So what does it look like? That’s the question, right?
I’m like you: I get to this point in a book like this and I want examples, concrete images, stories, pictures—I want to know how these big ideas actually take on flesh and blood in everyday life.
God with us,
for us,
ahead of us—
that all sounds great,
but what does it look like?
It looks like lots of things, and to talk about a few of those things, we’ll first talk about temples, and then we’ll talk about bread and wine, and then we’ll talk about curtains,
kings,
comedy clubs,
shadows,
depths,
dark matter,
splagchnon,
monkeys,
and furniture.
First, let’s go back in history, five or nine or twenty-three thousand years ago to a hill with a pile of rocks on it. A group of people are laying out sheaves of grain on that pile of rocks, which (you realize as you get closer) is an altar. They’re laying out this grain on this altar because they’ve just harvested their crop and they want to show their gods how grateful they are for the food that will keep their families alive for months to come. They’ve learned over time that for this grain to grow, they need the rain to fall in just the right amounts and the sun to shine at just the right times and the crops to be protected from any disease or animals that might eat the seeds. It takes a lot of good fortune for a harvest to be plentiful, and they are viscerally aware of their impotence in the face of all these potentially destructive forces. And so they’ve developed this ritual of taking a portion of the crop and offering it back to the rain god and sun god and protector god as a way of saying thanks, as an act of worship, hoping to keep the forces on their side so that they’ll continue to have abundant harvests that feed their families.
Now let’s jump ahead a few hundred years to that same hill, only now there’s a temple next to the altar, and people in robes are taking the sheaves from everyday, ordinary people and placing the sheaves on the altar.
Why a temple? Because as the years progressed and the offerings multiplied, the same questions arose time and time again as people questioned if they were doing enough. Maybe they needed to be more hospitable to the gods, more welcoming; maybe if the Gods took up residence in their midst, things would go better for them. And so they built a temple, a house for the Gods.
But with this growing religious system and its rules and rites came the increasing awareness of how many ways things could go wrong.
A wrong word,
an incorrect gesture,
an offensive act,
a flawed sacrifice—
who knows what would set the gods off?
How do you know that the drought you’re experiencing isn’t because somebody improperly offered his sacrifice, inadvertently provoking the wrath of the rain god?
And so gradually from among their midst a special class of people emerged, called priests, to oversee all of this ritual and offering. People set apart, devoted to the life of the temple, charged with the responsibility of making sure that everything was done in the way that was most likely to bring the favor of the gods.
Now imagine that you are a young woman and you’ve just discovered that you’re pregnant. You want your child to be healthy and you want the birth to go smoothly, so you decide to go up to the temple to give an offering of some grain and wine to the god or goddess who watches over pregnant women. You want to do everything you possibly can to gain the favor of the childbirth deities.
So you leave your house
and you go up to the temple.
You leave your common, ordinary, everyday space and you go up to the holy, sacred, divine space,
where you meet with the priests—holy, sacred,
uncommon people set apart from the masses to do the holy, sacred work of running the temple and organizing the sacrifices and keeping the gods pleased.
You do this because your life is divided into two kinds of space and time.
There is the sacred,
and there is the common.
There is your house,
and there is the temple.
There is the holy,
and there is the ordinary.
There is the divine,
and there is the everyday.
You would never take your dog into the temple area, in the same way that you would never expect a priest to show up at your house to help unclog your drain.
Let’s pause here to note two significant things briefly: One, this emergence of altars and temples and religious rites in human history wasn’t a bad thing; it was an early thing. Early in our evolution we humans became acutely aware that our existence was at the mercy of forces beyond our control, like rain and sun and disease and natural disasters. This was actually a rather sophisticated development, a click forward, because it was rooted in the acknowledgment that there are dimensions to reality that are unseen.
To point out the second thing, I take you back there to the birth of religion, because that early division between the sacred and the common is alive and well today. There’s a church near where I used to live that did a survey of its congregation, asking how important people’s spiritual lives were to them.
Spiritual lives? As opposed to their other lives?
Why do many churches celebrate someone being “called” into ministry but so few celebrate when people are called into law or medicine or business or art or making burritos or being a mother?
I can’t tell you how many times as a pastor I have interacted with people who were talking about their job and then said something along the lines of, “You know, it’s a normal job, not like being a pastor or doing something spiritual like that.”
I make these two observations because what we see in the Jesus story is the leaving behind of this division so that human history can move forward. In one of the accounts of Jesus’s death we read that the curtain in the temple of God—the one that kept people out of the holiest place of God’s presence—
ripped.
One New Testament writer said that this ripping was a picture of how, because of Jesus, we can have new, direct access to God.
A beautiful idea.
But the curtain ripping also means that God comes out, that God is no longer confined to the temple as God was previously.
God, of course, was never confined by a building. The point of the story is that our understanding of God was.
The Jesus story, then, is a radical new stage, or maybe we could say click, in our understanding of God.
A temple is meaningful and useful and helpful because it gives humans a way of conceiving of the idea of the holy and sacred. To see something as sacred, you have to set whatever it is apart and name it and label it and distinguish it as sacred. This is because you cannot comprehend everything being holy and sacred until you can grasp the idea that something is holy and sacred. You have to start somewhere. But if you don’t keep going, keep moving, keep evolving, there is the danger that in dividing reality up it will stay divided, leading people to see everything else—everything besides that sacred thing—as common, average, ordinary, and mundane.
You have to construct a temple to teach the idea of holy and sacred, but in doing that you risk that people will incorrectly divide the world up into two realms and distinctions that don’t actually exist.
This is why the Jesus story is so massive, progressive, and forward-looking in human history. Jesus comes among us as God in a body, the divine and the human existing in the same place, in his death bringing an end to the idea that God is confined to a temple because the whole world is a temple, the whole earth is
holy,
holy,
holy,
as the prophet Isaiah said.
Or, as one of the first Christians put it, we are the temple.
There’s a new place where God dwells,
and it’s us.
For more on this leap in how we understand the nature of reality, we’ll go to another table, this one on the night Jesus was betrayed. Surrounded by his followers, eating a last meal, he gave them bread and wine, telling them that those ordinary foods were his body and blood, telling them that whenever they gathered and took the bread and wine it would be an enduring experience for them of the new life he was giving them through his life and death and resurrection. In doing this, he was treating common bread and wine as holy and sacred because for him all bread and wine are holy and sacred. And all bread and wine are holy and sacred to him because all of life is sacred and holy, and that includes all interactions, events, tasks, conversations, work, words, and of course jobs.
The ancient sages say that when Moses comes across the burning bush, he doesn’t take his sandals off because suddenly the ground has become holy; he takes his sandals off because he’s just now realizing that the ground has been holy the whole time.
You are on holy ground wherever you are, and Jesus comes to let us know that the whole world is a temple because we’re temples, all of life is spiritual, all space sacred, all ground holy. He comes to heighten our senses and sharpen our eyes to that which we’ve been surrounded by the whole time; we’re just now beginning to see it.
Temples, then, and church services and worship gatherings continue to have their place and power in our lives to the degree to which moms and business-people and groundskeepers and lawyers and plumbers and people who stock the shelves of the grocery store and teachers and toll-booth collectors and farmers and graphic designers and taco makers all gather around a table with bread and wine on it to participate in Jesus’s ongoing life in the world as they’re reminded that all of life matters, all work is holy, all moments sacred, all encounters with others encounters with the divine.
For Jesus,
it’s never just a job,
a conversation is never just an exchange of words,
a meal is never just the consumption of food,
because
it’s never just
bread
and it’s never just
wine.
Jesus doesn’t divide the world up into the common and the sacred; he gives us eyes to see the sacred in the common. He comes to help us see things more, more how they actually are: that they matter, that they’re connected, and that they’re headed somewhere.
It’s easy for each new day to become like all our other days, isn’t it?
Wake up and eat, then go to work or school or exercise or head to the grocery store or return e-mails or walk the dog or call your insurance agent or take the kids to soccer practice or write that term paper or watch that game or mow the lawn or go to the dentist or book that flight or all of the above—all without forgetting to water the plants and pick up eggs on the way home before filling out the expense report and hanging the laundry before brushing your teeth and going to sleep so that you can wake up
in order to
do it all over again the next day.
Our days can easily become a blur,
the parts and pieces blending together,
all of it losing its connection and depth and significance; cut off from any sense that there’s way more going on here
until a tree is just a tree,
a conversation merely a succession of words,
a song simply noise in the background,
a job just a way to get a paycheck.
All of it reduced to what it is at its surface, shallow level, separated from the source.
Which takes us back to that nativity scene, to that baby Jesus with his tiny balled-up fists, to the insistence of that choir in that surf shop in their song that the divine and human can exist in the same place. When we talk about God, we’re talking about the Jesus who comes to reunite and reconnect us with the sacred depth, holiness, significance, and meaning of every moment of every day.
Jesus told a story about a king who was making decisions about his subjects, separating people “as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.” The sheep, we learn, are the ones who brought the king food when he was hungry and water when he was thirsty and clothes when he was naked and looked after him when he was sick and visited him when he was in prison.
The sheep are confused when they learn of their good standing with the king.
“Uhhhhhhh, king?” they protest. “When were you hungry or thirsty or naked or lonely or sick? We’ve never seen that!” They ask because of course they understand the king to be quite wealthy, not lacking in basic necessities like food, clothing, and friends.
He responds, “Whatever you did for the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
The king here makes the astounding claim that he is somehow present with and standing in solidarity with all of them, and that love and care and compassion shown to others is love for him.
Jesus tells stories like this one often, stories that speak to the divine presence in every single one of our interactions—a unity, power, and love present in all things, hidden right here in plain sight.
This story Jesus told raises the haunting question: What are we missing? Is there an entire world, right here within this one, as close as our breath, but we aren’t seeing it because we’re moving too fast, we’re separated from the source, cut off from the depths, our eyes not as open as they could be?
Jesus comes to help us see things as they truly are, moving forward, with greater and greater connectivity, higher and higher levels of hierarchy leading to holism beyond even us as all matter is permeated by the redeeming energy and power of God.
The first Christians had a way of talking about this massive movement, bigger than any one of us, that’s sweeping across human history: they wrote that God is in the process of moving everything forward so that God will be over all and through all and in all, and in another passage in the Bible it’s written that God does what God does so that God may be all in all.
over
and
through
and
in
and
all in all.
For God to be recognized as all in all,
then, we will become more and more aware of the uniting of all the depths and dimensions of being—
from the physical to the spiritual,
from the seen to the unseen,
from matter to spirit and everything in between—
as we see more and more of the universe as the single, seamless reality it’s always been.
As we say yes to this invitation and call and pull, more and more things that were previously thought to be at odds—
like science and faith,
the brain and the heart,
logic and feeling,
joy and suffering,
having explanations and not having explanations—
will become reconciled to each other and take their proper place
as more and more we flourish and thrive in this life, right here and right now.
Which reminds me of my friend Tim.
He’s a comedian, actor, motivational speaker, and author. He used to do a radio show on Friday mornings in which he’d answer callers’ questions live on the air as a number of different characters. One Friday he began talking on air as an old Irish priest, calling himself Father Tim and inviting people to ask him anything they’d like to know. Father Tim was an instant hit, so much so that Tim decided to make a public appearance at a radio promotional party. Did I mention that it was a classic rock station? Wearing a robe and a big round priest hat he’d found, he showed up at the party and greeted people and walked around smiling and telling stories, as if it were totally natural to be dressed as a priest at a classic rock station promotional party.
Did I also mention that he’s absolutely fearless?
One woman told him that her husband had driven an hour to see him in person, adding that she was sure her husband had “never been this close to God.” Other people came up to him and asked him to bless their babies.
Tim, it might not surprise you, decided to take it farther. He took a large piece of cardboard and cut a square hole in it; then he took some strips of cardboard and glued them together to make a confessional window in his cardboard confessional wall. Then he went downtown late on a weekend night to a comedy club in full Father Tim robe and hat and asked the stage manager if he could go on. The crowd, as they often are by this time, were quite rowdy, just as Tim prefers them. He went up on stage, sat down in one of two chairs, put the cardboard confessional wall between him and the other chair, and asked if anybody wanted to make a confession.
Here’s the fascinating part: they did—lots of them! Within moments people were lined up to publicly confess their sins in front of complete strangers. In a comedy club. Late on a Friday night.
I tell you this story because often we carry around secrets, sins, doubts, regrets, and crippling fears that we simply don’t know what to do with. And so those things are in there, in us somewhere, lurking in the shadows, sapping us of strength and vitality.
As it’s written in the Psalms,
When I kept silent,
my bones wasted away . . .
In spite of all the ways that we live split, detached, and compartmentalized lives, we know that this is not how it’s supposed to be, because our bodies and minds and hearts and consciences want to be united. When we’re talking about God, then, we’re talking about the power pulling us forward, the awareness we have that when something is eating us up inside it’s not right to keep it hidden or repressed or stuffed down in there. It’s the ruach of God, drawing the truth out of us so that those dark and destructive energies are no longer wasting our bones away.
We have phrases for this movement of God in our lives—we speak of getting something off our chest,
we talk about how good it was to vent,
we say after we’ve voiced some truth or doubt that we feel a thousand times lighter,
all of this language blurring the line between our
thoughts and emotions and bodies.
Why does ranting about how we really feel create such release in our chest?
For many, the word confession is tied up in what they perceive to be archaic ideas about God and judgment and condemnation and how bad we are and how God just can’t wait to crush us.
But confession—
confession is about liberation,
freedom,
naming the darkness and pain that lies within and, in naming it, robbing it of its power.
Jesus told a story about two men who went up to the temple to pray. One went on and on about how glad he was for all of the good things he’d done and how he wasn’t like other people, while the other man stood at a distance and prayed, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” Jesus said that the second man went home justified. Or, as we might say, it’s the second man who went home free.
Confession is like really, really healthy vomit. It may smell and get all over the front of your shirt, but you feel better—you feel cleansed—when you’re done. Over the years I’ve had people confess all sorts of things to me, from trivial and sometimes even funny to strange and dark and violent and illegal. I always first ask them, “Have you told anybody else about this?” and a shockingly high number of people say no, no one knows about this.
This is not only sad, but destructive. We need each other. We need friends and community, people we can vomit all over, getting it out, confessing it, and saying yes to the pull of God forward to live whole, integrated lives, where nothing is split or stuffed or repressed or stifled or hidden.
This is why the Psalms, the collection of prayers in the middle of the Bible, are so full of people asking God to do horrible, vengeful, violent things to their enemies.
You’ve felt that way before, right? Like you wanted someone who hurt you to suffer in a prolonged, excruciating way? The Psalms show us what a healthy, vibrant spirituality looks like—you pray those impulses, you speak them, you drag them up and let them pass through your lips, however mean and nasty and cruel they are.
And what you discover when you do this is that they become less than what they used to be.
Less pressing,
less urgent,
less powerful.
Make a list of every last awful thing you want done to the one you hate, and by the end of your list making you will have far less energy for list making.
Simply by being honest about what’s really going on inside of you, you live less and less divided. It’s written in the Proverbs that “a heart at peace gives life to the body.” Of course. The mind and the heart and the bones and the body are all an interconnected, interrelated whole. When you’ve wronged someone or violated your true self and it remains a deep, dark secret, it negatively affects all of you.
This is what Jesus does: he comes to integrate, to make whole, to take all the bits and pieces and disintegrated parts and bring them together, reconciling us to ourselves and to the God who never stops inviting us forward—the God who, reintegrating and reintegrated, finally truly is all in all.
We all have a shadow side, the part of us in which our fears and insecurities and greed and terror and worst suspicions about ourselves reside. It’s a churning, restless, dark place, often containing truths that can cripple us with just a fleeting thought.
When I talk about the God who is with us, for us, and ahead of us, I’m talking about our facing that which most terrifies us about ourselves, embracing it and fearing it no longer, refusing to allow it to exist separate from the rest of our being, resting assured that we are loved and we belong and we are going to be just fine.
People deal with their shadow side in a number of ways, the most common way being to find outside enemies and point to them, demonizing them and blaming them for long lists of perceived evils. This strategy often does a very effective job of helping us avoid that which lurks within us. Politicians and radio talk-show hosts and pastors can become very skilled in this, constantly pointing out the darkness and evil and twisted ways of others to avoid dealing with the doubts and insecurities and questions they bear in their own bones.
Institutions can easily become shadow management systems, finely tuned to compellingly convince people of how evil, wrong, dangerous, and threatening somebody else—some other person or group—is.
People often respond favorably to this shadow management because it’s much, much easier than actually entering into the darkness. And so the numbers grow, the budget increases, and the system becomes more convinced of its own importance and power, all the while obscuring the unspoken realities that lurk in the center of it: fear, terror, and insecurity. It’s easy to crank up the rhetoric, identifying a new enemy each week, calling each one out, appearing to your followers to be strong and authoritative and willing to take a stand, but all of it in the end a weak, shallow, desperate, pathetic, and broken exercise in shadow management.
But as we’re more and more open to the ongoing work of God in the world, we become more and more present to our depths.
Remember, 96 percent of the universe is dark matter—a vibrant, pulsating source of energy for the universe. We don’t transform our shadow side by denial but by entering into it, embracing it, facing it, and naming it because we believe God is with us and for us.
When we do this—name our fears and sins and failures and own up to them, describing them as clearly as we are able—we pass through them into the new life on the other side. We have faced the worst about ourselves and we have survived, making us strong in the only sense that actually matters. This is why resurrection is so central to the Jesus story: he faces the worst that can happen to a person, and comes out the other side alive in a new way. It is not a false strength we gain, a posing and posturing and pretending, but a quiet, humble, grounded strength that has done the hard work of facing our most troubling inner torments and then watching them be transformed into sources of vitality and life.
To be healthy and whole, then, will always lead us to become more and more fully present to our own depths, which include our shadow side as well as our deepest desires.
Jesus asked a man, “What do you want?”
A rather simple, straightforward question, and yet how many can answer it? What is it you want? What is it that you would pay a high price for and endure hardship for and overcome any obstacle put in your way to have? What is it that would get you up every morning thrilled for another day?
There’s a reason why so many personal transformations begin with the question, “Is this all there is?”
God gives us desires,
heart,
passion,
and love—
gives us desires for justice, compassion, organization, order, beauty, knowledge, wisdom—
and when we become separated from these desires, we lose something vital to who we are. For many of us, we learned quickly how to adapt, what authority figures wanted from us, and how to play the game. This can be good, and profitable, and can earn us all sorts of attention and accolades, but this can also violate who we are. We can become enslaved to the expectations of others, losing our true self in the process.
The Greeks had a way of talking about the deep place within us where our desires reside: they called it our splagchnon. Splagchnon translates literally as bowels or intestines or guts or innards. It came to refer to the part of you from which you truly live, the seat of your being that drives you to move and act and touch and feel.
And so when we talk about God, we’re talking about the divine ruach who is constantly at work in us, connecting us to our splagchnon, calling out of us all kinds of resolve and fiber and spine we may not even have known we possessed, giving us what we need to face and know and name and embrace all that is true about us, from our fears and addictions and doubts and guilt to our dreams and desires and hopes and longings.
God, it turns out, is found over, through, and in all of it. Which includes, of course, our bodies.
A friend of mine recently told me about a woman in a small town in the Midwest who started teaching a weeknight yoga class. It was the first yoga class ever taught in her town, yet a surprisingly large number of women began attending. The teacher told my friend that a fascinating thing began happening in the classes: several of the women (different ones each time) would begin weeping partway through the class, and they wouldn’t stop.
Now, I assume you’re like me when I first heard about that class, and you’re thinking, “What’s the problem? It’s just yoga.” But the teacher quickly developed a compelling theory about why the women were crying. Yoga is a Sanskrit word that means to join, unite, or integrate. As the teacher got to know the participants and listened to their perspectives on the class, she learned that for many of these women, it was the first time they had ever been told that their body is good and that it is proper and healthy for them to honor and respect and care for it as the sacred gift that it is. They’d never had someone guide them in the intentional integration of their body with their rest of their being.
Have you ever known that someone was lying but you couldn’t give a very articulate explanation of how you knew, other than “I just know”? In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Gwyneth Paltrow talked about a boyfriend she’d had who frequently cheated on her, which she said she “knew on a cellular level,” though she “bought his story.”
She knew on a cellular level.
We tell ourselves that we are rational, logical people, but we know a number of things—things we’re sure of, positive of, certain of—because of gut feelings, heartfelt inclinations, cells and molecules telling us what’s real and what’s true.
It’s been estimated that our unconscious influences 70 percent of our behavior. We’re picking up signals from people and places all day long. We often know when we’re being followed, when someone can or can’t be trusted, and even when we’re being watched. It’s astounding how many women know when they aren’t safe, even if they can’t tell you how they know this. Much of this comes from what’s called subcortical energy, coming from a place in our bodies other than our rational consciousness.
We are highly perceptive beings, with layer upon layer of sensory complexity, all finely tuned and precisely calibrated to pick up the millions of messages our personal environment is sending us every single second.
This is why art speaks to us so deeply. If you’re in a gallery and you’re standing in front of a painting and you aren’t moving because what you’re seeing is so powerful, chances are if I ask you why you’re drawn to that painting, you won’t be able to explain it to me, other than in vague terms. As the legendary British theologian Keith Richards put it, “There’s something primordial in the way we react to pulses without even knowing it.”
What happened in the Western world several hundred years ago is that the rational dimensions of our being gained a prominence over other ways of knowing—specifically, over intuition. This had a powerful effect on the way we process external stimuli, leading many of us to discount the very real and reliable information our bodies are constantly absorbing from the world around us.
To be open to the integrating power of Jesus in our lives, then, will mean that we are more and more connected with all of the ways we know things, from our linear, logical, intellectual powers all the way down to the hairs on the back of our necks and the tightness in our guts. And this isn’t just about listening and trusting our bodies, but also about the far more important responsibility we have to honor them as the gifts they are.
It will not stop there, however, because the more we are attuned to our own depths and shadows and desires, the more God is all in all in our lives, and the more we realize the depths of interaction between us and others in every gesture, conversation, and interaction.
In the early 1990s several Italian neurobiologists were studying monkeys and how their brains work. When a monkey ate a peanut, a certain motor neuron in the monkey’s brain would light up. But then the scientists learned something else, something unexpected: when the monkey watched one of the researchers eat a peanut, those same motor neurons lit up again.
Just from watching.
Related research on the human brain led to the discovery that when person A watches person B eat a peanut, 20 percent of person A’s motor neurons light up as if he’s eating the peanut himself.
Your actions cause my brain to act in very specific ways.
Ever find yourself yawning because your friend just yawned? Ever reach for your glass in a restaurant to take a drink and realize that you’re doing it because your friend across the table just took a drink?
Same thing.
We deeply impact each other, and we are way more connected and aware of what each other is doing than any of us realize. We’re patterns and relationships of energy, moving through space and time, made of millions of cells that are dying and being replaced every second, along with the trillions of swirling, frenetic atoms that comprise us in this second but in the next will go on to be others.
When we say that we had a draining conversation with someone, who knows what kind of exchange was going on at a subatomic level? That person may actually have been draining us. It may not be just a figure of speech.
When we talk about how that person took a piece of us, did she really?
When we say that somebody sucked the life out of us, how do we know that he didn’t do exactly that?
What the modern world did in its fascination with parts and pieces is teach us that we are individual, isolated human units, talking and conversing and interacting but not much more than that. What we intuitively know, however, and what we’re learning more and more from current science, is that there’s way more going on between us than we first thought.
So when Jesus calls us to love our neighbor, this is more than just a command or an ethical statement or a rule of life; it’s a truth about the very nature of reality. We are deeply connected with everybody around us, and our intentions and words and thoughts and inclinations toward them matter more than we can begin to comprehend.
There are different kinds of engagement and drain, and they affect us in much different ways. When a high school student walks out at the end of taking the SATs, her brain is cooked. When you finish a five-mile run or an hour-long weight-lifting session, your muscles ache and you’re drenched in sweat. But when your friend’s mother dies and you go to the funeral, that’s a different kind of fatigue. It drains not so much your brain or your muscles as it drains your spirit. Some events exhaust us at a spirit level, in the same way that some people can crush our spirit if we let them. Learning to be present to our depths means paying attention to all interactions and the toll they exact or the life they bring to that most mysterious, elusive aspect of ourselves we call spirit.
Remember Einstein’s discovery that matter is locked-up energy, and energy is liberated matter? You exert a gravitational pull on every object around you, including people. And they’re doing the same, at the exact same time.
When we encounter someone inspiring, it may be way more than words or actions that she gives us. Likewise, when someone makes something for us and then gives it to us and it means something to us and moves us, we feel like a part of that person is present in the gift. It’s not because we’re superstitious; it’s because a part of him may actually be in the gift.
When we talk about the vibes somebody gives off,
or the not-so-good feeling we’re getting from someone,
or we’re sure that somebody is jealous,
or harboring bitterness,
or distracted,
our bodies are doing the job that highly sophisticated radar systems do, picking up signals and processing them in real time.
Deep, as we know, calls to deep.
Our body language and facial expressions and changes in posture when we’re interacting with each other are so vast and varied that some of them can’t be consciously noticed until they’re videotaped and played back in slow motion.
When you have the sense that someone has more to tell you but you don’t know how you know that, there’s a good chance that her body sent your body that information faster than your mind could notice it.
The brain alone is stunning in its endless ability to process and morph and transform in response to external stimuli. This is called neuroplasticity, and from it we learn that how we focus our attention actually shapes our brain.
Joy is contagious,
and despair brings everybody down,
and when positive energy is present and flowing,
we all benefit.
This is why we find so many writings in the scriptures about the fruit of the spirit and not complaining and rejoicing and again rejoicing and being grateful and saying thanks and remembering where we’ve been. As we are more and more open to Jesus’s integrating work in our lives, we are more and more aware that these clichés about positive energy and good vibes and joy being contagious are true facts about how the world works.
Events and environments act on us, and the more we are experiencing God bringing together all the dimensions of our lives, the more we’ll be aware of the powerful effect our surroundings and interactions are having on us.
One quick example involving architecture: You are a phototropic being, drawn to light, for a number of biological and physiological reasons. But you also have legs that get tired if you have to stand for too long. So when you enter a room, you are drawn to the window, but you are also drawn to the chairs. You want light, and you also want to sit down. Which is all fine, unless the chairs are not arranged in front of the window. When that happens, the room draws you to two places at the same time. This creates tension in your being, very real forces within you that are unresolved.
Now think about those contending forces on a larger scale. As modern consciousness built a head of steam over the past few hundred years, very real dynamics such as these were often pushed to the side, because people saw the universe as more and more of a machine, engineered to be productive and efficient. Design and aesthetics and how things look and feel were often relegated to lesser status, rendered irrelevant because they were seen as having very little to do with what can be empirically measured and demonstrated, like profit and cost and productivity and efficiency.
But we are integrated beings, and aesthetics matter. The Bible itself begins with God taking great joy in how things look. Color and layout and feel and landscape and furniture arrangement and shape and form and line and curve all matter, because they affect us in powerful and sublime ways.
Beauty matters, and as we are more and more alive to the divine ruach at work in the world, the more and more aware we will be of the importance of all dimensions of our being, because Jesus is at work saving and rescuing and redeeming and reconciling all of us, uniting us, bringing us more and more into the full and joyous life God intends for us.
Back once more to that table with the bread and wine on it. There’s a reason why people have been taking the bread and wine and remembering Jesus’s life and death and resurrection for the past two thousand years.
We need reminders of who we are and how things actually are.
And so we come to the table exactly as we are, some days on top of the world, other days barely getting by. Some days we feel like a number, like a machine, like a mere cog in a machine, severed and separated from the depth of things, this day feeling like all the others. Other days we come feeling tuned in to the song, fully alive, hyperaware of the God who is all in all. The point of the experience isn’t to create special space where God is, over and against the rest of life where God isn’t. The power is in the striking ability of this experience to open our eyes all over again (and again and again) to the holiness and sacred nature of all of life, from family to friends to neighbors to money and breath and sex and work and play and food and wine.
That’s God all in all, bringing together all of our bodies and our minds and our souls and our spirits and all the parts and pieces that make us us, as our eyes are opened in
the good,
the bad,
the ugly,
the beautiful,
the inspiring,
and the
gut-wrenching
to the presence in all of life of the God who is with us,
for us,
and ahead of us.