FIRE AND WATER

Recently I have been rereading Ronald Rolheiser's The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality. It is probably the best work on spirituality that I have ever read. That is why it deserves a reread. There is just too much there to comprehend the first time through.

Rolheiser maintains that in each one of us there is a never-ending desire, a fundamental dis-ease, that will not allow us to be satisfied, ever. It is akin to running with wolves, having a fire in the belly. We cannot explain it; we just know it is there. Spirituality, he says, is what we do with this unrest, this dis-ease, this fire, this desire to keep on running, never standing still, if you will.

But as with any fire, if it gets out of control, we can be consumed by whatever it is that is driving us. So there is a need to have water ready to toss on the fire, not to put it out, but to keep it under control. Spirituality is about how we channel our desires, whatever they are and however we define or understand them, so that we do not get out of control, subsumed, consumed, by our desires. That, in a way, is what sin is all about: it is about giving in to an all-consuming desire to do or say something even though we know that to do so is wrong.

The opposite of being spiritual is to have no energy, to be unable to do anything, to lose all zest for living, to be a couch potato. Spirituality, then, has to keep us glued together so that we do not roll up into a ball and die. A healthy spirituality keeps us, he says, both energized and glued together.

A healthy spirituality does that. I don't know about you, but it seems that sometimes I am either so glued together that I am stuck or so loose that I am not sure which way to turn. Most of the time I am somewhere in the middle, neither stuck nor loose. Spirituality is about making choices. Healthy spirituality is about making the right choices, or at least making more right choices than wrong choices.

This drive, which Rolheiser calls "eros," is soul, soul that gives us energy. But it is also the glue that keeps us together. It puts fire in our veins and keeps us energized; and it adds water to the mix and keeps us glued together. There is chaos and there is order. It is the creative tension between the two, between fire and water that both keeps us alive and keeps us safe.

All this, I suspect, sounds rather esoteric, and maybe so.  Our own spirituality is something we never quite get a handle on. We know what it is even if we cannot define it or even describe it. We know when we are on fire and we know when we seem stuck in the mud. And we often do not know what to do about either.

And this is only for starters! We do have to recognize what is going on inside us if we want to even begin to understand ourselves. If there is any consolation, even the greatest saints had problems with their spiritual lives. So will/do we.