Holiness, holiness is what we long for.
Holiness is what we need.
Holiness, holiness is what you want for us...

so I had an interesting experience the other day. I came home. Coming home is always an interesting experience but this one has raised some particularly intriguing questions. I hadn't been to church in a while due to travelling on Sundays and so I called up Becca Van Donk and asked her if I could come to her church. I knew her church is charismatic and moves in the healing/"presence of the Spirit" kind of circles. this is new to me. Not in the sense that I couldn't follow what was going on but in the sense that this is not the sort of way that I have experienced God. I've never spoken in tongues. I've never been healed in any way that is miraculous outside of the miracles of everyday life. Its not that I haven't wanted to be. I've made myself available to this sort of healing on a few occasions. I've tried to focus and concentrate and get out of the way enough for the Spirit to move through me. I've witnessed things happen, too. But I've just never quite been in the middle of the Spirit and the flesh, if that makes sense. I've never been the conduit for that sort of flow.

So going to this church service with my prophet brother (no seriously. he is a prophet. this stuff is kind of his deal.) was challenging. I knew it would be.

I was sitting there, drawing and writing and feeling very much a part and not a part of what was going on and the questions and images that kept running thorugh my head were all centering around the images of the first Nazarenes, these unintellectual, compassionate, passionate, camp-meeting types who would hang out with the down-and-outers in the cast-off parts of L.A., who refused to start their denomination until the poor Southerners could join them, who wrestled with the gift of tongues (why? probably because people were doing it), and who would not back away from a holy life.

is there some wisdom here for us? is there something for us to glean here, to remember about who we are? how do we remember? how do we allow this past to be a part of who we are? I'm flipping this around these days. I'm trying to find a way that we can know this to be true: that we are not only the descendants of a church that instituted the Eucharist and other sacraments and that serves with humility, compassion, and love. That we are also the descendants of the church in Acts, whose absurdity is an offense to me; we are the descendants of St. Francis of Assisi as much as we are the descendants of Dorothy Day, of John Wesley as much as Quakers and Shakers (we can't let Quakers' emphasis on silence distract us from their less-than-silent history).

I want to find where this nonsense that may be the greatest sense we know fits into the scheme of who we are as a church. How can we be gifted by the Spirit and not forget the Eucharist? How can we allow God to break through our liturgy (not destroying liturgy, but freeing us through liturgy) to a truly transformative life lived before the Lord in a spirit of thanksgiving and joy, of pouring ourselves out before God that we might be transformed and changed and that we might ultimately be brought to holiness for the glory of God.