Spirituality connects you to others
February 21, 2008
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Britt Bravo’s blog about spirituality and social justice provoked me become even more clear about my spirituality. I have never been in a place where spirituality was disconnected from social justice, exactly because being spirit filled is the realization of connection with others.
It is a puzzle to me how spirituality can be so individualistic. What reason to be spiritual but to realize your connectedness to the world, the physical world and the spirit world. We are being seduced however, to seek spirituality and take action only after we have discovered the spirit, our purpose in life, God, or whatever you call it.
It is only through action that we can discover who we really are, including as spiritual people. I wrote about the possibility to learn to love yourself by praying for somebody else. Sometimes, you don’t know how to love yourself, but I think that you will feel better about yourself when you serve someone else.
Serve somebody. Share food. My bishop, Yvette Flunder, always urges people to serve while they are waiting to hear from God about His plan for them in this life. Our purpose can be revealed to us in so many ways. It usually doesn’t happen when we sit still and listen to the spirit. Most of the times, our purpose becomes clear when we interact with others and respond to something somebody says, or something we see. Give yourself then the opportunity to learn about yourself by getting out there and serving others. A the gestalt psychologists said: you cannot know yourself on an uninhabited island.
And when we are connected, truly connected, can we not see the suffering in people? On the contrary, it takes a great effort on our part to block the suffering from our consciousness. We work hard to be less conscious of the world than we truly are. And we need a spiritual practice to strengthen ourselves. I believe that we reduce our consciousness, because we fear that we cannot handle the suffering of others, in particular since there is already so much going on in our lives.
That is what Christ is giving me, though. I have the opportunity to see and feel his support and strength so that I don’t have to shut my eyes. And when I can witness most clearly the suffering of others, without being blown away by it, that is when I feel most connected and most spiritual.
There is a heavy burden of history that Christianity has given us. That is the burden of salvation. For so long, christians seemed to be concerned primarily with being saved. I have never shared that concern—perhaps I was spared by being an atheist. It has never made sense to me that we are created by God to be condemned. When you listen to the sermon by Yvette Flunder that is interspersed on the CD, Whosoever Believes, you will hear what I mean. We do what we do, not to earn the Grace of God, but exactly because of the Grace of God which has already been given to us, for free.
We act for social justice precisely because we have been given God’s Grace. That grace which allows us to be fully human, which means that we see the world for what it really is and we are able to connect. We don’t have to shut ourselves off, we can open our eyes and when it hurts what we see, we have God to fall back on.
Technorati Tags: spirituality, christianity, social-justice, service, God, grace, salvation
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