Written in Oldenburg Germany, summer 2001

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.

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.

Jonathan Kraft from URL @ 2:01 PM