The drought that we have experienced this summer has strong lessons. We cannot live without water. No rain: no crops to harvest! The bean plants in my garden are surrounded by cracks in the dry, hard soil. You can barely see any bean pods on the stocks. If Mother Nature does not water the earth, we have no beans to harvest!
If we do not care and nurture our friendships, they die. If we do not work hard at family life it will wilt and often, disintegrate.
The same is true of our spiritual lives. Faith is always a gift from the Holy Spirit but we must do our part to nurture and care for the gift of faith. It is not an automatic thing: God may be most generous with us, but we must work at our faith and respond. The spiritual life stresses responsibility.
There is a pithy piece of wisdom that applies to our physical bodies (we need movement), our brains (they will seize up if they are not used) and our spiritual life: if you do not use it, you will lose it!
We cannot have a life of faith in the triune God all on our own. We are born into a faith community. We learn and develop through the practices and traditions of this community which is actively pursuing life in and through the Holy Trinity. It will be with the help of the faith community that we grow and develop a spiritual life.
Throughout the world we have learnt that when a person stops participating in the life and spiritual practices of the faith community, they soon do very little of any spiritual practice. This just affirms that adage: if you don’t use it, you lose it.
All people who claim to believe in God (focus on our Christian faith) must be taught that you could be like the sorry looking bean plants out in the garden in this draught season: you will die if you are nourished and sustained by the good rains, sunshine and the friendly bumble bees. You need to take care of your spiritual life just as a gardener needs to take good care of the bean plants in her garden.
The care for our spiritual life comes from three sources.
First, we must have a daily prayer practice, a regular time to spend time with the divine. Prayer will always take many forms. For the busy parent, they may find that when they wait to pick up one of their kids, the silence in the vehicle is an opportunity to move into prayer.
Second, we need the weekly gathering and prayer of the faith community. Our Christian faith brings us together every seven days to share in the great event of our salvation, the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Sunday Eucharist is not only to nourish our faith life but also to empower us to go forth into the world to bring the love and mercy of God to others.
Thirdly, we need to share our stories and experiences with other faith people. Their stories can encourage and support us to grow in our faith life. We need that sharing (i.e., nourishment) from our fellow believers.
There is no built-in guarantee to our faith life. It could thrive or it could wilt and die. Choose life. Chose to use it!
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