To grasp and-or be grasped

The Real World must be much bigger than we think.

If imagination is part of who we are, it must mean something.

The movie 1492 about Christopher Columbus's arrival to the American continent ended with a sentence attributed to this explorer I never forgot.

"Life has more imagination than we carry in our dreams."

Christopher Columbus

The depth of this sentence is in the openness of the explorer to the unknown. We are a species of explorers. We explored the land. The sea. The sky. Space. We explore the mind and the spiritual world. This latter has been challenged by people who's lower sensibility to religious matters hardened their spiritual heart. These people need to hypothesize, measure, analyze and that's good, but more than being understood, we shouldn't forget the world is to be loved as well. And love belongs to the spiritual world.

You may think love is a feeling, a decision, a commitment, quantifiable like in Hannah Fry's Mathematics of Love, and you're right. It's all that, but it must be much more than that. I do not take lightly the fact that Saint John, the Apostle, wrote in one of his letters "God is Love". It must mean something.

The effect of love are not for our benefit alone, but for the benefit of relationships. I don't take lightly also when in the Gospel of Matthew (18, 20) is written "when two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them". If God is love, his presence is only experience in love, therefore, it is one of the effect of love. I don't know about you, but I have experience this.

I remember one time I was having lunch with two atheists and a jesuit priest. We discuss things and knew the differences in convictions, but I only thought about loving them through a deep listening and experience a unity in diversity I never thought possible. Today I think this could only be due to the mystical presence of Jesus in our midst. Why is this hard to understand?

We are relational beings primarily through our senses. We feel things. Touch. Smell. Listening. Tasting. Seeing. Thus, our deepest desire is to touch, smell, listen, taste and see the spiritual world to believe in its existence. But aren't we more than our senses? A thought can change people's lives using none of our senses. An emotion impacts our bodies, but the emotion itself, although it's grounded in materiality, its raison d'etre is beyond mere materiality, or even immateriality.

The spiritual dimension of human nature is something we experience without noticing, or even in a state of denial. It's just there because it cannot not be. This is why things like faith are not quantitative (more or less faith), or something we possess (have it or not), but we may welcome it in our lives and be transformed by the experience faith provides, or we may reject it. We are used to grasp knowledge through science, but in spirituality, we are grasped by the life experience it provides.