[3/24/2002
3:01:49 PM | Jonathan Kraft] Thoughts on Passion I make a distinction between passion of the body and passion of the
spirit, but they must coexist, and must operate within the understanding
of one another.
Written in Oldenburg
Germany, summer 2001
I could never be passionate (romantically) with someone who I did not
feel love for. Love is of the spirit much more so than it is of the
body. Love is primarily spiritual because the feelings we receive with
love are just beyond what our physical senses bring to us.
I can not be romantically physically passionate in the absence of love.
I can also not be spiritually passionate towards a cause or an aim
without a demonstration to myself and to others of that passion in a
physical manner.
Spiritual passion is only fully realized when accompanied by some
physical action.
What is more difficult to appreciate and live out is that if spiritual
passion is only fully realized when accompanied by some physical action,
then physical action can also only be fully realized when accompanied by
a spiritual aim.
Love is greater than the spirit and the body.
Love is the spirit and the body, until we try to make it otherwise.
This is why Jesus had to die in physicality � and in rising again, the
physical body was gone with the spiritual.
Jesus had to become human so that we would know that God understands our
human physical state. Otherwise, why would Jesus have become human?
Spiritual movement and physical movement should both be guided by the
greater, love.
We must learn to make our physical movement an act of spiritual passion.
We must learn to make our spiritual passion real though our physical
action.
We can not deny the spiritual, we can not deny the physical.
The physical, the temporal, where we live now, must be used, for it is
our training ground.