They that speak of this fire of love know not well what it is; save this I can tell that it is neither any bodily thing nor felt by any sense of the body. A soul may feel it in prayer or in devotion, which soul is in the body, but it feeleth it not by any bodily sense; for though it is true that it works in and upon the soul, that the body itself is turned thereby into a heat and be as it were chafed through the labour and travail of the spirit, nevertheless the fire of love is not bodily, for it is only in the spiritual desire of the soul. And this is no riddle to any man or woman that have had the experience of devotion; but because some are so simple as to imagine that because it is called a fire that therefore it should be hot as bodily fire is, therefore have I set down thus much. (John Climacus)

Spiritual experience has physical and intellectual consequences.

Jacob was exhausted from wrestling. Moses felt the heat of the burning bush. Jesus was hungry from a forty day fast.

Yet Jacob was strengthened immeasurably by the struggle. Moses was not burned, even when his face shone brightly. Jesus responded, ¨man does not live by bread alone.¨

The physical is real, but it is transient. The intellectual is real, but is limited by our perspective.

The spiritual is where we most fully engage reality beyond time and space. May it inform what we understand and do in time and space.

The image is of pentecost by Duccio.