But there is also an active, dynamic spiritual real world that we live within. In fact, all physical reality - us included - emerged from the Spiritual Reality which is God, and will return to God. The Body of Christ is a Corporate Spiritual Reality. The Body of Christ is the Communion - or union - of holy men and women, from all time, united, interconnected through and with Christ: it's also called the "Communion of Saints" that we speak of in the Creed.
We get so intent sometimes on "God and Me," and on our individual relationship with Jesus, that we forget that we are interconnected with millions of people, that God is at work saving millions of people all the time, that God sees us simultaneously as individuals and as part of a Dynamic Whole.
In the Hebrew Scriptures, (Old Testament,) God makes promises to Israel as a whole; the prophets challenge and confront Israel as a whole. But by the 16th century, we started to think and pray as individuals and worry about how individual people can go to Heaven, instead of thinking, praying, and worrying about the rest of God's people - and how we are united to them all the time - through, with, and in Christ.
We'd also forgotten that God's plan for renewing us is cosmic in scope. That God speaks of all creation groaning, waiting for renewal, that God promises us a new Heaven and a new Earth. All creation is from God's Hand and God sees all creation as good (in Genesis); why would we think that only humans will be recreated for eternity?
How small we had become! We had forgotten the message that Jesus is the "promise," the "guarantee," and the "pledge": his life, death, and resurrection is the pattern for the human lives of every age to follow - as well as the pattern for the life, death, and resurrection of the universe itself.
Fr. Rohr says "There are really two resurrections in St. Paul's view: the first is the private resurrection that seemingly happens after we die, and the second, and much more important one for St. Paul, is his cosmic hope that ....what God did in Jesus (namely to raise up what humanity crucified), God is going to do in all of history and all of creation. It's a universal message!"
When I find myself praying "Dear God, please bless my family, and friends, and me today," I have to catch myself and say "Sorry, God, that's too small a prayer!" My "family" that needs my prayers is one that Christ grafted me onto, and its number is beyond my imagination.
Part of our spiritual journey then is seeing and hearing with the eyes and ears of God, and recognizing the spiritual reality that undergirds our physical reality: the child starving in Africa, the homeless man under the downtown bridge, the woman refugee in Syria or Iraq, are my family. The Spiritual Reality of our lives is that we belong to the amazing Corporate Reality of the Body of Christ, a spiritual reality much stronger than physical family ties, and there are millions of our brothers and sisters out there in need of our prayers, our sacrifices, our caring hearts.
Yes, I mean it, our connection to the Body of Christ, the Communion of Saints, is STRONGER than our ties of blood! Because these ties to others came through the Blood of Christ, the One Who reinforced our relationships of Son-ship and Daughter-ship, Brother and Sisterhood, through His sacrificial death and resurrection for us!
"We believe in the Communion of Saints, the forgiveness of sins, the Resurrection of the Body, and Life Everlasting." (Part of the Creed, believed in by all Christian denominations.)
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