Dave Brisbin 2.16.25
Like an over-the-top extravert, life can suck all the oxygen out of the room, leaving little energy or attention for anything else. And against life’s overwhelming physical realities, the spiritual can seem like a whisper we’re not even sure we heard…naïve, even irrelevant to our most pressing needs.
I understand why spiritual leaders often change lanes into the socio-political, macro issues. It’s like getting off the sidelines and into the game, a side to take, a cause to champion…all driven by the legitimate belief that spirituality is only as authentic as it is present in all our physical relationships—personal and communal.
It’s chicken and egg...
Which comes first, spiritual formation or the championing of causes? They work hand in glove, but with life pulling relentlessly to the physical, we need to act as our own counterweight, pulling back toward the spiritual. Not because spiritual awareness is better, “righter” than our physical lives, but because spiritual awareness is underrepresented in daily life and needs special attention. Spiritual formation builds the awareness of who we really are: not individual entities, but part of the whole of everything that is, including each other in all our diversity and disagreement. And when this awareness of oneness is informing our choices, it changes the way we approach the championing of our causes.
We can’t separate spirituality from physicality. Each is lived in the presence of the other, defined in the context of the other. And neither is more important than the other as long as we’re breathing here. Human life is a balancing act. Each of us needs dreams, plans, and the hard work of accomplishing them—the “not yet." But if we’ve not mastered the ability to work with grateful completion right now, to balance now and not yet, if we confuse our work with the spirituality that propels us to it, we remain billboards for the human problem.
A faith community and recovery ministry, theeffect is a community of imperfect people working together to find the physical and emotional recovery and spiritual transformation that is theeffect of God’s love by unlearning limiting perceptions, beliefs, and compulsions, and engaging a first century Jesus in a non-religious and transforming way.
