The Spirit is Movin' (and so am I)

Last day in New York City. I'm here in my apartment alone, with everything packed, and all two pieces of my furniture sold. I was sitting in my empty room earlier and feeling a bit like I was a castaway on the moon. It is so quiet here, it seems as if I must have accidentally packed the whole neighbourhood, not just the books and sweaters and billions of tiny odds and ends, and they've all gone to sleep in my filched FreshDirect boxes. All I can hear is the growl and mutter of the cars on the BQE, and nobody is even honking. My street is never silent, so this is a twilight zone experience.

I am trying to take this weird quiet time to settle my heart and pull nearer to the Spirit. The low-grade good-natured panic of any big change has been tailing me this week, and I feel very tired and tweaky. I know that God is always speaking, and that somewhere in the cardboard and dust piles and goodbye beers there is a message and a lesson. I haven't been hearing it or responding to it on an emotional level - for all my listening and worshipping I have remained moody in the extreme: giddy, insecure, sad, worried, excited, and above all, full of self-doubt. I've been wracked with random fears that I will somehow mess up one or all of the good things that have been so generously heaped upon me. I am trying consciously, as often as I have to, (sometimes 30, 40, 300 times a day), to take my life and place it back in God's hands, up and above the reach of mine.

It seems to me these days, and it is a new discovery, that I don't have to bludgeon my emotions into submission before I'm free to "be good" or "be prayerful". I used to wonder how I could ever begin on my journey towards holiness or wholeness while my emotional life was such a mess. And so I spent much too much time monitoring what was happening in my emotional weather, and couldn't get started.

Today I've decided: let it howl. Let the internal tantrums and gloating and quailing and quaking and shuddering and singing happen. I'm not going to fight them. I'm just going to pray.

I know I am a quote monster, but here are two important readings that have been soothing to me in this struggle:


Be still and cool in thy own mind and spirit from thy own thoughts, and then thou wilt feel the principle of God to turn thy mind to the Lord God, whereby thou wilt receive his strength and power from whence life comes, to allay all tempests, against blusterings and storms. That is it which moulds up into patience, into innocency, into soberness, into stillness, into stayedness, into quietness, up to God, with his power.

~George Fox


How, then, shall we lay hold of that Life and Power, and live the life of prayer without ceasing? By quiet, persistent practice in turning all our being, day and night, in prayer and inward worship and surrender, towards Him who calls in the deeps of our souls. Mental habits of inward orientation must be established. An inner, secret turning to God can be made fairly steady, after weeks and months and years of practice and lapses and failures and returns. It is as simple an art as Brother Lawrence found it, but it may be long before we achieve any steadiness in the process. Begin now, as you read these words, as you sit in your chair, to offer your whole selves, utterly and in joyful abandon, in quiet, glad surrender to Him who is within. In secret ejaculations of praise, turn in humble wonder to the Light, faint though it may be. Keep contact with the outer world of sense and meanings. Here is no discipline in absent-mindedness. Walk and talk and work and laugh with your friends. But behind the scenes keep up the life of simple prayer and inward worship. Keep it up throughout the day. Let inward prayer be your last act before you fall asleep and the first act when you awake. And in time you will find, as did Brother Lawrence, that 'those who have the gale of the Holy Spirit go forward even in sleep'.

~Thomas R Kelly