Faith experience

Yesterday E. asked me this question regarding faith, "Do you feel it in your body?" Initially I thought it a curious question but responded in the affirmative after giving the question some thought.

My experiences of God are many and diverse, but at the most visceral level, it is a felt, sensory experience.

It's a sense of incredible lightness that permeates every corner of my mind, the distant reaches of my psyche and every tingly nerve ending in my body.

As my heart is touched by the experience of Divine love, it's a point of transformation and an opportunity for growth.

It's an ineffable lightness of being. There are no words save when it happens to you, you will know it, even if it is not a dramatic Damascus event like St. Paul's.

This gift of the Spirit is often one of surprise, unexpected, oft-times elusive although deeply sought - what Ignatius might call "consolation without previous cause".

While I am wary of over-simplifying and reducing faith to an experiential high that one gets, the truth of God's love is undeniably decoded in the language of the body, as Pope John Paul II elucidates in his Theology of the Body.

In order for there to be real meaning and depth in any human experience, the experience must be an amalgam of thought/words and life/love. So that it becomes an experience that can be shared with others, connecting and uniting humanity one with the other, thereby forging yet another link in the chain of life that answers the fundamental questions of existence and how meaning in life is lived out in the body.

Experience cannot be reduced to merely a series of events, separate from affectivity, and without any meaning in life.

With the body as the foundational place of all experiences in life, the body becomes the place not only to meet and "communicate" God, but it is the vehicle for us to "reach out and touch someone" (be it child, parent, sibling, relative, friend or stranger), and thereby make a difference in the world.

In that encounter with the other where we give of ourselves (be it a smile, a kind word, a loving caress or a helping hand), our hearts are transformed by that act of love and we move closer to the true meaning of love and towards God.

And we get to live out the message that God is love in our bodies.