Seeking 3
October 29, 2008
Celtic Daily Prayer’s third opening and arresting question asks:
Do you seek Him with all your soul? and answers with: Amen, Lord, have mercy!
Scot McKnight says that the soul is the seat of our spirituality in 40 Days of Living the Jesus Creed. I understand Christian (The only spirituality Missional Order promotes) spirituality as “The entirety of my lived relationship with God” (Brazos Introduction to Christian Spirituality, which is a fantastic resource to help us sort through terms like spiritual formation, spirituality, spiritual growth, discipleship, sanctification, religion, mysticism, etc…).
Every particular happening I live through with God, I process it through my soul. Better, God processes it with me through my soul. This means the seeking of God I do aims to discover God in every aspect of my lived relationship with God. Here I ask every time I go through an event or experience, God what is this about? What are showing me of you? The community in Psalm 60 couldn’t help but ask God to interpret their experience. This is seeking with the soul as I am coming to understand it.
There are patterns of lived relationship with God that are common to all God-life practitioners (e.g. prayer, Bible reading, sacred rhythm). But there are particulars that can only be true of each of us bespeaking the uniqueness of each soul design. The soul is deep, deeper than human knowledge can fathom. I enjoy expressing my relationality with God through playing the piano. When I do, say late at night, I experience a real sense of the presence of God touching my soul. But you may do so by jogging, writing, cooking, plumbing, blogging…
Seeking God with our soul, is seeking to understand the entirety of our lived relationship with God. In that sense our “spirituality is local and ordinary” (the phrase is often used by Eugene Petersen). The soul is a mystery. It stands in defiance of understanding life materially or with the lens of consumerism. The soul is THE seeking mechanism of our lives. It takes what our minds think and feel, what our hearts will and spirits experience, what our bodies do, integrating the whole life (The entirety of our lived relationship with God). When the soul is seeking the life is reflecting what is sought.
Amen, (May it be so) Lord, (possessor of my soul), have mercy (for truly I know little of whom I seek, and I seek in such little ways)!
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