Transformative Spirituality and God’s Justice
Christian spirituality is the way in which the invisible heart of God is made visible to the world by revealing the life of Christ in the lives of his followers…. From a Christian perspective, spirituality is integrally related to the deeper needs and concerns of the human heart. The human heart has always been understood not only biologically as the source of blood flow but metaphorically as the source from which flows the greatest values and aspirations of human life.…
God’s justice is not principally about vengeance or retribution but about restoring people to right relationships. Christian theology speaks primarily about two notions of justice: internal justice and external justice. Internal justice involves the experience of justification or being put in right relationship with God through the saving work of Jesus Christ. External justice deals with the promotion of good works. Internal justice refers to God’s activity within a person and external justice to one’s response to God’s grace. Internal justice relates to the first and the greatest command to love the Lord God with all one’s heart, soul and mind (Matt. 22:36–38) and external justice to the second command which is like the first, to love one’s neighbour as oneself (Matt. 22:39). It seeks humanizing activity leading to right relationships with one’s self, the community, its social structures and finally to the environment….
A central focus of the New Testament is to reveal Jesus Christ as the justice of God who brings people into right relationships. The mission of God in Jesus is a mission of reconciliation and the church is called by the risen Lord to participate in this mission. This mission impels the church to move outwards not only to the ends of the earth but also to the edges of society in order to help create those new relationships. In imitation of Christ, it seeks to invite all people to God’s table, especially those who experience ex-clusion in their current lot and find themselves alienated from the social, economic and even religious life of people in society….
A spirituality becomes transformative when it engages the deeper levels of the human person and names and claims the deeper truths of the human heart. Unless our efforts are somehow correlated with the significant questions, aspirations and struggles of human beings in the depths of their existence, our missionary efforts will inevitably falter. In this sense we can speak of a transformative spirituality as cardio-centric. As a church community we may have the best medicine in the world, but if it does not address the deeper sicknesses within people, as well as their deeper aspirations, then it is of little use. The mission of the church involves a dynamic interchange between the personal terrain of the human heart, the global terrain of human experience in the heart of the world and the universal terrain of the gratuitous love of God in the heart of Christ.
Secondly, a transformative spirituality is contextually-grounded. It is rooted within the cultural system of people that is part and parcel of human identity. These same cultures may indeed have dimensions which also need change and transformation, but unless evangelization efforts are rooted within these cultural systems, people will find it very difficult to accept divine love within their concrete experience in the world. A transformative spirituality emerges from the crossroads of the horizontal and vertical dimensions of our relationships as well at the multifaceted particular and universal expressions of divine gifts.
Lastly, a transformative spirituality is commission-oriented. As Stephen Bevans notes, ‘‘God’s call to participate in the divine mission … is what constitutes the church. [T]he church does not so much have a mission as the mission has a church.’’ The church looks not only upward towards the triune God and inward to its own transformation but also outward towards the poor. The fact that Jesus lived and died on the margins and the early church took shape there too, means that the church is transformed on the margins as well. These same margins give life to the church because they enable it to create new relationships. The church’s own transformation will be deepened as it moves from its own comfort zones to places of greater possibility, even while it encounters and embraces greater vulnerability.
This movement into the margins makes the spiritual life not just a journey but a migration because it orients its movement towards a promised land, it names the concomitant risks and challenges it faces in its difficult sojourn and it highlights the centrality of hospitality offered to all people in its praxis of faith, beginning with those who are most vulnerable. The image of the church as migrant also carries with it a social responsibility. In the migrant the church sees not only an image of itself but also discovers its mission of mercy (Matt. 25:31–46) through which it becomes a sacrament for the world.
In becoming a migrant, the church comes to realize that its mission will take shape on the borders of the world, particularly those between centre and periphery, between privilege and poverty and between life and death. Borders will always be a privileged place of revelation and transformation…. As the church lives with those who are vulnerable and is touched by these relationships, it will become more and more stripped of many false illusions and discover that relationships shape the very core of its own existence and are the means through which it is made into something new. Put another way, a transformative spirituality is about finding the way home. But home is not simply a geographical location. Rather, home is a state of being that leads one to live at peace through the ongoing work towards right relationships with God, oneself, one’s neighbour and the world. A spirituality of transformation, after all, is a movement towards integration and a movement towards our most authentic selves as we seek to make present God’s reign of justice.
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