Spiritual-ness.

We are both physical and spiritual beings, thus everything we do is spiritual. I do believe this. Everything we do isn't solely the physical-ness of our decisions/ideas/actions/etc ... they have just as real, if not even more real, spiritual consequences and responses. I've been really allowing this to sink into my heart the last few weeks and reading Nouwen's book, "Here and Now" has really just affirmed so much in me. Not only that, but Nouwen has furthered the thought by adding a much more wider, yet deeper perspective on what our spiritual-ness actually is.

It's so profound to actually comprehend the fact that for every situation there is a spiritual situation surrounding it. I'm not just talking in terms of this great spiritual battle between Good and Evil. ( God you are victorious! ) In this post I'm focusing on the profound, yet soft and gentle ways the Holy Spirit generates and cultivates His plans for His people. His ways are so flawless yet at times seem so ... haphazard. I wonder why this seemingly great relationship didn't work out or how this person could so easily walk away from their faith ...etc. . . It's in times as those I wonder ..." Where is the spiritual side to all this?" - more specifically "where is the Holy Spirit in that certain situation? Is He going to show up later down the road? Is He taking a break from this wretched situation?"

While in a fallen world, sin is inevitable and it inevitably spreads leaving behind remnants of it's manifestation. Wretched situations are going to happen. The spiritual side to that is the fact that God does not waste- through the Holy Spirit, any wretched situation calls someone to transformation - and the complete union with God that our humanness is dying for.

" Jesus does not give a political interpretation of the event but a spiritual one: What happened invites you to conversion! This is the deepest meaning of history: a constant invitation calling us to turn our hearts to God and so discover the full meaning of our lives. " - Nouwen

Everything the Holy Spirit does inevitably draws us closer to that place of union with Him, as He first intended before the fall of Adam. This brings hope.

I also loved this in Nouwen's book ::

"When I marched with thousands of black and white Americans from Selma to Montgomery in the summer of 1965, to support the blacks in their struggle for equal rights, Martin Luther King already said that the deeper spiritual meaning of the civil rights movement was that the blacks were calling the whites to conversion...the poor have a mission to the rich, the blacks have a mission to the whites, the handicapped have a mission to the "normal", the gay people have a mission to the straight, the dying have a mission to the living. Those whom the world has made into victims, God has chosen to be bearers of good news. "

I never thought of the Civil Rights Movement this way - and now that I think about it I can also apply this to the women's movements that have taken place over the past century. When looking at the spiritual side of these circumstances, according to Nouwen, they are quite reversed. Without taking this to an unhealthy extreme I can say that the spiritual side to the womens movements werent so much about women becoming independent and fighting the men for equal rights - but rather it was an invitation for men to relinquish entitlements and further see the value in a coexisting union between God, husband and wife. Interesting.