St Paul says: “Take on the mind of Christ”. What does that mean? Does it mean we think like Christ; act like Christ; talk like Christ? We actually have little to go on there. The Gospels are about Jesus, but they don’t actually give us a lot of His words. So we’re left to our spiritual imagination in many ways to determine what the “mind of Christ” was/is.
Maybe we can ask a different question: Is Christ’s mind, Christ’s Spirit? If we talk about Spirit, we are talking not only about Christ’s Spirit but the Spirit deep within us. The Spirit we share with Christ. How do we “get” that Spirit? We’ve already been given it through the gift of our life. It’s less a matter of “getting” and more one of “living into”. It is how we live our lives that demonstrate how the Spirit is acting within us.
This, then, is about our Spiritual Journey. How do we walk our Spiritual Journey, recognizing that the Spirit is within us?
When we are children we see God clearly. But that gets interrupted because as we get older we realize that to survive, we need to get to know the world better. So we do. Maybe in the process our Spiritual Journey turns into our World Journey, and we let God go as a priority. We “know” God is always there, so we move on to other things. Having a career, a mate, a family… maybe some of those things, maybe all.
Plus, we have many distractions. The world, in it’s many forms both big and small, distracts us from our Spiritual Journey. A big part of the distractions involve the baggage we pick up along the way. Oh the baggage! Protective mechanisms, defense mechanisms… these are behaviors that help us cope with what we perceive as our weaknesses. The problem is, they draw us farther from our true nature. They even can conceal our true nature. We develop a false self. A “self” that deals with the world. And our true self gets buried deeper and deeper, until for some of us, it’s almost imperceptible. This “world journey” conceals rather than reveals the spirit within us.
How, and when, do we reclaim our Spiritual Journey? This will be next week’s discussion. May God bless your thoughts, your work, and your relationships this week.
In Christ,
Peter