Supernaturally Spiritual

December 29, 2009

“God is a Spirit,” Jesus told the Samaritan woman at the well. That is something a lot of people have a
problem with: spirits. Just because it isn’t visible, it must be inferior (or scary). We only allow things
we can see to impress us, even if they’re totally unreal, like most of the special effects we see in the
movies.
As long as it can be seen, it impresses us. Anything that’s not seen, immediately receives the label
“inferior,” if not “irrelevant.”
Perhaps if we exchange the word “spirit” for “supernatural,” though, we might get a little bit more
attention.
Pretty much everyone is somewhat interested in the supernatural, even if they have no interest
whatsoever in spirits. Spirits are stuff for stories they used to scare kids with in the olden days.
Supernatural is more like “now you’re talking,” because the stuff they watch on TV deals a lot with
those things.
In reality, “spiritual” and “supernatural” is one and the same thing. Everything that cannot be
explained in natural, physical terms stems from a realm that is beyond our natural realm we have thus
far been able to observe, which is the spirit realm, and everything supernatural stems from the spirit
world – of course, both sides, good and evil.
It’s just that by avoiding the term “spirits” we can avoid the biblical and conventional aspect of the
supernatural.
Just as he did with sex, astrology and a bunch of other things, the devil would like to claim the domain
of the supernatural exclusively for himself, which he unfortunately manages to a large extent because
of people’s (and particularly Christians’) fear of the supernatural.
C. S. Lewis wrote in his book “Miracles,” the following:
“Only Supernaturalists really see Nature. You must go a little away from her, and then turn round, and
look back. Then at last the true landscape will become visible. You must have tasted, however briefly,
the pure water from beyond the world before you can be distinctly conscious of the hot, salty tang of
Nature’s current. To treat her as God, or as Everything, is to lose the whole pith and pleasure of her.
Come out, look back, and then you will see…”
That’s in essence the point I’m trying to make with my ongoing eBook project “The Deeper Meaning
of Everything:” that there is something more to see in nature than meets the eye, the handwriting and
footprint of the supernatural, (that which we dare not call spiritual) … of God.