a spiritual sketch or ‘study’: salvation
In art, a sketch or ‘study’ is a drawing or painting done to assist in making a more finished picture. In our spiritual lives — our soulful art of being here — we grow through everyday practices, sketches or ‘studies’ that the Spirit makes known to us in everyday life, which can transform us toward God’s fuller love and likeness.
The idea of ‘salvation’ is better understood through a different lens than most of us were told in the last century. It is not merely a transaction or evacuation plan to a better place, though it may include that. It is much more all encompassing. It is the awakened awareness, practiced transition and subtle transformation in present everyday life to an unseen — but more real — realm and growing reality of freedom, love, joy and peace. These 4 things (at least) are universally written in the stars and in our very skin as everlasting values and longings we all have.
Jesus’ core lens was the ‘kingdom of God’ (or kingdom of heaven=same). About it, he said the kingdom of God is here, at hand, now, not later. At the very least, this included the idea of salvation. In his prayer, the Lord prayed: “your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth, as it is in heaven..”. Biblically speaking, salvation reveals itself as where God rescues human frailty, the uncoerced lightness of being, the internal acceptance of a free condition of grace, and the awareness of God’s Spirit abiding in us, as us, and undeservedly, surprisingly flowing through us. —-Prh
So then, my beloved… work out your salvation with fear and trembling; for it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to work for His good pleasure.-—Paul to the Philippians 2: 12-13
Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore love is the fulfillment of the Law. Do this, knowing the time, that it is already the hour for you to awaken from sleep; for now salvation is nearer to us than when we first believed. The night is almost gone, and the day is near. —- Paul to Roman believers, ch. 13: 10-12
From Barbara Brown Taylor: Salvation is much more than many of its proponents would have us believe. In the Bible, human beings experience God’s salvation when peace ends war, when food follows famine, when health supplants sickness and freedom trumps oppression. Salvation is a word for the divine spaciousness that comes to human beings in all the tight places where their lives are at risk, regardless of how they got there or whether they know God’s name. Sometimes it comes as an extended human hand and sometimes as a bolt from the blue, but either way it opens a door in what looked for all the world like a wall.
By Waking Up we are speaking of any spiritual experience which overcomes our experience of the self as separate from our true Being. This is variously referred to as enlightenment, awakening, or unitive consciousness, and it should be the full Christian meaning of salvation. Unfortunately, we pushed all waking up into something that would hopefully happen later, in heaven or after death, or as a reward for good behavior in this world. This was a major loss and defeat for Christianity and a disastrous misplacement of attention. We became a religion of religious transactions more than spiritual transformation.
Waking up should be the goal of all spiritual work, sacraments, and Bible study, but, at least in the West, this has not been the case. Because we were not practice-based for the most part, and had a bias against inner experience, it seemed very presumptuous to actually believe the conclusion of Jesus [and saints]: Jesus’ “I and the Father are one” (see John 10:30), Augustine’s “God is closer to me than I am to myself,” or Catherine of Genoa’s “My deepest me is God.” Organized Christianity largely described waking up in terms of growing up, and that growing up was almost entirely interpreted in highly moralistic terms.
I would name salvation as simply the readiness, the capacity, and the willingness to stay in relationship. As long as you show up with some degree of vulnerability, the Spirit can keep working. Self-sufficiency makes the God experience impossible. —-Richard Rohr
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