The other day I received an email asking, “What would be your dream vacation?” and I thought what if God sent me an email asking, “What would be your dream spirituality?”
Imagine standing in a nice hot spiritual shower with the love of God flowing down from the showerhead and enveloping you in the soft rain of his presence with the scrubbing bubbles of his tender touch washing away the accumulated grime of your life. I could spend a bit of time in that shower!
But are there other, more public, options that God may use for our spiritual cleansing? What if sometimes God’s will for our sanctification is to spend some time in a Jacuzzi? There certainly is a soothing aspect to a Jacuzzi but as well it is an environment where a lot of different spiritual currents can bubble up around us and, to our chagrin, we discover that there are other creatures inhabiting the hot tub, that we are compelled to suffer! In our tutelage of becoming Christlike this may be par for the course for it says, of Jesus, in Hebrews 5:8, “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what (and who) he suffered”.
I don’t know about you, but it seems that God gets me to spend more time in the Jacuzzi than in the shower. Perhaps the discomforting elements of “Jacuzzi Spirituality” are a part of what Jesus was talking about when he said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.” Matthew 16:24. The Church might be one of the venues where Jesus measures us up for our ‘custom fitted’ cross.
After having had the experience of a spiritually invigorating and sanctifying shower it is tempting to spend our time pining for a sequel to that cherished episode of our lives. The Christian mystics talk about periods in their personal spirituality called, “the dark night of the soul” where the intimacy of their ‘shower’ experiences have become just dim memories. To spiritually survive they needed to learn to depend on the luminescent insights from their faith alone.
Perhaps Jacuzzi spirituality, as well as being a cleansing experience, is also a place of formation helping us to mature in both the externals and internals of our faith. If we can learn to survive and thrive in the hot tub called the Church then we should be battle hardened for our commission to, “Go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel to every creature”, Mark 16:15
Jacuzzi image from wikimedia
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