Wednesday 1 June 2011

Other Spirits

Having just published the notes on Tom Wright (working to hold on to a quiet orthodoxy), I feel I ought to be frank about something that doesn't fit - a spiritual experience of a rare intensity. Over the weekend, I felt the rush of a manic energy that overtook my thoughts, my actions and my prayers. I wrote and created pictures under a kind of compulsion. These were things that had to be made; something was communicable in the works but the life of them was strange to me.

At about 1 in the morning, I found myself walking up and down, alternating between free association, words of praise and pleading, senses deranged by God. The whole of me was in it - gestures finding the shape of ritual, the feet marking out another kind of time on the floor, all awash in the electrochemical flood. I was no longer afraid of heresy, of pagan traces, of the intrusion of other spirits. There was an open door in my skull.

This necessary madness makes for a curious turn in the story; a weird and lovely bloom will have its life now. It's hard to know what to make of it. There's nothing demonic discernible. However, it isn't Christian as I would ordinarily understand it. Before all this I was giving out a lot of chatter about the unruliness of God, of his wildness and unmanageability. Maybe this is the line to follow. Best steer clear of the vudutronics.

What I know is that things will change; I am becoming something other than I was. Let this becoming be for Christ a growing stem, a bright branch of flame, an undoing.

Amen. Allelueia.

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