Jim Wallis, an evangelical Christian, is a powerful voice in the larger religious community today. He is the author of the best-selling book: God’s Politics. His message is that poverty in this country and in the world is the driving moral issue of our day. He says that “there are two great hungers in the world: spiritual integrity and social justice. What the world is waiting for is the connection between the two. And he concludes with a message to us: “People of faith have to find that connection.”

Spirituality comes out of our lives. For each of us, our sense of the spiritual has emerged from some significant event in our lives. For some, and maybe most of us, the nurture of one’s spiritual side energizes their compassionate response to human needs and their passion for social justice. For others, personal experience and involvement in the injustices of the world is what creates and nurtures a spiritual awareness. Social justice and spirituality are intertwined. They are really two sides of the same coin, and have to be seen as part of a whole.

A personal spirituality without a concern for the needs of others can be self-centered, narcissistic , and only inward-looking: “being”, but not always “doing”. Social justice, on the other hand, without a spiritual foundation can result in frustrated activism, loss of focus and direction, and will last only as long as your energy holds out.

This morning I want to tell the story of how my outward journey into social action led to an inward spirituality. For me the awareness of the “spiritual” in my life came from my connection with other people in the midst of confronting injustice, both personally and in society. These experiences of the injustices of the world is what nurtured a spiritual awakening within me.
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More Will Be Revealed

A few months ago I agreed to lead a service on this date tentatively titled, “Dark Night of the Soul” and I had collected some poems and passages along the way that I thought might help me form this theme. But when we actually got to the planning stages of developing this service, I felt like I had nothing to say about “Dark Night of the Soul.” In fact, I didn’t have much to say about anything. I was feeling depressed, but it wasn’t a “Dark Night of the Soul” kind of depression. Rather, I felt like a lot was happening inside me but it was best if I didn’t talk about it, resist it, or try to change my mood. It was best if I didn’t try to describe what I was feeling or why I was feeling it. I recognized intuitively that I should refrain from trying to name it and define it and then give a reflection on what it is I had experienced or was presently experiencing. Intuitively, my sense was that I needed to be quiet. I need to let the process unveil itself.

I think all of us go through times when we need to shut down and quiet ourselves because something is happening, growing, changing within us. So instead of giving a reflection on what it is that is spiritually unfolding, I decided all I could really talk about was the process of unfolding, the process of being as still as I can be until more is revealed. And while this thing- this new change or insight (or whatever it is) is in the process of becoming, I have three choices: I can fight it; I can try to force it to unfold faster; or I can trust the process and let more be revealed in the space and time it needs to emerge.

That’s what I’ve been trying to do this time with mixed success: trust the process without analyzing, defining, forcing, fixing, trying to control, manage or steer my internal life and the world around me. That’s what I usually do. I always feel like I have to be in charge of my internal life somehow, that my vigilance will help things along, that I can control the outcome, the pain or lack thereof. This process of change is often uncomfortable and my first reaction is to cut down on the discomfort in whichever way I can. I read books looking for answers, I make lists, I talk about it, I try to manage how I’m feeling, I try to steer my moods, I try to force myself to do things I’m just now ready or able to do. But that’s usually counter productive and doesn’t help the unfolding process.
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