July 2022 - Made SacredMade Sacred

There is so much confusion in our current place and time when it comes to our selves and what we consist of.

Some tell us that we are purely physical and have no need to consider any spiritual aspect.

Others tell us that the most important piece of us is the spiritual piece and we should disregard the physical altogether.

I confess that I tend to lean toward the latter. Most days I’d prefer to ignore my physical body completely and only tend to my spiritual life. There are probably many of you who lean the other way.

Both of these either/or views, however, don’t accurately depict the way God created humans.

God created man to be unique among all created beings. He created us to be the link between natural life and spiritual life, called to manifest his glory in both.

Humans are

truly created a little lower than the angels, yet truly crowned with glory and worship, because in this unperfected human nature the Absolute Life itself has deigned to dwell. ~ Evelyn Underhill

We are the only beings created to be both physical and spiritual. We stand in the gap between heaven and earth, bringing God’s kingdom rule here on earth and reflecting the praises of creation back to God.

Rulers and priests.

Physical and spiritual.

It has helped me when thinking through this idea to think of the self as a house. Many theologians over the centuries have written of the self in this way.

St. Teresa of Avila, a Christian mystic in the 16th century, wrote a book called The Interior Castle in which she describes the movement between the lower floors of the castle (the physical self) and the upper floors (the spiritual self) as prayer.

Evelyn Underhill, a theologian from the early 1900’s, wrote of the self as a home with an upstairs (again, the spiritual self) and a downstairs (the physical body).

Both floors of the home are necessary. Taking care of both is essential to being a whole person in the way God intended for us to be.

Therefore a full and wholesome spiritual life can never consist of living upstairs, and forgetting to consider the ground floor and its homely uses and needs; thus ignoring the humbling fact that those upper rooms are entirely supported by it. ~ Underhill

I feel as though those words were written directly to me.

I not only tend to forget the “humbling fact that those upper rooms are entirely supported by” the ground floor, I sin against my Creator when I disparage my physical body as unimportant or less than.

Back to the singularness of human beings, the strength of our “house” consists in that “intimate welding together of the divine and the human.” (Underhill)

That intimate welding together found its perfection in the humanity and deity of Christ.

That intimate welding together is what you and I must aim toward if we are to become like Jesus, become the kind of human we were created to be.

We were created to be a whole house, with the lower and upper floors intimately welded together for the glory of God.

Art credits: painting is by Thomas Kinkade; photo of light through trees is by Kirk Sewell

Our lives are “extroverted to excess. Our attention is incessantly called outwards toward the multitude of details and demands …” Evelyn Underhill, 1926

Culture has been heading this direction for a long time. Perhaps this world has always been so, developing in us a call to focus outward, a pride in busyness, a tendency to give undue importance to external details.

Many of our churches follow in the same direction, calling their people towards service and events far more than prayer, contemplation, and spiritual formation. We are asked to always be ready to give and serve yet are not told how to be filled up with anything to give.

It becomes clear, when we look at the life of Jesus, that we should live a mixed life, not a single-focused life. We should live a life of prayer and service, a life of looking and working, a life of being filled up with God and spilling that life out for others.

To deepen our own spiritual lives to meet the demands of others, we must first spend time gazing at God. We need a vision, a conception, as clear and deep and lovely as we are able, of the splendor and beauty of God.

That enrichment of the sense of God is surely the crying need of our current Christianity. A shallow religiousness, the tendency to be content with a bright ethical piety wrongly called practical Christianity … seems to me to be one of the ruling defects of institutional religion at the present time.

We have not changed directions since Evelyn Underhill wrote this in 1926. We have only moved further down that path.

Stressing service rather than awe simply does not wear well. In those moments when the pain and mystery of life are deeply felt, in the moments when we fall into a dangerous spiritual exhaustion in the name of meetings the needs of others, this “shallow religiousness” falls flat.

St. Ignatius of Loyola said that “Man was created for this end – to praise, reverence, and serve the Lord his God.” Notice that two of the three things for which our souls were made are our relationship with God: adoration and awe. Unless these two pieces are in their correct place, the last of the triad, service, will not be right.

Again, it is in looking to Jesus and the pattern of his own life that we see the way in which we should walk. This mixed life of prayer and service

unites the will, the imagination, and the heart; concentrates them on one single aim. In the recollected hours of prayer and meditation you do the looking; in the active and expansive hours you do the working. (Underhill)

Our secret life of prayer, the steady orientation of our hearts to the reality of God, is what leads to the desire and ability to be Jesus’s hands and feet to those around us. Ruysbroeck, a contemplative in the Middle Ages, said that the result of a perfected life of prayer was “a widespreading love to all in common.”

It is, for certain, a grace from God to have a sense of wonder and delight in him. Like all graces, however, our ability to receive it depends mostly on the exercise of our will and desire, on our openness and giving of our time to receive it. It will not be forced upon us.

Our churches are not wrong in teaching that a life of service is good and necessary, yet service should not, cannot, come first. We must first “deepen (our) own lives, that (we) are capable of deepening the lives of others.” (Underhill)

Christ set us an example in all things, and so it is a mixed life that we are called to live, a life of prayer and service, of looking and working. We must first take the time to be filled up with a deep and clear vision of the splendor of God; only then will we have the ability to spill out our lives in love for others.

Made Sacred

Thoughtfully engaging life and culture as a way of loving God and loving others

Monthly Archives: July 2022

The Welding Together of the Whole House

There is so much confusion in our current place and time when it comes to our selves and what we consist of.

Some tell us that we are purely physical and have no need to consider any spiritual aspect.

Others tell us that the most important piece of us is the spiritual piece and we should disregard the physical altogether.

I confess that I tend to lean toward the latter. Most days I’d prefer to ignore my physical body completely and only tend to my spiritual life. There are probably many of you who lean the other way.

Both of these either/or views, however, don’t accurately depict the way God created humans.

God created man to be unique among all created beings. He created us to be the link between natural life and spiritual life, called to manifest his glory in both.

Humans are

truly created a little lower than the angels, yet truly crowned with glory and worship, because in this unperfected human nature the Absolute Life itself has deigned to dwell. ~ Evelyn Underhill

We are the only beings created to be both physical and spiritual. We stand in the gap between heaven and earth, bringing God’s kingdom rule here on earth and reflecting the praises of creation back to God.

Rulers and priests.

Physical and spiritual.

It has helped me when thinking through this idea to think of the self as a house. Many theologians over the centuries have written of the self in this way.

St. Teresa of Avila, a Christian mystic in the 16th century, wrote a book called The Interior Castle in which she describes the movement between the lower floors of the castle (the physical self) and the upper floors (the spiritual self) as prayer.

Evelyn Underhill, a theologian from the early 1900’s, wrote of the self as a home with an upstairs (again, the spiritual self) and a downstairs (the physical body).

Both floors of the home are necessary. Taking care of both is essential to being a whole person in the way God intended for us to be.

Therefore a full and wholesome spiritual life can never consist of living upstairs, and forgetting to consider the ground floor and its homely uses and needs; thus ignoring the humbling fact that those upper rooms are entirely supported by it. ~ Underhill

I feel as though those words were written directly to me.

I not only tend to forget the “humbling fact that those upper rooms are entirely supported by” the ground floor, I sin against my Creator when I disparage my physical body as unimportant or less than.

Back to the singularness of human beings, the strength of our “house” consists in that “intimate welding together of the divine and the human.” (Underhill)

That intimate welding together found its perfection in the humanity and deity of Christ.

That intimate welding together is what you and I must aim toward if we are to become like Jesus, become the kind of human we were created to be.

We were created to be a whole house, with the lower and upper floors intimately welded together for the glory of God.

Living a Mixed Life

Our lives are “extroverted to excess. Our attention is incessantly called outwards toward the multitude of details and demands …” Evelyn Underhill, 1926

Culture has been heading this direction for a long time. Perhaps this world has always been so, developing in us a call to focus outward, a pride in busyness, a tendency to give undue importance to external details.

Many of our churches follow in the same direction, calling their people towards service and events far more than prayer, contemplation, and spiritual formation. We are asked to always be ready to give and serve yet are not told how to be filled up with anything to give.

It becomes clear, when we look at the life of Jesus, that we should live a mixed life, not a single-focused life. We should live a life of prayer and service, a life of looking and working, a life of being filled up with God and spilling that life out for others.

To deepen our own spiritual lives to meet the demands of others, we must first spend time gazing at God. We need a vision, a conception, as clear and deep and lovely as we are able, of the splendor and beauty of God.

We have not changed directions since Evelyn Underhill wrote this in 1926. We have only moved further down that path.

Stressing service rather than awe simply does not wear well. In those moments when the pain and mystery of life are deeply felt, in the moments when we fall into a dangerous spiritual exhaustion in the name of meetings the needs of others, this “shallow religiousness” falls flat.

Again, it is in looking to Jesus and the pattern of his own life that we see the way in which we should walk. This mixed life of prayer and service

unites the will, the imagination, and the heart; concentrates them on one single aim. In the recollected hours of prayer and meditation you do the looking; in the active and expansive hours you do the working. (Underhill)

It is, for certain, a grace from God to have a sense of wonder and delight in him. Like all graces, however, our ability to receive it depends mostly on the exercise of our will and desire, on our openness and giving of our time to receive it. It will not be forced upon us.

Our churches are not wrong in teaching that a life of service is good and necessary, yet service should not, cannot, come first. We must first “deepen (our) own lives, that (we) are capable of deepening the lives of others.” (Underhill)