“It is not faith that sustains us; the Spirit sustains us, and the exercise of faith and discipline facilitates this process.”
–Aphorism 6
This one is a little more mystical, more metaphysical perhaps, than is usual for me. I find it quite difficult to engage with because it doesn’t fit terribly well with how I conceptualise my relationship with the Divine. And yet I wrote it down, because I was called to do so.
I do not see the Spirit as something essential without the person, but as an essential essence of each person that is connected to that in others; a series of Divine shards, if you will, that joins us together and makes up a greater whole – though ‘shards’ conjures the image of these pieces having once been an undivided whole that was broken, which isn’t how I see it.
How then can I say the Spirit sustains us? I have spent quite a lot of time sitting with this, and the answer, once I found it, seems remarkably simple. It is the connection between us that sustains us. Not in the sense that food, shelter, rest and recreation sustain us; those are essential needs. Yet there is much that we do, even that we are compelled to do, that goes beyond the essential.
As we face adversity beyond those essentials, whether imposed upon us without any will of our own, chosen freely to achieve some goal, or that we are driven towards by ethical or spiritual conviction, something must sustain us through that adversity. The Spirit does so, whether we realise it or not, because it is our connection with our fellows that allows us to go beyond the basics of sustaining our lives in a time of only typical difficulty.
How then does the exercise of faith and discipline facilitate this? It seems to be that it does so in several ways – by supporting our forming of communities; by helping us to know what chosen adversities should be faced, and which set aside or left for others; and by heightening our awareness of that connection, that shared divinity that binds us together, and so enabling it do so more.
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