"To Live as Resurrected"

This phrase, dense and strong and deep, sits in the mind like a koan, provoking and awaiting further thought. What does it mean to live as resurrected? What might it mean? The poignancy and difficulty of the question deepen if we situate it amidst the conditions of poverty, political oppression and death that mark the existence of so many human beings. What would it mean, in the midst of such conditions, to live and believe in the possibility of life — not just as a future hope but realized in some measure here and now? Is this really possible? Elsa Tamez's meditation on Romans 6 and 8 that appears in this issue of Spiritus argues that such a hope is possible, that living witnesses to this hope exist. Much of the power of her words arise from precisely this fact: she is speaking not only for herself, but also on behalf of a diverse community of persons, many of whom struggle daily with the most serious threats to life and happiness and who bear witness daily to the reality of their hope. If resurrection is to mean anything, it has to mean something here. And it does.

Her essay raises important questions about the public character of our work as scholars of spirituality. What is the particular context out of which our work arises? For whom, on behalf of whom, does such work exist? Sometimes, of course, scholarship is narrowly focused and the question of social context does not arise as a central concern. In such cases, the work of scholarship is to examine, closely and carefully, a particular question in the hope of bringing greater clarity or understanding to the issue. Often, though, the questions we confront arise — directly or indirectly — from concrete social or political concerns. And they bear upon these concerns in a significant way.

In the present moment, with the world in tumult, such questions arise with particular urgency. We find ourselves wondering: will the work I am engaged in help in some way? Will it contribute something toward the broad efforts currently underway to find a less aggressive, more peaceful, more just way of living? To pose such questions is to ask about our place within the larger community, and what our work of critical engagement with the Christian spiritual tradition might contribute to a renewal of spirit in the world.

This is why the phrase, "to live as resurrected," rings so deeply in the imagination. It is a root question, a question that for Christians pulses at the heart of so many other questions. What does it mean to live, to enhance life, to struggle against all those forces set against life?

Many of the essays in this issue of Spiritus struggle with just such questions. Aloysius Pieris, a Sri Lankan Jesuit, asks what it might mean for us to engage anew the Apostle's Creed in light of the struggles of the poor and dispossessed in South Asia. To recover the true meaning of this creed, especially its sense of the life-giving power of the Holy Spirit, could, he argues, be crucial to the Christian communities of this region as they struggle against death dealing political and economic structures. Philip Sheldrake asks a similar question, reexamining the ancient division between the "inner" and the "outer" worlds in Christian spirituality and wondering how we might heal this imaginative and spiritual rift. Our ability to do so, he suggests, may well determine the extent to which we are able to conceive of our spirituality as an integral part of our public lives and act accordingly. In the same way that we have come to value the "inner" over the "outer" dimension of our spiritual lives, Meredith McGuire reminds us of how much it has cost us to neglect and even denigrate our material, embodied existence. To retrieve a sense of embodiment as a beautiful and precious dimension of our spiritual lives is, potentially, to...