Wednesday: This Seemed More Important
WEEK 15
WEDNESDAY
THIS SEEMED MORE IMPORTANT
Acts 19:18-20
What had happened to lift this whole account in the Acts above sex preoccupation? Evidently it was the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit brought such a deep emotional satisfaction that the emotions of sex were pushed to the margin. A stronger and more satisfying emotion occupied the center.
“Mary,” of whom I have written in Growing Spiritually, illustrates this; for she went through the experience of being filled with the Spirit. She was aglow with it. The doctor had said that there must be an operation to remove a cyst. She wrote me after seeing the doctor, at which meeting it was to be finally decided whether there was to be an operation. But she didn’t mention the matter. When I wrote asking about it, she replied: “Oh, I forgot to tell you the doctor said: ‘No operation.’ I forgot to tell you, for I seemed so preoccupied with this glorious coming of the Holy Spirit that this seemed more important.” That is exactly what happened in the Acts: “this”—the coming of the Holy Spirit—seemed more important.
But the sex urge was not eliminated or suppressed; it was expressed on another level. The sex urge, or the creative urge, was expressed in creating faith, hope, new spiritually born souls, new movements, new life in general. The Holy Spirit, who is the Creative Spirit, was now creating on the highest level, the level of remaking human personality. God, who in the beginning of creation had brooded over chaos and brought cosmos out of it, was now doing the same on another level. The Spirit was brooding over the chaos and darkness of human personality and producing the cosmos of changed, coordinated, harmonious human living. But this time the Spirit was creating through created beings—a cooperative endeavor. And God was doing it through the sex urge, which had been converted to creation on a higher level. This was more than sublimation, as psychology uses it, it was creation. Sublimation is “to divert the primitive urges.” This was to convert these urges into the higher creation. The human personality was never more fulfilled than in this creation.
O Spirit of God, you have brought us to our own fulfillment when you take the lower urges and turn them into the highest uses. I glow to your purposes. Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: My primitive urges will be not diverted but directed to higher creative ends.