What Does the Holy Spirit 'Feel Like'?

That was the FB question I posted for the church today.

Remember, I am a literal thinker, so I really mean what happens within our bodies, minds and spirits when we believe we’re having a direct encounter with God’s own Spirit.

The best word that I have for such times in my own life is heavy.

‘Heavy’, again, in its literal sense.

Most modern-day writers who speak of the encounter with the divine identify a ‘spirit of heaviness’ as something connected to sin and the broken world.

But it’s not like that for me, this heaviness which I would not call a ‘spirit of’ at all.

I hear and read others speak of a lightness – either a lightness of being, of a sort of floating self, held aloft by the palm of God’s own hand, or of an all-pervading light.

For me, it is the reverse.

Image: Ute Kraus, Institute of Physics, Universität Hildesheim, Space Time Travel (http://www.spacetimetravel.org/).
Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Germany

When God comes knocking at the door of my soul, there is darkness and a great heaviness. . . the darkness being the presence of everything . . . the heaviness of heavy water and black holes, where everything collapses into not itself, but into God.

It is the in-between place outside of time and in between breaths.

It is a descending thing, as if I am sinking into God – every particle of me.

Physically as well as spiritually, it’s like I’m being trash-compacted into the smallest possible me there can be.

It’s neither danger nor safety.

Nothing of the external goes away and I may ‘leave’ this space any time I wish and I always come away ‘more than’ in some indefinable way.

What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; 

what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs.

–Matthew 10.27