Christian Spirituality and the Incarnation

"Christian spirituality is the study and experience of what happens when the Holy Spirit meets the human spirit.   This definition is not meant to exclude God’s contact with the entire person, including the body.  Indeed, Christian spirituality is profoundly incarnational, since that meeting-place between spirit and Spirit, that holy tryst, finds its example par excellence – indeed, its proto-type and its cause – in Jesus, the God-Man.  Our Christian story is the marvelous drama of a “holy tryst” – a holy meeting in which God, through His very own love, brings humanity (spirit, soul, body) to Himself.  …Let us not hope to find a spiritual life unconnected to that one tangible, wondrous place in which perfect God and perfect humanity are joined.  In observing the tendencies of the contemporary search for spirituality, we must beware of that wrongheaded quest  for “religious experience without faith…a religion of pure experience.”  (Dupre and Wiseman, p23) .  Such a quest recently has been proposed to the troubled Anglican faith community by Bishop Michael Ingham, who, in his Mansions of the Spirit, cautiously valorized an “esoteric” search for that  mystical experimental point beyond doctrine where “all faiths meet” (pp.119-23).  But to do this is to place that One from whom are all things and in whom all things converge in a subordinate position; it is to miss the staggering import of the unique and revolutionary Incarnation of God the Son.  It is to worship experience, and not that One from whom all experience flows."   

Edith Humphrey, Ecstasy and Intimacy: When the Holy Spirit meets the Human Spirit, pp17-18