Born again: material and spiritual

Here’s a poem about our first birth:

These are your first lessons in living.

To begin we drag you head-first from your shelter,

away from your food, from your warmth.

We cut you apart from your only known friend.

We take you and beat you until strange gases

rush your lungs and pain jerks your frame.

These are your first lessons in living.

They will stand you in good stead. (Steve Turner)

In this poem life is portrayed as something hard and painful. It says that we are being born into a world where, if we don’t look out for ourselves, we will dragged from everything we enjoy and beaten up. And it says that our first lessons in living when we emerge from our mother’s womb, the placenta is cut and the nurse strikes us on the back to get us breathing are important lessons for us in survival. The lesson to learn is that in a world like this we need to put ourselves first, we need to look after No. 1, otherwise someone else will take what we have and hurt us in the process. It is what scientists describe when they talk about us having selfish genes which get us ready to live in a world that is about the survival of the fittest.

Jesus said to Nicodemus that no one can see the Kingdom of God unless he is born again (John 3. 1 - 17). He went on to explain that a person is first born physically of human parents. In our physical, material existence we do not have to believe in God. We have a genuine choice, we can grow up choosing to believe only in the material world around us and in our own powers or we can encounter God and grow in relationship with him. The world in which we live can point us to God but it does not provide us with absolute proof of his existence. Therefore, we are free to choose.

Samuel Beckett’s great play, Waiting for Godot, features two tramps who spend the whole play doing nothing except waiting for Godot, who of course never arrives. For Beckett, to wait for Godot is the equivalent of believing in God, both are a waste of time. So Beckett in his plays is describing a world without God and what an unremittingly harsh and despairing place it is. In another of his plays, Endgame, two of his characters spend the whole play living in rubbish bins and the last speech in the play sums up Beckett’s sense of what a world without God is like in these words: “all he knows is hunger, and cold, and death to crown it all.” Life without God is the equivalent of living in a rubbish bin or of spending everyday pointlessly waiting for someone who does not arrive.

The philosopher Bertrand Russell once wrote that: “Only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul’s habitation be safely built.” Russell, like Beckett, is saying that life without God is despair. If we are here by accident, if we are shortly going to die without there being an afterlife and if whatever we achieve in our short life will also be destroyed soon after our death, then a life without God offers us no hope just unyielding despair.

So, for us to believe in God, to believe that both the material and the spiritual exist and are intertwined, involves us in coming alive to the spiritual. It therefore involves a second birth, an awakening to the reality of the spiritual as well as to the reality of the physical. The physical things around us are easy to believe in because we can see and touch them. The spiritual, though, is like the wind - it can’t be seen, although it can be experienced and felt. It is not immediately apparent in the way that physical realities are and so we have a free choice about whether or not we respond to the signs of the Spirit in our world and when we do we are coming alive, being born again, to the spiritual in our world.

Here are some of the things in my life that have made me come alive to the spiritual:

When I stand in snow on a mountain slope viewing a cobalt lake,

I come alive.

When the morning mist forms a white sea on the Somerset levels, islanding trees,

I come alive.

When my daughter nestles up and hugs me tight,

I come alive.

When my wife and I lie, skin touching, sweat mingling in the heat of summer and passion,

I come alive.

When a friend listens with understanding and without advising,

I come alive.

When I sing and dance in the echoes of an empty Church,

I come alive.

When words cannot express Your praise and I sing in tongues,

I come alive.

When I hear the rustle of angel’s wings above me in the eaves,

I come alive.

I come alive to endurance

when I see a hesitant smile form on the face of the Big Issue seller.

I come alive to pain

when I hear a friend’s story of depression and unanswered pleading.

I come alive to patience

when I see a husband answer again the question from his alzheimered wife.

I come alive to injustice

when the Metro contrasts Big Mac obesity lawsuits with African famine victims.

I come alive to suffering

when I see Sutherland’s Crucifixion and read Endo’s Silence.

I come alive to grief

when I remember the aircraft shattered and scattered across Kosovan heights.

I come alive

when I am touched and see and hear

the beautiful or broken, the passionate or poor.

The mystery or madness

of the Other in which God

meets and greets me

and calls forth the response

that is love.

I wonder what it is that makes you come alive to the spiritual in life. Jesus came into our world to bring us to life; to wake us up from the despair of living only in the physical and material. He does this, firstly by showing us what life is like when it is lived as God intended and secondly, by the threatened response that we as human beings make to him. To see someone genuinely living by the Spirit is scary, it turns our understanding of life upside down. We often respond to people who live life differently to us by attacking them and that is what we did with Jesus. We focused on the physical, we nailed his hands and feet to a cross of wood. We thought that by killing him physically we were doing away with the threat he posed to our material way of life.

But God is greater than our materialism and he loves us too much for that to be the end and so he raised his Son from death that we might be saved from material existence and come alive to the Spirit of God himself.

We have a choice - the unyielding despair of a rubbish bin existence or the freedom of life in the Spirit. Which will it be for you? Have you come alive to the spiritual in life? And, if you have, have you gone on coming alive to the spiritual on a day by day basis by looking out for all that God’s Spirit is doing in our world and getting involved?

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David Grant - Life.