I’M CALLING,
ARE YOU LISTENING? When you think about it, life is ultimately a being “called forth.” In most families there is a regular call that the younger members try to avoid - “Clean your room”, “Do the dishes” or perhaps today “Empty the dishwasher.” When we are young we often try to avoid these calls and think about ourselves and what we want. We tend to forget about how these calls invite us to be more of a family where everyone has a part to play to make the family more united and harmonious. When you think about it, life is ultimately a being “called forth.” When we think of our
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self-understanding when we were small compared to now, our whole self-understanding has changed. We might have understood ourselves as a son or daughter of our parents… now we might be parents ourselves. Our two great life forces, our sexuality and our spirituality, remind us that we are not an end in ourselves. These two great gifts of our humanity need to be kept in a healthy balance. A person who spiritualises everything lives in an abstract world and can end up moralising and viewing people in
BISHOP STEVE LOWE | DIOCESE OF HAMILTON, NEW ZEALAND
“how they should be”, in their view, and missing the person before them. A person who sexualises everything is looking only for what satisfies themselves. In our time there is a rather unhealthy balance between a strong trivialisation of sexuality and a weak sense of the spiritual. When there is a healthy balance between our life forces, we notice within ourselves that we are drawn towards others and it’s in giving of ourselves to others in friendship and relationships we discover more of who we are and who we are called to be. In this way we are always arriving at who we are.
