Holy Spirit Stuff pt. 2


Abstract:
All through May I've talked to my congregation about the Holy Spirit. But the most important thing to learn about the Holy Spirit can't be taught with words.

Body:
It's about silence.

Silence isn't easy for me. It's much more tempting to try to tell people stuff. I am a preacher, after all. I've spent the last several years learning about how to tell people stuff. How to preach better, how to teach better, how to use words and gestures and rhetoric and context. But I've been learning silence. Slowly.

It sounds very mystical and stuff, but it isn't, really. It's very practical. It has to do with blood pressure and chilling out. It has to do with perspective. Sometimes I learn silence when the Universe seems to tell me loudly and clearly to shut up and listen, like when someone tells me they have been thinking about killing themselves. Other times it is more of a whispered invitation, like seeing a sunrise slowly burn away morning fog. Sometimes I simply look at my calendar and have no idea how I'm supposed to get all this stuff done and still have time for the important things, and I have a choice between stress or quiet. One way or another I am driven to silence.

When I was in Bolivia, I had my words taken away from me. I could still speak, of course, but not in my native tongue. We all leaned on our interpreters to make sense of our environment. I felt helpless. I began to see my words from a new perspective. As odd as it felt, I hunger for that experience again.

We are made out of words. Nearly all our speech is metaphorical, and so much of what we consider "real" is constructed from language. Our world is built out of human words, frail little things, more like toothpicks and glue than bricks and mortar. And we intuit a deeper, more profound Word, some sort of Universal Grammar, that we want to hear and speak and know.

But before you can speak it
you have to hear it.

And in order to hear it
you have
to
be

quiet



Posted: Tue - May 31, 2005 at 09:08 AM           |

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