Spiritual Fruit - Introduction

I first really became aware of the fuits of the spirit verse (Galatians 5:somethingorother) when I started doing karate. It was always one of those verses that you felt ashamed not to be able to chime in with whenever someone would start it, but it was a surprise when I started karate and it was our class motto, recited every class. It only took a couple of recitations to get it memorized, and it took not that long to realize why it is an appropriate mantra for a Christian martial arts program, but it has taken many years to slowly come to grips with the implications of the verse. So here are some introductory thoughts regarding the fruits of the Spirit, and I will be following up shortly with focused percolations* on the individual 'fruits'.

The active fruits

The first thing that occured to me eventually is the fact that all of these fruits appear on the surface to be emotions, or passions. It sounds like Paul is saying that the eventual outpouring of God after enough spiritual formation will be that you will feel the following way: loving, joyous, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, and self controlled. While this may be true too - see C.S. Lewis on the effects of action of emotion - I do not believe it is actually what is being said.

If you look a little closer, you eventually see that these fruits are actually virtues, or 'lifestyles' to choose a psychobabylic term. They are actions, rather than passions**. That is, they are things in which you are the actor, and not the passive receiver. They are muscles that you must exercise in order to use them when you need them.

All things in moderation

Secondly, I am coming to realize that, as with all things in the Christian life, each of these fruits involves a balancing act. All of them have various facets, which, when put together, make up a virtue. But if you focus too much on on facet over the others, you begin to lose the virtuousness of the fruit. Just like with real fruit, you can over water or under water, over prune or under prune, etc. Most of the time, it is not obvious at first what these balancing acts involve. This is one of the areas I am hoping to explore a little more deeply with this series.

The martial connection

Because I am interested in the martial arts and how other things relate to them and vice versa, I will probably spend at least a few bytes on the connection between the Fruits of the Spirit and karate. These connections will - of course - be at least partially limited to my encounters with the martial arts, but most of the points should be fairly wide spread.

So stay tuned, because I'll be kicking it all off with a doozy:

Love

*I use the words 'percolations' rather than 'meditations' to reflect the method by which I usually achieve such insights (if I may call them such); that being that I do not actively reflect on them for long periods of time, but rather they will sit in my back brain where some magical part of my mind will process them over a long period of time, eventually producing (in some cases) enough coherent thoughts to put together some sort of statement. Thus, I find it to be more similar to the slow and steady process of a coffee drip resulting in the cafeinated beverage my wife enjoys so much - or perhaps the slow and amorphous steeping process of tea, a beverage which I myself actually enjoy - rather than to some sort of mental or spiritual scrutiny.

**I would not have truly understood what this meant if it were not for Dr. Dave H. and his discussion on what exactly we refer to when we talk about the Passion of Christ, so props to Dr. H.