The Spiritual Life

In The Blue Period, his novel about Pablo Picasso, Luke Gerard Kummer describes a scene between Picasso and his close friend, Carles, a poet:

[Carles] paused at the studio's threshold and turned back around. "Tell me something.  What do you feel when you paint?"

Pablo couldn't help but detect a note of envy in Carles's voice.  "Didn't you declare once that painting is nothing more than dust and grease slopped on a rag?"

"Am I wrong? Doesn't mean it can't evoke powerful feelings, though.  In the viewer or painter.  You always appear so immersed in the picture you're making, yet serene."

….Pablo had not considered the question before. He was sure his brush never got the best of him...and supposed that's what Carles must see.  But the feeling of painting?  It came so naturally that Carles might well have asked him. "What does it feel like to be awake?" As opposed to what, asleep?

[Pablo notes that Carles always seems to struggle with his life and his work, "wrestling his demons" and rarely winning.]

….The origin of this unenviable condition was difficult to pinpoint.  Its root, though,, no doubt was tangled up with his (Carles's) ennui. Hard to say what comes first and in what order, right? Events conspire to induce sadness, then melancholy becomes its own disease.  So we medicate ourselves.  And then, poof! The flesh is sapped -- another unhappy development, thus repeating the cycle.  The world sags, the body sags, the world sags even more.

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Most people seem to believe that the spiritual life is an option -- something that we can take or leave, depending on our interest in such things.  But when God breathed His Spirit into man's nostrils at creation, "Man became a living being."  Without that Spirit, we fall back first into ennui, then into discouragement, and then into melancholy.  

Jesus said:  The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing.  The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life (JN. 6:63).  

In the New Testament, two Greek words are both translated as "life" in English --- but they mean very different things.  The word "bios" refers to this present existence--physical life.  The word "zoe" refers to spiritual/ eternal life.  The zoe that Jesus promises, however, gives life not only to our spirits, but also to our minds, our hearts, our wills, and our physical bodies.  It overflows from the deepest part of us to all the other parts of us.  

That is why after people have an encounter with Jesus Christ, they come fully alive in intellect, in love, in doing good, and even physical cures in some cases.  His ministry on earth continues to this day -- I have come that they might have life and have it more abundantly, He said.

The spiritual life is not an option; it is a necessity if we do not wish to live a downward spiral: The world sags, the body sags, the world sags even more!