YES! With Thanks by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

"Spiritual means alive – super-alive, if you want. "

[Cont. from page 1 ] ...

That brings us to the second question: What is the spiritual work for our time? I have already said it: re-rooting ourselves. When people say “spiritual” they mean a great variety of things, so we ought to ask ourselves what we mean by spiritual. Since it comes out of the biblical vocabulary, going back to spiritus in Latin and pneuma in Greek and ruah in Hebrew, we ought to ask ourselves what it means in a western context. It means aliveness. Spiritual means alive – super-alive, if you want.

The opposite of spirit is not matter. Absolutely not. We may choose to use it so, but we ought to be clear that at that moment we have left the biblical tradition. I could give you many examples – St Paul for instance speaks of a “spiritual rock.” If a rock can be spiritual, almost anything can be spiritual – and he means literally a rock. He refers to the legend about a rock that followed the Israelites through the desert and wherever they camped, that rock followed them and gushed out water. That rock was a spiritual rock and it was super-real, more rock than any other rock.

The opposition between spirit and body actually comes from a misunderstanding of biblical language. The Bible opposes spirit and flesh; that is the only appropriate opposition in the Bible. Most unfortunately flesh got confused with body, but they are totally different things.

The point of the opposition between spirit and flesh is based on an everyday experience. Spirit was “breath” and as long as something was breathing, it was alive. What made it alive was breath, so breath stood for life. When the breath went out, all that was left was a lump of meat. That’s flesh. And particularly in the near East in the time before refrigeration, it very soon started smelling and crawling.

The whole idea of flesh has nothing to do with body or matter; it has to do with decay. Spirit means life-giving and alive, and flesh means death-bound, decaying, life-denying, that which undoes itself. Therefore when Paul lists the sins of the flesh, very few of them have anything to do with the body. They are all things like back-biting, envy and factions. That’s decay: the decay of a society, the decay of a community. So when you read “flesh,” think decay, and when you read “spirit,” think of life or super-life.

That’s what we are dealing with. The spiritual work of our time is the task of making things alive, of rerooting – because if something is cut off from its roots, it will sooner or later die. That’s the image of flesh – something that’s cut off from its life, its roots.

"If we live and work in a leisurely manner life becomes so much richer."

Just as we have misunderstandings with regard to spirit, we consider work and leisure opposites. But we all know that the best work is leisurely work, and if you don’t work leisurely, you’re in danger of knocking over with one hand what you’re building up with the other.

What is the real opposite of work? Play. We have basically two kinds of activities, work and play. Work and play. Work has a clear purpose in mind, a goal, and when that purpose is achieved, the work as work is ended. In certain cases you cannot even continue; the very activity comes to an end when the purpose is achieved. For instance, when you are sewing on a button the purpose is to get it on to where you want. When it is sewn on, you can’t sew it on more.

Other activities are work and can continue after the purpose is achieved. For instance, vacuuming. The floor can look absolutely spotless, but say there is still a little spot somewhere and you vacuum again and then again. Sooner or later somebody’s going to say, "Why are you playing around with this vacuum cleaner?" So from work, it turns into play—that kind of activity that doesn’t need a purpose. It has all its meaning within itself and you can do it as long as you find it meaningful. If you answer, "It’s very meaningful to me. I always dance with the vacuum cleaner on Monday nights," it may raise some eyebrows, but it’s perfectly all right. Play does not have to achieve any purpose whatsoever.

So now we have purpose and meaning, two totally different things which we also get mixed up. Purpose is something that you manipulate your activity in order to achieve. Meaning gives itself to you. You would never say, "I took things in hand, kept them nicely under control, and achieved meaning." You don’t achieve meaning that way; you achieve your purpose. When something becomes profoundly meaningful, you say, "It really did something to me, it grabbed me, it swept me off my feet, it knocked me over." Whatever it does to you, the more it does it, the more meaningful it is.

Where does leisure come in? It is the balance between work and play. Good work is playful work – work to which you have added what is best in play, namely doing it for its own sake and opening yourself so that meaning can flow into your activities. If we live and work in a leisurely manner life becomes so much richer.

Pick from your various daily or weekly activities one that you usually do just to get it over with. That’s terrible – to do things just to get them over with – but most of us do. Then take that particular activity and do it playfully, enjoy it.

Some people, for instance, don’t like washing dishes, but when they absolutely can’t help it any more and the sink is filled to the brim, they get it over with. Millions of people in Japan go through courses every year to learn the Japanese tea ceremony, a very simple ritual which is basically preparing a cup of tea, serving it to a guest and then washing the dishes in their presence, very simply and beautifully. One of the things they learn about washing dishes is to lift all the light things – like the tiny little bamboo spoon for dishing out the tea – as if they were very heavy, and to lift all the heavy things, like the big kettle, as if they were featherweight. Now try that sometime when you are washing the dishes: lift all the little spoons as if they weigh a ton. I guarantee you that it will be an unforgettable experience. And you’ll come alive. It will be a totally different experience and that’s what we’re after.

» next page