Some recent conversations round the table have entered the realm of "faith and passion" and why is it that the Christian community seems to feel those two cannot go together. The answer to "why" has not yet become clear but my search for it deepens.
Passion - a word of enormous significance, and defining for me. Passion, as I see it, means living life with your senses fully awake and alive. Yet somehow, in religious terms, it seems to be solely connected to sexual passion. While that is a piece of it, there is so much more to this vitality of living, of seeing, of hearing, of knowing, of tasting of life that allows us to live in colour, in sound, and in texture. I like to call this holy passion, the place where I am learning to let the breath of God, Ruach, breathe into my whole being, and the exhaling of that passion into living.
I feel like I am starting my favourite sermon here, but I can't help it... I feel so passionately about living with passion! My heart has come alive after years of being in a boxed up prescribed place and it just refuses to let me stay long in anything less that the passion for which it/we were created. Oh I still wrestle with it, but I am learning to lean into it. Maybe it is like leaning into love.
The table discussion went something like "somehow the church has decided that faith and passion don't exist together". Not only is that hogwash, or whatever word you prefer to use, it is a complete lie and travesty of who the Almighty created us to be, created in his image.
When the Spirit breathed into the friends of Jesus it must have been a breath of passion for their soul. I feel the breath of the Spirit breathing this same fire for life into my soul, my heart, my senses, and my words. Anj has written this wonderful piece about contentment and in it I hear passion. "Be still and know that I am God" - is a place of contentment and stillness as well as passion - at least from my perspective.
I have been mediating on Galations 5:13-23 (The Message) which is all about passionate living - and nothing less than that.
Abba, I so want to live this life with the inhaling of your passion and exhale it into life for as long as my heart beats. Not with arrogance or power but from a place of trust, an open heart, humility, wisdom and love for others as I love myself in the "act of true freedom".
"Live freely, animated and motivated by God's Spirit"
"But what happens when we live God's way? He brings gifts into our lives, much the same way that fruit appears in an orchard - things like affection for others, exuberance about life, serenity. We developed a willingness to stick with things, a sense of compassion in the heart, and a conviction that a basic holiness permeates things and people."
I'd love to hear your thoughts on how faith, passion, contentment and stillness fit together.