What does it mean to be "spiritual?" In a day when "spirituality" is in and "organized religion" is out, it behooves the church to seek a biblical definition and theology of "spiritual." To this end, breathing is more than a means of propulsion; it''s a spiritual principle.

(The following discussion of "The Kiss of God" has been developed more directly in my Quantum Spirituality: A Postmodern Apologetic [Dayton: Whaleprints, 1991]. The quotes are from that book. -L.I.S)

"The human species has been twice kissed by the divine. If the first kiss brought us breath and birth, the second kiss brought us rebirth and a second breath" (298). As John records Jesus' first post-resurrection appearance to his disciples,

Jesus came and stood among them. "Peace be with you!" he said, and then showed them his hands and his side. So when the disciples saw the Lord, they were filled with joy. Jesus repeated, "Peace be with you!", and said, "As the Father sent me, so I send you." Then he breathed on them saying, "Receive the Holy Spirit." (19b-22)

Again as this is put in Quantum Spirituality, "The first kiss of God quickened us to come alive. Adam was God's first kiss. The second kiss of God quickens us to come alive in Christ and be 'born of the Spirit' (John 3:8). Jesus is God's second kiss (or in the words of Bernard of Clairvaux, 'Jesus is God's kiss'). The Spirit is the breath of God in the body of the church" (299).

In one of John Wesley's most classic sermons, "The New Birth," Wesley draws graphically on the Genesis vocabulary of breathing and respiration to describe the meaning of "regeneration" and "being born again":

God is continually breathing, as it were, upon his soul, and his soul is breathing unto God. Grace is descending into his heart, and prayer and praise ascending to heaven. And by this intercourse between God and man, this fellowship with the Father and the Son, as by a kind of respiration, the life of God in the soul is sustained: and the child of God grows up, till he comes to "the full measure of the stature of Christ". (John Wesley, Sermons, ed. Albert C. Outler [Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1985], 2:193)

In other words, salvation is at heart a form of breathing or respiration. The means of grace are breathed in (that's "inhalation"), and good works are breathed out (that's "exhalation"). If one tries to get by in life by only breathing in grace, what happens? How long can you hold your breath? After a while one passes out. Breathing that only takes in but doesn't give out is a form of respiration that leads quickly to expiration.

Then there are those who want large draughts of divine grace, and inhale deeply the grace of God, but who don't want to let out too many good works. If one takes deep inhalations and shallow exhalations, what happens? You hyperventilate, and some Christians are hyperventilating on the Holy Spirit.

The 14th century mystic Ruysbroeck puts it in an even more powerful way that shifts the axis from our breathing to God's breath:

God aspires us into himself in contemplation, and then we must be wholly his; but afterwards the Spirit of God expires us without, for the practice of love and good works. (As quoted in Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy [New York: Harper, 1945], 300)

Have you let God's Spirit breathe in your life? Can you say this morning you are alive to life in all its magic and mystery? Can you say this morning you are alive to life in Jesus Christ in all its majesty and miracle? Let it breathe, brothers and sisters. Let it breathe...