Cleansing the Sense & Purifying the Will - No. 57
In the Christian world, we have mostly lost sight of what a really spiritual journey is. We think that because we believe certain things and are part of a local faith community, we are on a spiritual journey. Because we do not participate in certain hedonistic practices, we assume we are being transformed. But in reality, this type of thinking is like calling your car a race car because you put stickers on it and drive fast everywhere you go. We have settled for a very diluted counterfeit of spiritual transformation, and we are rarely challenged on the topic.
Most of what Christian culture thinks about what it means to follow Jesus is very incomplete. Yet this is the culture that has shaped most of our understanding of God. I think we would all benefit immensely from assuming that there is so much more available in our spiritual journey than we perhaps have ever realized. If we can approach this topic with new eyes, then I believe we will see things we have never been able to see before.
In order to wrap our minds around what a spiritual journey really is, it is often helpful to think about ourselves in three parts. First we have the external; this is the realm of action and behavior. This is what people see and experience of us. Then we have the internal, which includes our mind and heart, and then we have the spirit, which is the deepest part of ourselves, the part of us that is truly made to commune with God.
Most Christian energy and teachings focuses on the external, how we act and treat others. Often, what leads people to see that they need God is when they observe their own external life. More spiritually mature people will venture inside to the heart and mind. This is the place of emotions, feelings, thoughts, and desires. Real transformation doesn’t happen in the external because everything external is just a symptom of something internal. The Sermon on the Mount is where Jesus so clearly shows us the relationship between the internal and the external.
There is more to us, though, than heart, mind, and behavior. We are, most importantly, spirit as well. Our spirit is our true self, and we are made to live from it. But we are rarely shown how to venture into the domain of the spirit. I believe that is because we have not been taught how to train our hearts and minds to work with us instead of against us so that we can engage our spirit and learn to live in union with God.
Our spirit is not our emotions. Emotions are deceptive and often lead us astray; they are blown here and there by the wind and regularly leave us in a ditch on the side of the road. We need emotions the same way we need to be able to feel when we put our hand on a hot stove, but they cannot be what runs our lives or shapes our view of reality. The spirit is for most people, very foreign to them, I am not sure if they would even be capable of recognizing their own spirit if it could walk up to them and start a conversation. Another term for our spirit would be our true selves.
Aligning our heart, mind, and spirit.
I believe that our spirits truly and naturally desire God. I have no way of validating that, but we are created by God for union with Him, and our spirits are not as easily deceived as our hearts and minds are by the pursuit of the temporal and material, in place of the spiritual. So I think most of what we are doing when we go on a spiritual journey is removing the stuff in our hearts and minds that gets in the way of our ability to engage our spirit so we can freely commune with God.
A central part of every authentic spiritual journey is a process of cleansing the senses and purifying the will. This is the only path past the mind and into the domain of the spirit. Cleansing the senses is like cleaning off your windshield in your car. Over our lives, we pick up all sorts of unhealthy and distorted junk on our windshield. We are abused, betrayed, shamed, blamed, judged, rejected, praised, envied, manipulated, and deceived. All of those things severely distort our view of reality. We start to see ourselves, God, and others through this distorted lens. Then we have a much bigger problem that pollutes our sense: what we accept as normal, good, and bad has been shaped by generations of thinkers that we have never met. Their teaching and leadership have infected the very air we breathe.
There is no way to trace everyone who has shaped our current cultural thinking. Consider, for instance, the materialism and self-obsession of the Western world. No one person or handful of people caused that, but instead, over time, false worldviews and human self-interest converged with political and social values to create a compounding effect that has distorted our reality.
For instance, we think very little of spending our lives working and pursuing the life of a middle-class American. The idea of sending our kids to school and then college to prepare them for a career makes total sense to us. Ubiquitous entertainment seems unhealthy, but yet we still embrace it wholeheartedly. We become dues-paying members of massive faith-based corporations called churches and believe that we are pursuing God. We mix politics with faith and think it is God’s will. I am not saying schools, middle-class America, churches, and politics are bad; I am saying that they are the creations of generations of thinkers who have shaped a broken way of life that we accept as normal and good. The challenge is that when we read what Jesus says, much of the life we accept as good and normal is actually diametrically opposed to the life He is calling us to. Again, not necessarily bad, just in opposition to the path we are called to walk.
When we try to perceive God, ourselves, and others clearly through this dirty and distorted windshield, we find that we do not see clearly and that we are almost incapable of being present and truly connecting with others, much less ourselves. This is why wisdom writings and spiritual teachers throughout time have always led people through a process of cleansing the senses, cleaning the windshield. Most Christians seem to struggle to hear God, be still in prayer or contemplation, and are addicted to movement, doing, and distraction. This is all due to the chaos of our senses, and the noise level is simply too high to hear God.
As our senses are cleansed, we become capable of seeing ourselves clearly for the first time. This is why it is the spiritually mature who can so easily and honestly admit that they are the chief of sinners, the Pharisee and the one who says, I believe, Lord, now help my unbelief. Without seeing ourselves clearly, it is very hard to recognize our need for redemption, healing, and transformation.
With our increasingly clear senses, we must turn our newly restored attention to purifying our will. The fact is that almost all of us live with a fever for achievement and possession. We are addicted to the lust for more of what we want when we want it. This insatiable desire is unquestionably at odds with our own spiritual journey. Union with God is not something we attain without wholehearted and singular intentionality. We will not find union with God when we want things and experiences more than we want Him.
The process of purifying the senses is allowing and asking God to reveal to us the part of our hearts and minds that desires things, feelings, control, and self-gratification more than God. As He reveals those things to us, our cleansed senses can truly see how vain and worthless pursuing anything but God is, and so we run to the foot of the cross where we surrender the impurities of our will and ask Him to give us a heart after His. This is not driven by shame or hopelessness, but instead by a clear-eyed conviction that God is the only real thing worthy of our will.
Through our increasingly clear eyes and our purified will, we begin to be capable of living from our spirit. We start to truly experience the flow state of living in union with God. Our yoke becomes light, or more accurately translated, no yoke at all. We find that peace, joy, and love are our new reality. We are no longer enslaved to broken desires to accumulate things and gratify our physical desires. We have truly surrendered our false reality for God’s true reality. We are living transformation, children of God. Our birthright has been recovered, and we are now, for the first time, truly human.
Transformation is a spirit-led journey deep into our heart and mind to overcome our false self so that we can become who we were truly created to be and learn to live in union with God. That is a big thing to try and wrap our heads around, and there is no way to talk about it that truly does it justice. It is beyond our ability to fully comprehend and communicate. I hope that thinking about it the way I have written about it helps you see it from a new perspective, but there are many different words we could use and ways we could talk about it that would be as equally incomplete as mine. The constant theme of all great spiritual teaching, though, is some version of cleansing the senses and purifying the will so that we can actually see things as they really are and finally desire what is true instead of what is false.
- John Walt
