Friday: Wanted to Take a Bath
WEEK 13
FRIDAY
WANTED TO TAKE A BATH
Jude 19-21
We have looked at the astonishing fact of a group of people who were buried deep in the problems of human living, yet seemingly had no inner problems of their own or none not being handled successfully or on the way to solution. Contrast this atmosphere of the Acts with that of modern church life. In our Ashrams, places of spiritual retreat, we ask the group the first day: “Why have you come? What do you want? What do you really need?” And we spend three to five hours in telling simply and honestly our needs.
One reaction was this, “Well, when I heard all these people telling their needs, I wondered if I hadn’t landed in the center of all cracked souls, if not crackpots, of the country.” No, he hadn’t. He had looked into the souls of a cross section of modern church life—lay and clerical—and it spelled out one word: problems.
Is psychology with all its knowledge able to show anything better? Better? Worse. One woman who heard a lecture on psychology said she felt as though she “wanted to take a bath.” What then is the difference between the modern atmosphere and that of the Acts? Do we just know more? Or is our knowledge just knowledge of problems and not knowledge of the way to solutions? Just what is the difference? The difference is that in the ordinary church today, and in modern psychology, little or nothing is known of the Spirit. This is an important lack, for the area of the Spirit’s work is largely, if not entirely, in the subconscious. God who made the subconscious an integral part of us also provided for cleansing, controlling, and coordinating the subconscious. That provision is the Holy Spirit. Without the Spirit religion deals with the conscious, introducing new loyalties and moralities there, but not with deep-down, driving motives and urges. Hence it ends in frustration and disappointment; for it leaves the house of humanity divided against itself—conscious mind converted, subconscious mind left unconverted. Jesus said a house divided against itself cannot stand, and modern living is giving way under the pressures of modern living.
O Lord, I thank you that you have not left us without remedy where we need it most—in the depths of us. How can we thank you enough for the Holy Spirit? Amen.
AFFIRMATION FOR THE DAY: As I breathe the air into the depths of my lungs to cleanse them, so I breathe the Holy Spirit into the depths of my subconscious.