the desert brings release and empowerment as does the mountain top vision.
We begin to sense the mysterious vastness of the smallest experiences. Everyday experiences sing of things beyond. In our own smallness, we feel somehow connected for the first time. The Spirit challenges us to regard mystery over mastery. Knowledge as power, cleverness, or insight disseminated at will, reflects a domestication of the soul’s radical nature. Made in God’s image, our deepest and most holy longings are what animate our very lives. Ambition, self seeking, hubris and self righteousness drive the soul towards busyness, an inclination to hold onto life and revelation as thought a sign of one’s own giftedness.
Religious training should involve a deep and abiding reverence for those who are called to take “care of the soul.” When the soul and body are mysteriously present in experience, the sacramental vitality of life is revealed in the ordinary. We all become pedestrian mystics.
When a religious person feigns “care for the soul” they may ultimately be detrimental to the spiritual life of the one they hope to impact. For example, in some circles, Evangelical spiritual training often tends to infantilize people and communities. Rigid spiritual laws, strict demands of obedience and servitude, usually reveal a picture of God who is distant, punitive and unable to look upon His creation without a degree of disdain or loathing. Who among us can look more than seconds upon our own hearts unless and until we sense a presence of grace and love?
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