The other day, I received an email asking me, “What would be your dream vacation?” I thought, ‘What if God sent me an email asking, “What
would be your dream spirituality?”’

Imagine standing in a nice hot spiritual shower with the love of God flowing down from the showerhead and enveloping you in the soft rain of his presence with the scrubbing bubbles of his tender touch washing away the accumulated grime of your life. I could spend a bit of time in that shower!

But are there other options, perhaps more public ones, that God may use for our spiritual cleansing? What if sometimes God’s will for our sanctification is to spend some time in the parish ‘Jacuzzi’? There certainly is a soothing aspect to a Jacuzzi, but it is also an environment where a lot of different spiritual currents can bubble up around us and, to our chagrin, we discover that there are other creatures inhabiting the hot tub, so we are compelled to suffer! In our journey of becoming Christ-like, this may be par for the course, for Hebrews chapter 5 says this about Jesus, “Although he was a son, he learned obedience through what (and who) he suffered.”

I don’t know about you, but it seems that God gets me to spend more time in the Jacuzzi than in the shower. Perhaps the more discomforting elements of ‘Jacuzzi spirituality’ are a part of what Jesus was talking about when he said, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me,” (Matthew 16:24). The Church might be one of the venues where Jesus chooses to measure us up for our custom-fitted cross.

After having the experience of a spiritually invigorating and sanctifying shower, it is tempting to spend our time pining for a sequel to that cherished episode of our lives. The Christian mystics talk about periods in their personal spirituality called ‘the dark night of the soul’, where the intimacy of their ‘shower’ experiences have become just dim memories. To spiritually survive, they needed to learn to depend on the luminous insights of their faith alone.

Perhaps ‘Jacuzzi spirituality’, as well as being a cleansing experience, is also a place of formation, helping us to mature in both the externals and internals of our faith. If we can learn to survive and thrive in the hot tub that is the Church, then we should be battle- hardened for our commission to “Go into all the world and proclaim the good news to the whole creation,” (Mark 16:15).