“Don’t let your spirit die before your body does,” reminds Jon Foreman.

It is a reminder that that which is neglected, ignored, denied can quickly atrophy and be lost. Our soil-ness—body, calendar, deadlines, to-do lists, pay checks—are right in front of us, demanding our attention…and rightly so!  Matter matters.  But if we ignore our spirit, we can easily begin to feel numb, like we are skimming over the surface of our lives.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about how we feed and nourish and enrich our spirit-ness…

Perhaps it begins with paying attention to where our spirit has come from in the first place.  In the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, before we are told we are made of spirit and soil, we are told that a more primordial Spirit hovered over the chaos, disorder, and murkiness of the world and began to pull life from it: ordered, meaningful, beautiful life.  This Spirit, then, is spoken of as forming us, spirit-and-soil-us.

There is a Giver at work, the ancients believed, that is constantly giving, constantly bringing forth life in the world and in us.  And this Giver has always been recognized as having a generous Spirit.

When one early student of Jesus tried to describe the already-presentness of this Spirit to a group whose own spirits were atrophying, this is what he said, “He has shown kindness by giving you rain from heaven and crops in their seasons; he provides you plenty of food and fills your hearts with joy.”

This Spirit is not violent or judgmental or exclusive or enraged.  He says, instead, that this Spirit is generous with everyone.  Good gifts and joy for everyone is how we recognize that we have been in the presence of this Spirit.

So that for generations, people have sought to nurture their own spirits by recognizing these gifts and holding onto these joys.  One group of students, desperate to pay attention to these gifts, began the practice of the awareness examen.  The examen was meant to be done at the end of the day, in silence, asking the question, “For what moment today was I the most grateful?”  It was a way for these students to hold onto the joy that they had so recently been given, to relive it, to retrieve it.

Because sometimes the problem isn’t that our spirits aren’t being gifted, but rather that we haven’t been paying attention to the gifting. Perhaps we’ve been too hurried, or distracted, or busy, or broken. It happens.

What we need, then, is to make a space to see in our past what we were blind to in our present.

In the Hebrew Scriptures, there is a story about a man named Moses who is unable to see God, but instead is able only to see His “back”.  The word for “back”, in the original tongue, is the word achorai, which can also have a temporal meaning.  In other words, it can mean that Moses could only see where God had been.

Sometimes this is our only way of seeing: by looking back and retrieving from our recent past the gift, the joy, that was given.

If you were to sit in the silence, and pay attention to your most recent past, what generous, joyful gift would you be able to retrieve from there and hold onto again?

For what moment today were you the most grateful?