CHIMING WITH OSWALD ON SPIRITUALITY

“Spiritual selfishness always wants repeated moments on the mount. We feel we could talk and live like angels if only we could stay on the mount.” Oswald Chambers

I don’t know about anyone else, but those lines make plenty of sense to me. Indeed, one thing about which I’ve been pondering this week is about the sacralizing of everyday life. Which is also to say, spirituality cannot stay in the clouds. It must descend into our everyday business in our particular valley. But this is never to say that spirituality will make all our acts, still less our thoughts, Weighty and Powerful.
No. The closest this mortal can come to describing how we need to take hold of spirituality (however we do so; my handle is Jesus Christ but you won’t catch me using Him as a club) is to see the special quality in each and every line of our world, including the healthy things we do day by day.
That’s not an easy thing to do, nor is such special quality an easy thing to handle, to ‘digest’ if you will, for we who move in mortal flesh. And Chambers realizes this; he continues thus:

“We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff we are in, and that is where we have to prove our mettle.”

Again, I couldn’t agree more: spirituality rolls up its sleeves and gets its hands dirty in the everyday muck which it sanctifies thereby. But the process requires work on our part. One of, and debatably, the most primary point about doing so, is to always remember that, when we try to gussy things up we usually show ourselves on one of error’s paths. This is why we are called to be open-hearted. Not simple-minded, but open-hearted.
“Do justly; love mercy, walk humbly with your God.” “Treat others as you would want them to treat you.” And so forth. The ramifications of these commands can become difficult to figure out but, once that’s done, they look pretty plain so long as one’s heart is open and doesn’t draw lines between ‘us’ and ‘THEM’. Unfortunately, there’s always been, and still is, too much of that going on!
“There is a great snare in asking — What is the use of it? In spiritual matters we can never calculate on that line.”
Chambers was on the mark when he wrote that too. And, as anyone who knows more than a smidge or two of history knows well, when we try to so calculate, too often we get the sum horrifically wrong. Another reason why the Almighty seems to keep actual commands simple and minimal. We humans are the ones adding, literally, God-knows-what-all to them in the forms of footnotes, asterisks, codicils, sub-sub-clauses, canon laws, congregational bylaws and He only knows what else.

“The mount is not meant to teach us anything [although that’s always possible], it is meant to make us something.”

Indeed yes. It’s part of what makes us into clean prisms through which God may illumine the world. It can also clean us after what’s been some hard labor in those vineyards in which we all must work from time to time. May God save each and all of us from selfishness, spiritual and otherwise, but especially spiritual. I hope what I write here may prove nourishing and strengthening to those who read and share it, with God’s help.