Friday 26 June 2009

To dwell within


“Anyone who welcomes you welcomes me; and anyone who welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.”
(Matthew 10:40)

There is always something new waiting for us a little further along the path we follow: some new angle on an old story; a new understanding of something of which we thought we already had a full grasp; a reminder of something we should never have forgotten; a renewed awareness of what our conscience has been telling us all the time. It may be some totally new and amazing revelation, or an unanticipated change of direction, but more often than not it is something which goes deeper rather than further: something which illuminates the multilayered nature of our spiritual life rather than the distance travelled during our living of it. It causes our spiritual knowledge and belief to be more clearly seen as being based upon truths viewed from only one viewpoint; what is already there is more fully revealed, and our inner response includes a salutary realization that we should have been able to recognize earlier the very thing of which we have now been made aware.
But believing that we should have grasped it earlier may be another part of our misplaced confidence in our own abilities. We are not as bright as we had thought; we are not as advanced in our understanding as we had believed. We are not only being given a new viewpoint, the particular newness of knowledge about something, but are being reminded of an underlying constant that always restricts our ability to see the more complete picture. It is not only carelessness, complacency and compromise that prevent our seeing more clearly; the brighter light shines within humility: it is our pride that blinds us. Couple our pride with our busyness, and with our failure to live in a minute-to-minute realization of the relevance of the spiritual to every moment of our lives, and we have our own individual reasons for stopping and waiting and praying somewhere close to the edge of our seemingly reliable and complete spiritual life. We have our own comprehension of why Jesus spoke so often in parables: multilayered stories in which everyone can find an understanding in keeping with their own lives, and with their own spiritual and intellectual capacities.
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Whenever such a moment arises it can bring about a quiet adjustment to our thinking and to our sense of direction, and a deeper appreciation both of where we are in relation to others, and of what we are doing or failing to do in those relationships. It is an unobtrusive prompting: a gentle nudge that may steer us to an awareness we need but which we are in danger of missing.
I found myself in one of those moments recently; a trio of feelings blended into one grace-filled reality: it was humbling, it was an awakening, and it elicited praise and thanksgiving for having been awakened. With my usual slowness, I saw the potential in the situation that had arisen only several minutes after the event, though I now believe that delayed recognition to have been an important part of what happened.

The moment occurred at the end of a conversation with two Jehovah’s Witnesses who had called at my home. One of them has been here twice before, and we had talked for quite a while on those occasions. When there are no pressing matters to prevent it, I am happy to talk with anyone who has God on their mind, and I believe we all enjoyed our discussions. I was happy to see her return again, this time with someone who had not been here before.
The conversation became discussion; the discussion became persuasion, and the persuasion gradually became more forceful. I was interested in their way of talking to me, and it seemed increasingly likely that the lady who was new to me had been brought along to ratchet up the approach: to apply a greater pressure which became a clear message that I was not on the right path.
“Why do you continue to be part of an organization (the Catholic Church) which so clearly is not teaching you the truth?”
I had suggested in previous conversations that perhaps they should be spending time with those who have no awareness of God rather than with me, and I repeated this again. The response was a definite no, and it seemed that my willingness to give time to them and listen to them had been taken as a sign of potential willingness to join them. I am well aware that every such visit, to my home or that of anyone else, is the first stage of a definite and preset agenda. My willingness to talk with them is a natural expression of my belief that people can never begin to understand each other if they are not willing to hear each other’s spiritual stories first-hand. This is how we can reach the point where we may really begin to talk to each other, whoever we are.
I found a disturbing rigidity to the Witnesses’ approach once the initial niceties have been dealt with, and especially when repeated meetings and the passage of time have created a degree of friendly relationship. It seems that progress can only be made in one predetermined direction, that being the one for which they seem to have been programmed and “sent forth”. The ladies I have been talking with are cheerful and pleasant, but when they felt the need to focus on what they had come for they showed signs of being under considerable pressure, both from without and within: pressure from others in the organisation to get out there and spread their carefully confined beliefs, and pressure from themselves to conform to those requirements, perhaps in order to maintain their standing within their own local and wider organisation. These pressures were manifested as a form of pressure on me, the person being visited, and are no doubt at least part of the reason why some people are not particularly welcoming towards them. There is little scope in this approach for hearing the stories of those they visit.

This most recent visit lasted for one and a half hours – standing in the garden all the while once we had walked around it – and while I believe they had been sent forth, as it were, not by God the Father: Yahweh: Jehovah; not by Jesus Christ, nor by the Holy Spirit, but by men within their organisation who maintain the rigidity of their unalterable agenda, I had been enabled simply to be there to listen and talk with them. Towards the end of their visit one of them mentioned St Paul’s experience on the Damascus road; an unexpected move away from most of what had gone before. I responded by saying that my own small experience was enough for me, and briefly described my being emptied and gradually refilled, the effect this had on me, and the following experience of walking with Jesus who became my constant companion. I explained that it was my ongoing relationship with Him and my awareness of the Holy Spirit in my life that had made me who I am today; that had filled me to overflowing and placed me somewhere in the stream of God’s eternal presence.
I had said this simply because it seemed right at the time, and it was only afterwards that I realized I had been speaking of something which – if I understand correctly – is not part of Jehovah’s Witnesses’ experience. It was the only time there seemed no real pressure to interrupt, to override, to correct or counter what I was saying.
Having said that I would know what to do by the prompting I received, by the recognition of things that were more than mere coincidences, and, if I was going wrong, by my conscience, I was asked, “Have you considered that this may be such a moment? That our being here may be more than a coincidence?” That was a good thought with which to leave me: one that fitted well with my way of thinking; and my attention being focussed on that possibility resulted in my giving no answer.
Having asked me to say a prayer for them, they left with the intention of returning later in the summer.
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I am now sure they had meant me to pray for God to reveal to me His purpose in sending them here, but I had not heard their request in that way. I told them I would of course pray for them, and would have done so anyway after they had gone. Having been asked (as I thought) I almost prayed for them there and then.
But that is for when the time is right: for when they return. It will be part of what God wants me to give them: part of the reason for their visits: part of God’s purpose in sending them to me. He wants them to have a living relationship with the risen Jesus, the Son, and to be guided by His Spirit; through that relationship they will have a previously unimagined relationship with the Father, the very same Jehovah for whom they are so eager and willing to witness. In short, they will have life in all its fullness.

I had not recognized the potential in the situation until after they had gone, and that was how God willed it. Without that delay I may have moved on, I may have prayed for them with them, and they may not have returned. The time was not right. I was held back, and the situation has been given time to mature. Instead of simply not being displeased to see them when they return, I am now eagerly awaiting that day.
May something new be here for them when they return, and may our next meeting become one of those moments for them: something deeper, something brighter, something more complete: a new awareness and understanding.
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“...and we shall come to him and make a home in him.”
(John 14:23)

Wednesday 17 June 2009

Small beginnings

"I have great faith in a seed ...
Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders."
(The Succession of Forest Trees. Henry David Thoreau)

The requirement to position ourselves between God and the people of the world as a means of access, reaching both towards God and towards all who will turn their lives in His direction, arises in many different forms. However it presents itself, it calls on those who have been blessed with the relevant gifts, to enliven the beckoning and the pointing out of the way; to make real the prospect of experiencing God’s touch in previously unapproachable areas of life. These areas are frequently regarded as inaccessible through being outside the limits or structures we have built around our faith, or through past determination to resist all those gentle but persistent inner calls to surrender to the beginnings of faith. They may have resulted from deprivation, abuse, grief, anger, fear or shame: from anything, long-running or centred on a single moment, that caused us to shut ourselves off from some part of the world around us, and in doing so, from part of ourselves. All such ‘no go’ areas share the same essential prison cell: they are caused by, they perpetuate, and they reinforce broken relationships. But, even when, or if, all other persons involved in the root cause of any such boarded-up area are discounted, it still remains as the pain and the separation of more than one relationship. One’s relationship with God is not yet restored, and every day is a continuation of a broken relationship with oneself.

That is what the whole process is about; that is why Jesus came. That is why our ongoing separations (political, economic, and ethnic, as well as religious and individual) are the greatest barrier to the coming of God’s Kingdom. We are not in Eden, and nor are we meant to be. We are meant to be back in a full and living relationship with God and with each other, complete with all the qualities the coming of the Kingdom of God demands, in this world as it exists and as we have made it today. It is our world, and it is our home.
In correct relationship with our inner selves, with each other, and with God through the Holy Spirit, that Kingdom can be brought into everyone’s sight. Eden was where we began, and it is behind us; but we are the ones who can bring about the changes needed to transform this world into another garden worthy of that name.
We have within us the beginnings of all that is needed: the gift of faith which, coupled with the work of the Holy Spirit, enables us to realize our vast potential. At the very least we carry the seed un-germinated, waiting to be awoken by others who have already taken their place as stepping stones for us. It is the mustard seed of which Jesus spoke.
........................................................................................ .‘................................... ...........................'The kingdom of Heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field. It is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the biggest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air can come and shelter in its branches.’ (Matthew 13:31-32)
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In Old Testament times God was securely in His Temple, set apart from ordinary people like ourselves, but part of the work Jesus accomplished in making all things new was enabling us to carry God within ourselves. I have always found it an unhelpful description, but I use it here nevertheless as it is literally the right expression: it expresses the truth: it expresses the reality of each person’s importance and worth in the eyes of God: the ‘special’ status, not of a few isolated and exceptional individuals, but of every person on the face of the earth.
Through baptism, we are able to become Temples of the Holy Spirit. God is no longer inaccessible, shut away in His Temple; and He is not shut securely in today’s church buildings for when we deign to visit; we have Him locked safe within ourselves. It is His life within us that wells up, fills to the brim and overflows into the world around us. His intention is that every one of us should become filled with the Holy Spirit, aware of our gifts, and empowered as part of a continuing journey towards becoming the daughters and sons the Father made us to be.

Saturday 13 June 2009

In hope

Life can be quite unnerving at times. I well remember that it was not always like that, but then, I had no real inkling of the things which now focus and occupy my attention.
Somewhere, sometime, somehow, something happened. I am sure it was not something I am now supposed to dwell upon, and I hear echoing in my mind the words of someone who, years ago, was essential to my journey in faith, telling me that my continued writing about and dwelling upon some of my experiences was only perpetuating the unrest I appeared to be enduring at that time.
In that respect, things do not appear to have changed much. I still write. I still ponder. I still use this process as a means to unravel the tangles within my mind, and now of course, I have even become used to doing it in a less private way through writing here at ‘the very edge’: a place to which, in one way or another, I have always been and to which I am likely always to return.
That I should ever have begun to broaden the reach of my soliloquizing in this way rather than keeping my thoughts very much to myself still surprises me, but it also makes me smile, as I have always been in need of something that would drag me out of myself: something to draw me from a solitude deeper than could be known when only looked on from a point well back from the edge.

In this case, the edge is that fine line separating the ordinary, normal, natural and every-day interaction between people, from the rare and intimate, inter-natural, spiritual, and almost entirely un-shareable opening of one person to another. We should hope to achieve and maintain this as part of our relationship with Jesus, but, other than in the form of a deep longing, this relationship with another living person, however close the friendship, remains almost untouchable.
This fine line is somewhat similar to the memory of the long-removed veil in the Temple; torn apart, all separation destroyed, yet in our minds still the closest we can get. We dare not approach that which had always been deemed unapproachable, and we find no reason to even consider trying to move into a place always deemed inaccessible. We have trouble enough with coming closer to God, but even when this hurdle has been placed behind us, we are still unable to step beyond a similar line with other people who have done likewise. Our fear of a real opening up, and of becoming truly and fully known by another is almost insurmountable.
It is part of what we lost in Eden. It is an aspect of our inability to return to that garden where there were no edges, no fine lines, no veils, no forms of demarcation whatever (except for that one tree); a place where man, and woman, and God, all shared and walked the same intimate paths of truth and trust.

It is the knowing that we are deeply unknowable, even to our friends, that makes time spent at the edge inseparable from solitude. In the company of others, and even in the company of a single particularly close spiritual other, we are kept back from the very edge by our fear of what lies immediately beyond the lip. We know that breath blows constantly over it, and breath gives power to speech. We fear that any utterance may not be only from The Holy Spirit, but a subsequent breaking of our own silence: our own breath moving over our lips suddenly giving rise to words spoken to another. It does not happen because we are unable to take ourselves that close to the edge when in the company of anyone other than God.
At times it may feel that we can return to Eden in our solitude. We can walk with God in the cool of the day, but we can be drawn into remaining there too long, becoming more isolated from others and thus further from where we are meant to be. Yes, we are each called to be in a close relationship with God, but we are not meant to remain in isolation. However it may feel, it is this isolation that should tell us we are not in Eden. In Eden we would be both in the presence of God and in the company of others.

The Lord God said, “It is not right that man should be alone...” (Genesis 2:18)

This is where we are today in the world as we now know it; not in Eden but as close as we can get to it. We were made to be in the company of others, and the only veil that remains un-torn is the one that keeps us out of Eden: the one that keeps us fundamentally apart.

There is only one faint glimmer on the horizon; for the few who can see it, it represents a seemingly insurmountable problem, but the fact that they see it at all is a beginning: a distant hope for all mankind. Our increasing environmental awareness is one superficial aspect of this hope, despite its being born of necessity and being one of today’s acceptable forms of global selfishness. The deeper consciousness of hope is in the minds of those few who may be able to begin the laborious process of one-by-one transformation through going beyond the very lip of their fear in the spiritual light of another’s gaze.

‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never is, but always to be, blest.’
(Alexander Pope. Essay on Man.)

Life can be quite unnerving at times.
It is meant to be. It is our natures’ way of telling us, not that we have got something wrong, but that we are on the verge of getting something right: that we have approached a little closer to that place where we sense the possibility of our breath giving rise to utterance. Something will break if that happens; it may well be us, but on the other side all fears will fall away. Christ in the one will become One with Christ in the other.
Those same words of John Henry Newman need quoting again:
........................................................................................................... ‘Perhaps the reason why the standard of holiness among us is so low, why our attainments are so poor, our view of the truth so dim, our belief so unreal, our general notions so artificial and external is this, that we dare not trust each other with the secret of our hearts. We have each the same secret, and we keep it to ourselves, and we fear that, as a cause of estrangement, which really would be a bond of union. We do not probe the wounds of our nature thoroughly; we do not lay the foundation of our religious profession in the ground of our inner man; we make clean the outside of things; we are amiable and friendly to each other in words and deeds, but our love is not enlarged, our bowels of affection are straitened, and we fear to let the intercourse begin at the root; and, in consequence, our religion, viewed as a social system is hollow. The presence of Christ is not in it.’ (Christian Sympathy. Parochial and Plain Sermons)

Thursday 11 June 2009

Inseparable

In leading us toward all that is good, prayer tends us toward a receptiveness of what is already available.
However infrequent I might feel my praying to be, in knowing that I have, in one way or another, repeated that one word from the heart, “Yes”, a few times in each day, I know that I have not failed to pray.
It is so simple and so effortless, but so utterly complete: - ‘Yes Lord. Your will be done’; and it is in following Him that the underlying joy is raised to consciousness where it soothes through even the worst of days. It runs through us, blending with God’s love, to quietly flow into the world around us.

‘Any joy that does not overflow from our souls and help other men to rejoice in God does not come to us from God.’
(Ruth Burrows. Guidelines for Mystical Prayer.)

I have been brought back once more to the question of fullness: being filled to the brim.
When I began writing here my sense of fullness and overflowing was so powerful that I was sure it was something peculiar to me; something particular given to me for a particular purpose and for a particular season. I had no thought of it coming to an end, but while feeling that it would remain for a long time, I could not be sure of its permanence. It was that strength of feeling that set me in motion on these pages. If I was not already doing this, I would not have any thought of starting it today.

But this is not a gift particular to me.
It had felt that way only because the sensation and accompanying level of understanding seemed so far beyond any previous experience. Growing accustomed to the ongoing wakefulness has enabled me to see that although the light within is indeed brighter than before, the dimmer switch, as it were, has only been turned up by the smallest of touches. The repetition of such adjustments as this – adjustments from excitement and a misplaced sense of awe, to actual truth and a more sober acceptance of reality – in response to small steps taken throughout life, gradually brings an awareness of our absolute incapacity to comprehend God, to see Him in the blinding radiance of His Glory, and to even begin to approach Him other than through the guidance, the teaching and the direction of His Holy Spirit.
My sense of fullness and overflowing readies me, enables me, empowers me to do whatever God may have me do, but it is not a precursor to some great calling or action. It is an awakening brought about by having been called and touched by God, and its realization is the inevitable consequence of knowing that I have been woken, and have dared to answer “Yes”.

Many things in our spiritual lives last only for a certain length of time: for a season; they fulfil a need and are gone. Whether experienced as positive or negative, they move us as God wills and then leave us. But other touches become permanent parts of us. They are part of our Lord’s will for us to tear down every veil that people still try to hang between themselves and God’s presence.

‘... he has destroyed the veil which used to veil all peoples, the pall enveloping all nations’ (Isaiah 25:7)

‘Jesus ... breathed his last. And the veil of the Sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom. (Mark 15:37-38)

These life-bringing gifts are available to us all, meant for us all, and necessary to the binding together of all of us into one body. They are gifts freely given to all who knowingly stand in God’s sight. They are blessings that fall on all who position themselves beneath God’s hand. They are cloaks of security and strength placed around the shoulders of all who breathe in the Spirit of God, and who allow His Spirit to breathe in them. They do not denote a particular significance of purpose; they are not individual signposts for those who lack direction; still less are they grounds for any sense of achievement, congratulation, self-satisfaction, or elevated self-worth.
What they are is awesome in its simplicity. They are the material from which all our tents should be woven if we are ever to know unity and security in the deserts of the world: in those places where we are called to position ourselves where the veil of the Temple in Jerusalem once hung: positioned between God and the people, not as a separation, but as a means of access, reaching out in both directions, towards God and towards all who turn their face towards Him. Jesus has made us inseparable.

That is where the fullness and the overflowing truly find their purpose. Each of us becomes a channel for God’s love; we are in that eternal stream and we stand ready to point the way, to reassure and encourage, to support the weary, and to help the fallen to regain their foothold. We become stepping-stones for those who fear to enter the water.
But essentially we are there for each other, and so long as we maintain that strength of commitment and availability within our own encampment, we shall be there for every stranger who seeks the way. And strangers there will be. Some will come from the unlikeliest of quarters and we must be ready for them. The Holy Spirit is at work, not only within the recognizable boundaries of Christ’s Church, but throughout all the peoples of the world. It is the work of the Spirit abroad coupled with the work we allow Him to do through ourselves that will transform the whole of mankind; and along that road lies the redemption of the whole world.
Can we even begin to imagine what would follow if the People of the Old Covenant became fully aware that their Messiah had already come, and, en masse, they began to respond to His call to follow Him? It is not a fool’s suggestion, unless that fool be a fool for Christ. Who else, throughout their history, has been aware of and guided by (sometimes) the Spirit of God? Whose scriptures, scribed before the birth of Christ and proclaiming His future coming, do we revere as being the word of God? And what links the millions of Christians, Jews and Muslims of today’s world if it is not Abraham, the man we all think of as our father in faith? Be assured, however far away it may appear to be at times, the day will come. The day will come!
That is why we are called to take our place, not just anywhere, but wherever we are called to be. For most of us it will be where we already are; for some it will be in the remotest corners of our world; but for all of us, wherever we are in geographical terms, it is to be as an invitation, a welcome, a reassurance, and as a friend and follower of Christ to all who are yet to overflow with love for Him.

My fullness is not for a season; it is now a part of me. It is God’s freely given awareness of the potential of His touch and His power working in and through His people. It holds me in the gift of a knowledge that I am in the endless stream of His love. It is that stream which fills me to overflowing. Once fully in that stream, we become a part of the flow, and the stream broadens and deepens as we carry God’s word and His touch into the world around us.
All that is in me now recognizes that God wants me filled to overflowing, not for a season, but for the whole of my life. It is my life.
It is where He wants us all to be, not as a particular gift, but as a normal and natural consequence of our faith and of our obedience to Him.
God’s gift to me is not so much that He has made me brim full, and still less that I have the feelings of peace and calm that accompany it; it is that He has enabled me to understand that such fullness and overflowing is what awaits all of us. It is merely the essential start-point for the next stage of our obedience to His will.

Jesus is looking straight at us, and He continues to say those same words, “Come, follow me.”
It is a rare occurrence for me, but I have need of company, of guidance and support.
Come,
let us walk together.

Saturday 6 June 2009

Breath of life


What is this Holy Spirit we hear about? Do we really know?

If we already regard ourselves as Christians, we surely carry an awareness with us all the time; we may speak of the Spirit among ourselves but do we, at any meaningful level, know the reality of which we speak? Do we have anything more than the often heard, the learned, the comfortable and assumed to be true hand-me-down stories of our childhood and those immensely influential years? They will undoubtedly have left us with memorable and cosy images of Jesus, but the Holy Spirit?

I am sure I am not alone in having spent forty years without any real sense of spiritual guidance, or comfort, or wonder, or gift in all that I heard or experienced; and that is with my life being built on a continuous and ever-present Christian upbringing and background. There was always a sense of receiving a gift in the bewilderingly beautiful and peace-bringing glory that was the natural world around me. In one way or another it has been my unquenchable source of excitement and joy throughout my life; but the Holy Spirit remained a lifeless part of what I sat through and heard about year after year.
Somewhere along the way, between the point at which I recognized a major change in my whole Spiritual life and a less discernible point somewhere in my more recent past, The Holy Spirit seemed to leap into life. Of course, it was my own awareness that had changed: it was me that leapt into life, and when I landed it was in a place without my accustomed barriers, and where the Spirit was given access to my heart and my mind, and more. Something deep within me was both consumed and impregnated by the Holy Spirit. Something which, if it could only express its feelings of interminable longing, and love, and peace, and joy, would also be enabled to kindle the flames of spiritual desire in others and thus burst into the realms of fulfilment. I can find no other word for it: it is my soul.
Soul: another word whose meaning sometimes seems to get lost among Christianity’s fluctuating and debilitating uncertainties. Such uncertainty should not exist, but however firmly we think we believe, we remain unsure about something. We are ‘believers’, but we doubt. We have faith, but not all the time. We know, but we question. What we lack is certainty; what we long for is certainty, but certainty is the one thing we cannot have. We can come closer to it than we may imagine possible through the realized and appreciated presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives, but the reality of that presence is as indefinable as the reality of that core of feeling, emotion and life –other life– that I speak of as my soul.

‘In Sacred Scripture the term "soul" often refers to human life or the entire human person. But "soul" also refers to the innermost aspect of man, that which is of greatest value in him, that by which he is most especially in God's image: "soul" signifies the spiritual principle in man. (Catechism of the Catholic Church. 363)

It is this personal inability to define the external power that would twin with our own equally indescribable centre of being that prevents any likelihood of certainty. We may experience a sense of something we call certainty, and it may seem long-lasting, but it will eventually waver and slip away. In the same way that there is only one truth, regardless of what we may believe to be the truth, certainty is not what it seems unless it is unshakeably certain. The only ‘truth’ which is true is The Truth. The only ‘certainty’ of which we can be certain is Certainty, and that is not granted to us. Faith would not be required if we were able to achieve and maintain absolute certainty, and it is faith that we are called to have. It is faith that will move mountains, and it is faith that enables prayers to be answered.

‘In truth I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt at all, ... even if you say to this mountain, “Be pulled up and thrown into the sea,” it will be done. And if you have faith, everything you ask for in prayer, you will receive.’ (Matthew 21:21-22).

How many of us can imagine having a faith equivalent to what we call certainty? A faith resulting in mountains actually moving as a result of our undoubted expectation that it will happen? And we are so sure that if this happened we would have our proof, and then we would have real faith! The reality is that it will never happen for us because we find that level of faith impossible; and faith must precede realization, just as realization always precedes proof. It is only a God given proof acquired through faith that will transcend the faith demanded of us.

‘Only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of realities that are unseen.’ (Hebrews 11:1).

My own near-certainty is perpetuated by my experience of being out in the elements; among mountains, yes, but also on far smaller hilltops; deep in forests, yes, but also in small patches of woodland; in the vastness of a treeless landscape, and in the seclusion of shadows beneath ancient trees. But I have been blessed with a faith that has leeched its way back from the drenching of this deeper solitude, to the simple quiet of a field of wheat, a cider orchard, a tumbled barn, the wheeling Buzzard, a country lane, skylarks, swifts, and the Barn Owl that ghosts above my smiling face as I watch it hunt with the setting sun two minutes from my home. And home itself, with its own life-giving qualities, is now impregnated with that same smile of growing conviction that God knows of my presence in this world, and that we are within reach of each other.
The warmth of the sunshine, the sound and the feel of the rain, the silence of snow, the crescendo of breathless wonder that is the thunderstorm; the bluest blue skies and the artistry of the ever changing clouds; all these I love, but what brings me to life, what links my childhood, my youth, my manhood and my gradually emerging spiritual maturity, is the movement of the air around me. It is not so much the touch as the broader awareness of its presence, highlighted for me by the sound of the wind, in the trees especially, but also across the grass or heather coated hills, and by the movement created by its passing. It lifts me to realms I find it impossible to access in any other way. I am transported – as recently stated – ‘with my breath and the wind sighing as one’.

What is this Holy Spirit we hear about? Do we really know?
It is the breath of God.
Whenever and wherever I hear the wind, I know that I am within His grasp and am being blown where God wills. But my nearest approach to certainty is that He is blowing right through me. He is the Spirit of Truth, and Truth is the only explanation I can offer for the production of so many joyful tears.

Open yourself to God’s universal gift: The Holy Spirit: the Spirit of Truth: the Breath of God.
Let it drive you forward to your destination; let it fill your sail and blow you to where your hidden gifts are to blossom and bear fruit. Let it guide you to the very edge of your faith, and beyond to the realization of God’s dream within you.
It is there, waiting for you.

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If you can hear the voice of Jesus ... “Come, follow me”,
your soul already knows what your answer needs to be;
just one word from the heart ...

“Yes”
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About Me

Who I am should be, and should remain, of little consequence to you. Who you are is what matters; who you are meant to be is what should matter most to you. In coming closer to my own true self, I have gradually been filled with the near inexpressible: I have simply become "brim full", and my words to you are drawn from those uttered within myself, as part of an undeniable overflowing that brings a smile to my every dusk, and to my every new dawn.
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

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