People don’t want to hear about spirituality because they don’t know what that word encompasses; they are unaware that it means more than religiosity, and that it doesn’t identify with what is traditionally understood as piety. “Spirituality” means living a “vital relationship” with the Spirit of God, and this is only possible when God is experienced as a “source of life” in every human experience.
As Jürgen Moltmann has explained, living in contact with the Spirit of God «does not lead to a spirituality that disregards the senses, turned inward, hostile to the body, detached from the world, but to a new vitality of love for life». Faced with the dead, the petrified, or the insensitive, the Spirit always awakens love for life. Therefore, living «spiritually» is «living against death», affirming life despite weakness, fear, illness, or guilt. Whoever lives open to the Spirit of God vibrates with everything that promotes life and rebels against what harms and kills it.
This love for life generates a different kind of joy, teaches us to live in a friendly and open way, in peace with everyone, giving life to each other, accompanying us in the task of making life more worthy and happy. Jürgen Moltmann dares to call this vital energy that the Spirit infuses in the person “eroticizing energy,” because it makes us live joyfully, attractively, and seductively.
This spiritual experience expands the heart: we begin to feel that our deepest expectations and longings blend with the promises of God; our finite and limited life opens to the infinite. Then we also discover that “sanctifying life” is not moralizing it, but living it from the Holy Spirit, that is, seeing it and loving it as God sees and loves it: good, worthy, and beautiful, open to eternal happiness.
This is, according to the Baptist, the great mission of Christ: “to baptize us with the Holy Spirit,” to teach us to live in contact with the Spirit. Only this can free us from a sad and stunted way of understanding and living faith in God.
José Antonio Pagola
Published on www.gruposdejesus.com
English version translated with AI