Day 14: Lent for my Flesh

I listened to this podcast about a week ago, a conversation between Rob Bell and Celtic pastor J. Philip Newell.

If you’ve got 30 minutes, give it a listen and let it work something out in you.

I’ve been delving more into Native American spirituality, into Celtic spirituality, the way it draws us back around to ancient voices, and back to God in a new way.

I’ve been thinking about our spirits and our souls and what they mean to our flesh.

And I think that maybe there’s way more than what we’ve thought, a much deeper river that flows from God to us and back again.

There’s this idea that the soul shines out through the body, and what we give to each other is this holy light– an aura, if you want to call that, and if you’re uncomfortable with that, call it something else.

Call it the handprint of God.

Call it the calling of holiness.

Call it your gifting,

your created presence,

the very essence that you give to this world.

I’m not sure our spirits are totally broken from our flesh, because I can feel the kind and good and full presence of God in the middle of a really hard day, and that is evidence that I am not and cannot do this on my own, within only a flesh body with no spirit.

No, I think that it all works together, this profound and holy and severely complex working that we cannot explain, even when we try to.

It’s something ancient, something spoken over and over from the beginning,

spoken into the blood and spit and heart and soul of every living thing.

So you and I, on this 14th day of Lent, we are living, breathing, fully alive creatures,

and our spirits are perhaps waiting to hear from us,

waiting to speak back to us,

waiting to lead us to that deep and full River that gives and gives and gives

until we don’t even know what it means to be full,

because we think we’ve never known anything but that fullness.

Hallelujah for those moments, when our flesh and our spirits align and we see that

God gives us everything we’ve ever needed.