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.
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| 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
