Dear friends,

Do you know that you are God’s temple and that the spirit of God dwells inside of you? This is one of my favorite passages from scripture in 1 Corinthians 3: 16. Its implications for our lives are nothing short of radical.

What if we truly believed that God’s spirit dwelt within us, and that in fact, we are God’s temple? Individually, think how our lives would be different if we treated our bodies, minds, and souls as God’s temple. Would we feed our bodies with toxic foods? Would we feed our minds with toxic thoughts and images? Would we rush around at 100 miles per hour, overworked, overstressed, and overburdened?

How much more would we exercise our bodies? How much more would we feed our spirits through uplifting and connecting spiritual practices, and through supportive spiritual community?

There are challenges in living this out. The first is- we are human! We fall short. We don’t always eat the right foods or take care of our bodies or minds or spirits as we should. This is a part of life.

Christianity is an incarnational religion. Jesus came to earth in a body, incarnating love, embodying peace and joy. In Jesus, we find the model par excellence of a life lived in service, compassion, and peacemaking. When we fall short, our task is not to beat ourselves up! As God loves us unconditionally, our task (difficult as it may be) is to love ourselves in the same way. God’s love isn’t punishing or unforgiving. Rather, God’s love invites us to grow continually into the greatest vision of the grandest version of ourselves. When we fall short, we remember God’s love- not in order to beat ourselves up, but to be patient and gentle with ourselves on the path to healing and wholeness, just as God is infinitely patient and gentle with us. This is the paradox of God’s love for us: God loves us just as we are; AND, God loves us too much for us to stay just as we are :)

The incarnational faith of Jesus invites us to live more deeply into our spiritual convictions day by day. This type of faith invites us not just into knowledge, but into lived experience. In today’s digital age, we can get just about any information we want over the internet. What we desire and crave, in life, and in faith, is not simply knowledge, but inspiration, experience, and integration.

What if we were to truly integrate and embody this passage about God’s temple dwelling inside of us- not only in an individual sense, but also interpersonally? In that case, we would strive to give love and peace first place in our hearts and in our human relationships, over and above fear and violence. We would constantly seek to walk gently upon the earth and with our fellow humans, realizing that God dwells not only within us, but within all others and within everything! Once we touch God inside ourselves, we awaken to the mystical, magical nature of all life. We see, or aim to see, God in everything! We begin to live into this quote from the wonderful Jesuit Father Pedro Arrupe:

Nothing is more practical than finding God,
than falling in Love in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination,
will affect everything.
It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.

If God’s spirit is truly inside everything and everyone, then the mosaic of God’s presence is expressed beautifully within the diversity of all things. Our task- no matter someone’s skin color, race, ethnicity, age, ability, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, and so on- is to see God in them. This does not mean being blind to color or to the real differences among us. Those differences are real and important to be addressed and acknowledged. But what we long and work for when we talk about the “Kingdom of God” is a world where we truly live into an incarnational faith; an embodied spirituality- where we realize that we cannot harm another without doing harm to ourselves; where all things are sacred, and all being are holy.

As with our individual selves, we fall short in relationships and communities of always manifesting love, understanding, and compassion. But, seeking to love as God loves, we must not give up when the road gets tough. Look at what is happening in Ferguson, and in the aftermath of police brutality with Eric Garner and countless others. These situations call us to grow more fully into the people God intends us to be. Our task is not to shy away from the light, but to shine the light in the darkness!

This is the kind of faith and spiritual community that Agape Spiritual Community, a new church I am part of in Waltham, Massachusetts, seeks and intends to create. We are just in the beginning, embryonic stages. And “church” is not a building, it is people! It is the people, those who are excited about this burgeoning spiritual community, that will make it what it is. How exciting!

As we move out of the Christmas season, may we hold in our minds and hearts the true spirit of the season. As Love became flesh and dwelt among us, we are called to do no less. For, as Teresa of Avila once said, “Christ has no body on earth now but yours.”

Christ has no body but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
Compassion on this world,
Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good,
Yours are the hands, with which he blesses all the world.
Yours are the hands, yours are the feet,
Yours are the eyes, you are his body.
Christ has no body now but yours,
No hands, no feet on earth but yours,
Yours are the eyes with which he looks
compassion on this world.
Christ has no body now on earth but yours.

In deep peace I wish you blessings as we head into the New Year,

Matt

www.agapewaltham.org

www.backtojesusnow.com