Becoming a healing presence to all: the end of stage six

Continued from a previous series of posts on the stages of spiritual growth . . . Abiding in love is the fruit of years of spiritual practice. There’s no shortcut to this experience of full union with God in Christ through the Spirit, nor is there any way for you to bring yourself here. It comes to you. You become “a partaker of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1.4) only because you’ve participated all along the way along with the mischief of God at work in you—through all your joys and sorrows. You’ve finally become fully human, alive to love, and therefore a person in whom all the fullness of God abides (Ephesians 3.19).

This doesn’t mean that you will live without suffering or frustration, temptation or even anger. Rather, when you abide in love, you know how to sublimate your reactivity to such things. You can redirect your spirit quickly and re-establish yourself in the current of God’s love.

Gratitude, warmth, and wisdom are the chief characteristics of those whom God has brought to this final stage, a stage, which is a taste of the eternal life that awaits us beyond death. These “saints” are a healing presence to us all.

The end of the series.

What's Ash Wednesday and Lent? Take Two Minutes and Find Out

Becoming more fully the self God made you to be

Continued from a previous series of posts on the stages of spiritual growth . . . You’ve not reached some pinnacle of perfection; instead, you’ve become more fully the self God made you to be. You own who you are. You have nothing to prove to anyone else. You need nothing to make yourself feel successful or worthy or lovable. You don’t need a new car, a better house, another spouse. You accept what you look like. You embrace your idiosyncrasies. You receive life as it is and have learned to let go of the woulda, shoulda, coulda’s. Judging yourself and judging others is no longer a need. And you’re no longer bothered by the challenges that come your way or lured by opportunities you must take advantage of or lose out. You’re not attached to things, not even your life. There’s an equanimity and a magnanimity that possess you. You’re free from everything that once held you captive.

This doesn’t mean that you’re passive and don’t care about things like injustice, or for your family or work. It means that your life is lived from an entirely different source. You’re abiding in the love of God. And this means that you will more effectively right the world’s wrongs and battle injustice and care for others than you did when there was still a lot of you, too much of your unhealed ego involved, to mess up even your best intentions.

To be continued . . .

Nourish the spirit in beauty and nurture justice

To create beauty is to testify to God's restoration; living beautifully facilitates justice. Check out this testimony from an artist exploring the role of spirituality, art, and justice:

A video from workofthepeople.com

Abiding in love: entering the sixth and final stage

Continued from a previous series of posts on the stages of spiritual growth . . . These stages certainly can be thought of and experienced as an upward path. But there are dangers in viewing the spiritual life as an ascent. In our world, people tend to scratch and claw over each other to get the top of the corporate ladder, or look down with a sense of superiority over those below them. Spiritual growth does require disciple and courage, but exertion and effort and self-will nearly always end in spiritual disaster. Remember, the effort to reach the heavens with the Tower of Babel was a colossal mistake of human hubris (Genesis 11).

If Christ teaches us anything, it’s that the way up is down, the way to greatness is through humility, the way to possess All is to let go of everything.

Stage six, what I call, “abiding in love,” is the end point in the journey, the goal of the spiritual quest. When you arrive here, you realize that you’ve not been traveling up but in, to the depths of your being; you’ve been traveling down, into the fullness of your humanity. You’ve become a fully integrated person.

To be continued . . .