Holy Beast

I’m tracking a Holy Beast. His footprints and trail are everywhere around me. It’s not so much that He is hiding from me as it is that He is hidden FOR me. In sublime moments here and there I thought we were completely intersected, but He slipped away or more accurately put, I assumed discovery while He sighed, “That’s the porch. I’m in the Great Room”.

For three decades I’ve read two passages of mystery, “Now when they heard this, they were pierced (violently stung) to the heart, and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, ‘Brethren, what shall we do?’” (Acts 2:37) and, “While Peter was still speaking these words, the Holy Spirit fell (affectionately seized with a violently grasping embrace) upon all those who were listening to the message…and all…the believers…who had come with Peter were amazed, because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out…”(Acts 10:44, 45). In these brilliant word pictures I see that Peter, most likely unwittingly, is unlocking the Kingdom of Heaven and Something, quantitative AND qualitative drops with an unmistakable thump and entire gatherings of people are blessedly attacked and desire no escape.

The truest essence of the language in these passages is that these people were seized, grasped, taken hold of, clutched and clasped and, while it was an affectionate seizure, it was with more or less violence than we might like to think. It was seminal, determining, generative, axiomatic, a point of origin, a fountainhead, a wellspring, a dictum and a command catalyst.

Western sensibilities long to tame this Holy Beast. Like a circus lion, we want it to play with the tamer, roar only on command and send me home with giddy arrogance. It offends our rational democratic pleasure of always wanting to take our time, consider the options, and come back later, after we’ve played the intellectual, to cast a vote against it. Yet, I’ve come to believe that He is eager to write a new book, “How the West Was Won; Again”.

I’m serious about this. There are Keys of the Kingdom for the unlocking of this undomesticated God and if Peter could stumble his way into their usefulness, then I refuse to be denied. In her book, “Teaching a Stone to Talk” Anne Dillard describes my heart perfectly, “Why do we people in churches seem like cheerful brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may awake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.” She quotes an Hasidic rabbi as refusing to visit a friend the next day by explaining, “How can you ask me to make such a promise? This evening I must pray, ‘Hear O Israel.’ When I say these words, my soul goes out to the utmost rim of life’”.

We are all beckoned to that utmost rim of life, but IN CHRIST, to return with the Hurricane Breath of God to unleash an irresistible Word. I’ve just participated in burying one too many young lives to believe that God does not have an irresistible Answer. Pardon me, but I just heard a Roar just a few meters from where I’m sitting….you can stay where its safe if you’d like, but I’m on my way to be delightfully devoured by a Holy Beast Who longs to be found.