|
LIVING IN THE SPIRIT A Spirituality for Today
David L. Hotek
Nine months of waiting, and now the time has come. The baby is about to be born. The mother, her abdomen swollen with new life, looks up and smiles at her husband by her side. His presence somehow helps her to surrender to that movement of life struggling within her.
She wonders what the outcome will be of their coming together in love. Will it be a boy or a girl? It doesn’t matter. Will it be strong and healthy? “Oh, I pray so, with all my heart!” Another contraction. The mother takes a deep breath and concentrates. The baby is very active now. New life struggles within the woman, beyond her control. The fetal monitor bleeps frantically, recording every movement within her. The baby’s heartbeat is strong.
“I have to push!” cries the mother, and with a burst of activity she is edged onto a stretcher-bed and wheeled into the delivery room. It is all so sudden. At one moment the baby was not there. Now he is. Yes -- it’s a boy and a fine, healthy one. As the doctor cuts the cord, the child is really free yet helpless. What will become of him? What can it all be for? What can it possibly mean? Can he mean anything? Does it matter?
What does it mean to be and become a human being? The answer is rooted in the Christian understanding of what a human being essentially is: a child of God. The newborn baby is indeed mortal. But the Christian affirms that there is an energy at work other than that which pushes one to death. The other energy is the Holy Spirit -- probing, pushing, challenging and calling each one of us to new life.
The Spirit of God is present -- present in our midst -- present to the world, to the Christian community, to each one of us individually. The Spirit is present to make us more alive, to stir up deep desires which make us thirst for God, desires which make us more aware of what it means to love. The Spirit is present to us in order that we may have life and have it more abundantly. The truth is that the grace of the Spirit gives us an increased capacity to be alive, vital, happy. Our life in Christ, under the Spirit’s touch, permeates our total existence, infuses our being with a newness, which if we give ourselves to it, brings a happiness and fullness of life impossible to the person who refuses the Spirit’s gift.
The Christian life is human life in the Spirit. Life in the Spirit is a man deeply and tenderly loving his wife, or a friend sharing with a friend. Life in the Spirit is our work life -- it is being a teacher, a laborer, a scientist, a pastor, a business man, a doctor, a housewife, a father, a mother. Life in the Spirit is a person at play -- swimming, skiing, eating with friends, enjoying music, seeing a movie. Life in the Spirit is laughing, rejoicing, thrilling at nature’s beauty, being eager for life. It is believing, trusting, loving. Life in the Spirit is also weeping, being crushed by sorrow, losing a loved one, experiencing failure, experiencing suffering. Life in the Spirit is the use of our intellects and our wills. It is the use of the emotions. It is also the use of the senses.
What I am speaking about here is a life lived in the Spirit, a life lived in awe and wonder. This is what Christian spirituality is about -- becoming human in the power of the Holy Spirit. Spirituality in this sense is that which gives meaning and harmony to the whole of human experience. It is the peculiar way in which we arrange all the bits and pieces of our lives and glue them together. How is that newborn baby going to make sense of all his experiences? The unique way he does it will be his peculiar and special spirituality. For us, there is a loving and unifying energy already at work in him: the Spirit of Christ. The link between the baby’s world of everyday experience and the creative and transforming Spirit is faith. Not that he understands this yet! Seen as a series of connecting links, spirituality deals with everything in creation. It is the way the growing human being understands how each piece of his or her life and the life of the world is connected with every other.
Living in the Spirit is concerned with keeping the fire of glory alive and glowing. It is easily suppressed although never entirely quenched. When we grow up, the wonder and the glory are often diminished. What was once a glowing fire becomes a smoking ember. We need to return again and again to our experiences of awe and wonder to be reminded of the deep presence of the Holy Spirit within each of us.
Part of what it means to be fully human is to rest in God in an attitude of complete trust. To be a person is to rest in God’s palm in the same simple way as a tiny seed or nut could rest in ours. To realize this one simple thing -- our utter reliance on God for all our being and doing -- is to have begun to understand the power of the Holy Spirit. Life comes to us as a free gift, and we depend absolutely for its maintenance and continuance on the giver. God, who generously sustains all life, allows us to mold and shape our lives as we will. The gift of life, however, is so rich and diverse that it requires a spirituality to bind it together in some kind of pattern. It is the arrangement of the various elements and the way that they are held together that make life both challenging and enjoyable.
How are we to put together the humbling fact that who we are is a gift utterly dependent on the giver, with the alarming and apparently opposite fact that we have been given the freedom to shape our lives as we will? How can we be both dependent and free at the same time? Human freedom depends on our being able to surrender to the giver of life. In fact, human life is meaningless without some act of surrender.
Christian spirituality is this: human life in its fullness, lived in an ever-deepening and loving surrender to the Spirit. This Spirit touches us in every part of our lives. We have to bring spirituality down to earth, to our particular circumstances, not in order to keep it there, but to see that it embraces everything to do with the here and now, with our breathing, with our sexuality, with our hopes and aspirations, with our failings, and with our human fear of death. We find that there are some basic concerns involving all human beings, which we call spiritual. These concerns usually come in the form of questions: Do I matter? Does anyone really love me? What is the meaning of my dying, my particular dying? These are the questions of meaning, of intimacy and of death which wait in the darkness of every human heart. These are the spiritual questions that challenge, stretch and vex the human spirit.
For those of us who have chosen to minister in a Lasallian school, we have not only Jesus as our model, but also John Baptist de La Salle. De La Salle recognized that spirituality was not something different from human life, but very much a part of it. His faith in God, his total dependance on God’s loving kindness and his enthusiasm for the ministry of education led De La Salle to establish Christian schools and to bring together Christian educators whose responsibility it was to lead youth to God. For De La Salle, the Spirit of God was present in all aspects of human life. Lasallian teachers, not just the Brothers, have the awesome responsibility of helping young people become fully human -- that is, persons alive in the Spirit. It is our responsibility to not only give meaning and harmony to our own lives, but to call our students to do the same.
De La Salle knew that if the work which he began was to continue and bear fruit, both he and his teachers had to rest in God in an attitude of complete trust. He understood that life comes to us as a free gift, and that we ultimately rely on God for all our being and doing.
My life, lived in the Spirit, is a life which draws meaning from the life of Jesus Christ and John Baptist de La Salle. The lives of these men give meaning and harmony to my existence. They have shown me ways in which I can arrange all the bits and pieces of my life and glue them together so that they have meaning. I have been able to draw from them a means of making sense of my experiences. As an educator, as a Lasallian educator, I have learned that not only must I continually strive to live in awe and wonder at the oneness of creation, but that I also must hand this on to the students that God has placed before me each day. Only in this way will I be able to give meaning to my life.
To sum up, spirituality is another way of talking about our total life. God is calling us to be persons. What does that mean? We need to ask ourselves some hard questions.
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
- What are the things that really help me to make sense of my life and that make me feel more of a person?
- What sort of activities have taken on a religious significance for me?
- What are the questions I persistently avoid asking?
- Have I answered the questions superficially?
- What sort of person have I become during the past year?
- What do I need to do to respond more fully to the call of the Spirit?
- In what ways am I helping my students become more fully human? More Spirit filled?
- What do my answers to these questions say about the general shape of my life, my use of time and money, and my commitment to family, friends, students and colleagues?
|
