Spiritual And Temporal

After Nephi read unto them the words of Isaiah, Laman and Lemuel asked if these were to be understood temporally, according to the flesh, or spiritually. But this is entirely the wrong way of looking at things. Nephi says, "the things of which I have read are things pertaining to things both temporal and spiritual" (1 Nephi 22:3). As CS Lewis puts it in The Screwtape Letters, "Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal... As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change." Everything we do in this life has a temporal and a spiritual component to it. What we eat, what we say, what we watch or listen to, how we act, all of these affect both our bodies and our spirits. We have no ability or option to compartmentalize or silo off either the physical or the spiritual aspects of our nature. Our bodies and our spirits are inextricably melded together. If we try to pursue physical pleasures at the expense of our spiritual well being, misery and disappointment await us. Similarly, if we are so paranoid about the sullying influence of the world tainting our pristine spirits, misery and disappointment await us. If we put all of our efforts into preventing the world from influencing us, then we have also removed our ability to influence the world, and God's whole purpose in sending us to this life is so that we can learn to reach out in love to improve the lives of our brothers and sisters and influence the world to make it a better place. Faith without works and works without faith are equally dead just as the physical without the spiritual and the spiritual without the physical are dead. "For man is spirit. The elements are eternal, and spirit and element, inseparably connected, receive a fulness of joy; And when separated, man cannot receive a fulness of joy." (D&C 93:33-34). We have to acknowledge that we are both physical and spiritual creatures if we want to have a hope of attaining a fullness of joy. Whether we're eating cereal or partaking of the sacrament, singing hymns or singing along to the radio, visiting the sick or visiting the mall, we can embrace the spiritual and physical sides of each experience and have more joy than trying to imagine that we need to somehow carve out half of ourselves in order to be happy. Nothing we do in this life will ever be purely Spiritual or purely physical, nor should it. We can have good experiences fixating on either the physical or spiritual aspects to the exclusion of one or the other, but we will have far greater joy embracing both sides of our nature and learning to find balance and harmony. The spirit can elevate the body and the body can ground the spirit in reality.