James 24:7

Intimacy with God. 

We hear it all the time.  Perhaps that is part of the problem...we hear it in the same way that we hear sound bites and cliches.   We hear it like we hear the beeping of a horn, a distant siren, so much Muzak.

Intimacy with God.

We would do better to savor it. We would do better to roll it around on our tongues while we purse our lips and draw in streams of air until the aroma of it fills our heads.

Intimacy with God.

We would do better to sink into it like a hot bath...to immerse ourselves in it...to inhale the steam of it until our passages are clear and enlarged.

Intimacy with God.

We would do better to wrap ourselves in it...to be warmed by it...to be snuggled in it.

Intimacy with God

We would do better to bask in it like a just-right-sun on a slightly breezy and cool April day.

We would do better in so many ways if we would just get over simply "hearing it".   To only hear it is to avoid encountering it.  To only hear it is to avoid engaging it, embracing it and being embraced by it.

To think of intimacy with God in terms of the above metaphors is to think sensually about our friendship with God. 

The thought of that scares us to death...at least some of us.  

To be sensual is to be attuned to the senses, to get out of your head (and maybe even out of your mind!) and to actually sense something.

But that's the rub!

How can the senses pertain to God?  The senses connect us to the physical world, the world of apples and rocks and birdsong and texture.  How can the senses pertain to Spirit, to God, to this intimacy with God?

Our struggle with that problem is part of what keeps us locked up in our own heads...thinking about God, postulating about God, wondering about God.

Since we assume that God does not pertain to the senses, how else are we to understand God if not with our heads, our minds?

Perhaps this bias against the sensual when it comes to God is why Christians have generated far, far more theology than they have art...at least in that last few centuries.

Words, upon words, upon words. 

Words to be parsed and to be analyzed.

Words to be debated.

Words to be systematized.

Words to launch wars large and small.

We'd rather talk about God than know God.

Our bias against the senses in matters of the Spirit are not only based on the disconnect between sense and Spirit.  They are based on something far more "sinister."

Sensuality, which again is about celebrating the senses, has been merged with sexuality.   We cannot speak of being 'sensual' without also being drawn into the 'sexual' and, sadly, we cannot be drawn into the sexual without being drawn into the lurid.

You need go no farther than the dictionary to see this.

Here's a quick cut 'n paste from dictionary.com:

Sensual....

The basic meaning of sensual is shoved all the way down to definition number five! 

Somehow sensual

hooked up with

sexual

and sexual

hooked up with

carnal/fleshly and

carnal/fleshly

hooked up with 

lewd and

lewd

hooked up with

materialistic (anti-spirit) and irreligious.

God!

No wonder we are scared of our own bodies, our own feelings.  No wonder we distance ourselves from ourselves by way of all kinds of substances.

Could we be filled with more self-disdain, more self-hatred?

We content ourselves to think about God, to hold God at some cold and calculated distance, to observe God from afar, through a microscope or a telescope. We satisfy ourselves with discussions over tea or coffee- depending upon denominational affiliation. 

We do so because we dare not draw God too close to the body, which we claim God made, lest God become tainted!

And all the while we become the most sexually marketed, sexually addicted people on earth.  Wonder if that is what comes from divorcing the sensual from the spiritual?

When Abba Joseph invited Abba Lot to become "all flame" he invited him to a spiritual life that was about as sensual as you could get.

How could anyone burst into flames and not "sense" it?   How could anyone burst into flames without "getting hot?"

I back up and ask myself: whose agenda was served by this project to de-sensualize the people of faith?  Whose agenda was served by freezing the people of faith and shoving them up into the freezers of their own minds?

I have my suspicions but I'll keep those to myself.

This much I know:  whoever it was did so because they knew that a people who dabble in God are far more easily controlled than a people who burn.