Phillip, welcome. I don’t think that we have met before, but I see that your spiritual journey resembles mine immensely. Relaxing into our faith is a very James phrase, and yes, you will find that.

Some years ago I studied Deuteronomy with a Hebrew speaking Jesuit, and it was a true revelation. ‘The Wilderness’ and ‘The Promised Land’ were not two strips of territory, but the absence and the presence of God. And it is in the wilderness, that is absence of God, that we grow spiritually.

James also has a remarkable anthropological aspect to his teaching which makes us realise that we find God, not only in Jesus, but also in the ‘other’. To quote him: ” Rather than grasping onto a theory, human beings learn by being inducted into a set of practices over time such that we find ourselves knowing from within how they work. ?  Christianity is the process of finding ourselves on the inside of an act of communication that is developing in us a new set of practices. This means that we discover from within what the ideas really mean as we discover ourselves becoming something, or someone, we scarcely knew before.”

I hope this helps, and I look forward to further conversations.?