Waiting...waiting...waiting

When I study the work of Michaelangelo, I think he was divinely inspired.  In his "Creation of Adam," I see more and more all the time.  Adam (from the earth) is emerging from the earth, clearly in the image of God (almost a mirror image of bone and flesh and sinew), but he has yet to receive the spark of life that is about to be communicated through the finger of God reaching toward him.  He reaches up; God reaches down -- and we all know what is about to happen:  Man is about to become a living being!

A friend of mine has told me for years that I need to read A World Waiting to be Born by M. Scott Peck.  And for years, I have kept forgetting to pursue her suggestion.  But lately, something has been stirring in me to read that book.  For one thing, the title itself intrigues me -- because I think that it captures the sense that I get from Michaelangelo's painting of Adam, "waiting to be born." 

Every one of us individually, at every moment of our lives, are, in a sense like that title and like Adam, are 'waiting to be born.'  We are reaching up, while God is reaching down.  We are waiting...waiting...waiting for the finger of God to touch us, to re-order the chaos within and without in our lives, to bring energy within and order without in our worlds.  We are waiting to be born -- again. 

I love in Michaelangelo's painting that Adam is fully grown, just as Genesis portrays also, because it is in our fully grown state that we most need the divine touch.  In The Holy Longing, Ron Rolheiser says that "Spirituality is what we do with the passion within us."  Everyone has a spirituality, whether it's creative or destructive.  It's how we channel the energy that makes us live.  Spirituality is what drives us forward in our lives, from moment to moment.  When I look at "The Creation of Adam," I think of what it portrays not just as a moment in time, but as every moment of our lives:  either our energy is being sapped and drained from within and without, or it is being renewed by the Spirit of God touching and energizing and bringing life to our souls.

Rolheiser says that there are two functions of a healthy spirit in us:  it has to energize us -- give us fire-- and it has to "glue us together."   As any mother or businessman will recognize, daily life "pulls us apart" in so many directions, with so many demands.  It is hard to stay focused and moving toward a goal.  People -- including children -- demand energy from us, deflate us, sometimes destroy us.  So where in this world, given its tendencies, do we find a renewal of our flagging spirit?  How do we stay energized and "glued together" instead of "pulled apart from the center"?

We see little children, fresh from the hand of God, as truly spiritual beings, full of energy, full of truth, focused on one goal -- learning and growing and loving.  And so many times, their spirits are quenched by evil, itself focused on one goal -- to destroy the spirit within them.  We have all been participants in evil to some degree or another; that is the human condition, the 'cross' we have to bear-- that we have inherited the tendency to destroy rather than to build up. 

So all of us, whether we have been destroyed, or whether we have had a part in unraveling the work of God in another -- all of us are alike awaiting the rebirth of our spirits.  At every moment, we are like Adam in M's painting -- partially of the earth, partially the "son of God, created in His Image," awaiting the new birth, awaiting the new divine touch, the spark that comes from the very hand of God and breath (Spirit) of God.

At the moment we cease reaching up and waiting for His touch, we begin to die.  God told Adam, "the day you eat of its fruit -- the fruit of experience -- dying, you will die."  Life, experience, has a way of killing the divine spirit within us, so that even while we are living, we are also dying.  But remaining in communion with God, even while we are dying, we are being renewed in strength, in wisdom, and in truth.  Even as we approach old age, our energy is being renewed, and we are being "glued together" by the hand of God.