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July 22, 2005
Struggling Against Birth
At times it seems that I kick against the goad when it comes to God. There's one metaphor for you. But let's go to Nicodemus and take our substantive metaphor. Jesus says, "Unless a man be born again of water and the spirit. . ."
At times it seems that I struggle against being born. What I need to do is relax (surrender) and cooperate. But let's face it--the womb is a comfortable, sensual place. No child in his right mind would choose to be born over staying in this warm, comfortable, quiet, intimate space. Well, that's probably not true of children. They are ready for the world. But as adults many of us have had enough of it to think that an additional decade or two suspended in an amniotic sac doesn't sound like so terrible a prospect.
That's the way it is with my spiritual life from time to time. For example, I can feel the movement of the spirit within me, coaxing me toward birth and renewal. But the "womb" of the world, the lure of what I know, the delights of the senses keep me pinned here. And pinned is exactly the right metaphor as well. So long as I cling to all the admitted delights of the world, I am pinned as a butterfly is pinned in a collect--beautiful, perhaps, but inert and dead. I am suspended without life.
True life lies beyond the sphere of the merely sensual. It lies within the realm of the spirit living with but not in the world. My struggle against birth is the fight of the Old Man to retain what is his "birthright." My struggle to be born is the struggle of the man renewed in Christ, the New Man, to claim the proper birthright of the one Risen from the Dead.
And all that it requires is surrender, to struggle to supress the urge to stay in the warm amniotic sac of the world and to allow myself to be born again to my true heritage--to my place in the body of Christ. That is the struggle that is what I go through daily--to choose myself and the world, or to choose my place in Christ's body and my spiritual heritage. God knows it is difficult, that is why many of us have been given so much practice in a lifetime. But the world is a more beautiful, more wonderful place when you have entered the new birth and can see more clearly our Father and our Brother in all that is around us.
Posted by Steven Riddle at July 22, 2005 11:58 AM