Advent Spirituality

Following God in the way of Jesus has been called messy, incarnational, or embodied. In LifeSpace, we speak of being fully human. However you describe it, the practice of life with God cannot be separated from our humanness. In God with Us, Eugene Peterson recognizes the draw of a spirituality focused on nature:

They get a satisfying sense of the inherently divine in life itself without all the complications of church: the theology, the mess of church history, the hypocrisies of church-goers, the incompetence of pastors, the appeals for money. Life, as life, seems perfectly capable of furnishing them with a spirituality that exults in beautiful beaches and fine sunsets, surfing and skiing and body massage, emotional states and aesthetic titillation . . .

Unfortunately, such an approach is "considerably deficient in person."

If we want to look at creation full, creation at its highest, we look at a person—a man, a woman, a child. There are those who prefer to gaze on the beauty of a bouquet of flowers rather than care for a squabbling baby, or to spend a day on the beach rather than rub shoulders with uncongenial neighbors in a cold church—creation without the inconvenience of persons. This may be understandable, but it is also decidedly not creation in the terms that have been revealed to us in Genesis and in the person of Jesus.