Hi. Good morning. It’s Sunday. And I’m not at all stressed or scrambling to polish what I’m going to say in church today. The reason is because today I’m playing at The MOprah show, interviewing two friends who walked the Camino de Santiago, a sacred pilgrimage in Europe.
I mean. A lot of us pastors feel like we’re putting on a little play, a little show every week, so I thought … why not have a set? Why not really just do it?
Our church lends itself well to this and I’ve always loved setting the stage, in places where I’ve lived and in the shop I once had with my friend, Kristin. It makes sense to me. The places we inhabit should be inviting and warm.
Pretty cozy, huh? I bet you’d go to church, too, if you knew you could sit down with your coffee, on comfy cushions, bring your dog to sit with you, and listen to interesting people talk about their spiritual journey.
There shouldn’t be any great distinction between life and church and the Infinite Whatever, but a bunch of churchy jerks have made it that way, so now it’s up to us to undo it.
It’s all One and the more we make it that way, the better off all of us will be.
Which rolls us right into …
What I’m working on, or what I call The Lecture. In truth it will take some time for me to refine this concept, but we’ll start to roll it out here this morning.
The Lecture (sip of water)
Humans are tri-dimensional beings. We are body, mind and soul.
I know most people are on board with the body and mind part and I know that there are a lot of skeptics when it comes to the soul part.
Here’s what I want to say about that: the fact that you are soul-imbued is not dependent on your belief or unbelief. It just is.
In our culture we have the body thing really down. The wellness industry is a multi-trillion dollar machine. If I start to name all the options you have, things you can access, stuff people want to sell you and people you can hire to help you become healthy we’ll be here all day. Suffice it to say we know body. It doesn’t necessarily mean we do a great job taking care of our bodies, but we’ve come a long way in that department.
Mind: there are counselors and psychiatrists and psychotherapists and life coaches and social workers and all of them have a waiting list for new clients. The self-help section of any library or bookstore is growing by the week. We have become obsessed with mental/emotional wellness. And people are profiting mightily from this, too. Scroll through any Instagram feed and your path will inevitably cross with some current shaman of mental wellness, someone who has crowned him or herself the Purveyor of Important Information on How to Live Your Best Life, distilled into bite-size portions.
A lot of it is bunk, but the fact that we are no longer turning a blind eye to our emotional well-being or thinking of ourselves as sissies if we need assistance in that area of our lives is a win.
So we have lots and lots of opportunities here in our cultural landscape to work on our physical and emotional health. But we have sorely neglected our spiritual wellbeing.
I think I know why.
Because we associate matters of the soul with the word God and we associate matters of God with religious institutions and religious institutions, generally speaking, suck.
I am allowed to say that because I have worked inside of religious institutions for ten years now. I’m not standing on the outside tossing rocks, I’m sitting inside, looking around and seeing just how bad things are.
So most people, when it comes to matters of the soul, have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. I will never go to church becomes synonymous with I don’t believe in God which plays out in our lives as not interested in what’s happening with my “soul,” hardy har har, that’s just for a bunch of religious losers.
Well.
Here’s the thing: if you tend to one part of the garden and neglect the other part, the weeds will eventually creep into the good part and take over and the whole thing will be … filled with weeds!
If you go to the gym and work out and eat well and visit your therapist once a week, you’re doing pretty well, but if you neglect your soul, you will never actually feel great. There will always be a sense of dis-ease (see what I did there? Dis-ease/disease. Clever, huh?) But actually not clever at all because it’s precisely that dis-ease, that disconnect between your body and mind and soul that is the place where disease is born.
You know how when you’re stressed your neck seizes up or your back aches? You know how when you have to talk to someone you don’t want to talk to your head hurts? That’s how it works. You cannot extract the body from the mind from the soul. And when you do things fall apart.
If you move through your life ignoring the yearnings of your soul, the desires of your spirit, you’ll arrive at a place where you can’t shake that feeling … that feeling that something’s off, you’re not really all that content and you can’t figure out why. You got all the stuff, all the equipment, all the books and tools and the nice apartment and cool car, your kids are fine, you go to Martha’s Vineyard every summer, but Something. Is. Off.
It’s your soul begging for your attention.
The Venn Diagram of your life is out of whack.
Things are not humming.
OK, fine, but you are not going to meditate and you already tried yoga and you are most definitely not going to start going to church and a week at Canyon Ranch is not in the budget.
What, then?
How do we create spiritual wellness in our own lives every single day?
This one I’ll start to lay out tomorrow. The Lecture will continue right back here tomorrow morning. Let what I’ve said here sink in. Trust that there’s a whole lot more to you than your brain and body. If you want to achieve true wellness and live a satisfying life you have got to tend to your soul. You just do, get over it.
xo, mo
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/13/opinion/love-duty-grace.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
An interesting NYT piece on grace (and soul)
It kills me I can't be at church today!