Only The Spiritual Is True?

From Tolstoy: In every faith, only that which is spiritual is true. God is a spirit, and those who worship [Him] must worship  in spirit and in truth.

John 4: 24

“If you do not believe that, in the beginning, that your life came from spirit, why are you looking for it elsewhere, thinking that you can find spirit in other places? He] who behaves in this way is like a [man] who burns a lantern in bright sunlight.

Do not be afraid to get rid of things which distract your attention- Everything material, everything which can be seen or felt.  The more you purify the spiritual core of your faith, the firmer your faith will be.”

Tolstoy, in this day’s collected thought, emphasized the priority of seeing and understanding God as being spiritual; Not confined by flesh, buildings, or even religious dogma. It couldn’t have been a popular view! 

In some important ways, Tolstoy gives us clues to his liberal and unconventional approach to Christianity by his insistence on a more mystical and metaphysical view of who and what God is: A spiritual presence, energy, intelligence, or being.

I resonate with this deeply, and with the primacy of Spirit over any parental God model is essential for me. I do not go so far as any denial of the physical as being illusory, nor do I negate the importance of the physical realm as being real, but the physical dimensions of life, or the results of the information that comes from our physical bodily senses, cannot relay to us the whole picture;  just provide us with foundational clues to the overall structure of life that is a Spiritual presence, energy, or greater reality that creates the material world out of itself…

As I am coming to understand him, Tolstoy has a more austere, pious quality about his religious outlook. In some ways, that makes him a man of his times, and that personal piety has a long religious history of being one of the facets of religious idealism, and practice during years that would include Victorian times. 

What I take from his more parsimonious attitude is the value of simplicity and the necessity of non-attachment to material or physical things as being a valued asset to one’s spiritual ideas and practices…