The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day — John Shaqi
The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-dayUnderhill, Evelyn
Religion
The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day
Underhill, Evelyn
Spiritual life
Last--and here is the aspect of religious experience which is specially
to concern us--Spirit is felt as an inflowing power, a veritable
accession of vitality; energizing the self, or the religious group,
impelling it to the fullest and most zealous living-out of its
existence, giving it fresh joy and vigour, and lifting it to fresh
levels of life. This sense of enhanced life is a mark of all religions
of the Spirit. "He giveth power to the faint," says the Second Isaiah,
"and to them that hath no might he increaseth strength ... they that
wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with
wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk,
and not faint."[16] "I live--yet not I," "I can do all things," says St.
Paul, seeking to express his dependence on this Divine strength invading
and controlling him: and assures his neophytes that they too have
received "the Spirit of power." "My life," says St. Augustine, "shall be
a real life, being wholly full of Thee."[17] "Having found God," says a
modern Indian saint, "the current of my life flowed on swiftly, I gained
fresh strength."[18] All other men and women of the Spirit speak in the
same sense, when they try to describe the source of their activity and
endurance.
So, the rich experiences of the religious consciousness seem to be
resumed in these three outstanding types of spiritual awareness. The
cosmic, ontological, or transcendent; finding God as the infinite
Reality outside and beyond us. The personal, finding Him as the living
and responsive object of our love, in immediate touch with us. The
dynamic, finding Him as the power that dwells within or energizes us.
These are not exclusive but complementary apprehensions, giving
objectives to intellect feeling and will. They must all be taken into
account in any attempt to estimate the full character of the spiritual
life, and this life can hardly achieve perfection unless all three be
present in some measure. Thus the French contemplative Lucie-Christine
says, that when the voice of God called her it was at one and the same
time a Light, a Drawing, and a Power,[19] and her Indian contemporary
the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore, that "Seekers after God must realize
Brahma in these three places. They must see Him within, see Him without,
and see Him in that abode of Brahma where He exists in Himself."[20] And
it seems to me, that what we have in the Christian doctrine of the
Trinity, is above all the crystallization and mind's interpretation of
these three ways in which our simple contact with God is actualized by
us. It is, like so many other dogmas when we get to the bottom of them,
an attempt to describe experience. What is that supernal symphony of
which this elusive music, with its three complementary strains, forms
part? We cannot know this, since we are debarred by our situation from
knowledge of wholes. But even those strains which we do hear, assure us
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