These past few days I have been focusing on the length of our lives, the way we live-out the three score years and ten. We do so through the body, mind and the strange abstract idea of the spirit or our spirituality. It is to the spiritual life that many of us look to for a greater vision of reality. Some of us, in our honest and reflective moments, might recognise and even acknowledge that making a connection spiritually is less easy than a physical or rational connection in life. Our senses, the five so often in play, can overwhelm or dominate our experience of life.
It is as though life can only be experienced through what we touch, smell, taste, hear, see or can in the case of the mind, comprehend. In fact I would suggest that this is because we perceive we cannot control or contain life any other way. Our senses have a powerful influence on us, they often make us feel good or safe or in control. Part of my own early challenge with faith was about trusting what is unknowable, uncontrollable even unimaginable. After all of the books and sermons, the intricate detailed descriptions of God I still had to act in faith or as Paul says to the Church in Corinth, ‘For we live by faith, not by sight.’
I know that sounds easy but it is the only real option in the end. It is life beyond our obvious physical and physiological existence. It is in moments of connection with the spirit within us that we encounter a world not governed by the norms of our understanding. Like Jack Sparrow’s compass in Pirates of the Caribbean which makes no sense until you stop asking it to conform to the boundaries of accepted navigation.
I wonder how we might experience the world around us if we moved beyond the limit of our physical senses and intellectual mind to connect with that part of us so often neglected – the spirit within. Imagine discovering an additional way of living, not through sight and sound, not via our amazing intellect but by a less well worn path, our spirituality. It might be really odd to say that my best friend is Jesus. Odd because most of our friends are physically alive and when we talk they talk back. Well, my conversations with my best friend are non verbal, they are through my spirituality. Try it, you will never know until you do!
Rob Wykes 