R
rwillenborg
Guest
Thanks for your thoughts on this. I do appreciate it.Rwillenburg: I sympathize with your thought here, since I am not big on “feelings”, either. I do think that perhaps the language people use to describe thought and how we react to thought may play a part here.
Note that when the Holy Spirit came among the disciples at Pentecost (Acts) one of the signs was that they were able to speak in “tongues” (languages) to the crowd. The miracle is not an upswelling of emotion or feeling, but better communication to the foreigners in the crowd. Many NT references are in this vein, that the Holy Spirit facilitates understanding, speaking, communicating. The Spirit’s work doesn’t seem (to me, anyway) to be so much feeling (hair stands on end, shivers, butterflies in stomach), but more like the moments when you finally “get” something, like when you solve a math problem and realize: “Eureka! I see the solution!” Sometimes this happens quickly, or at odd moments, so people speak of “flashes of inspiration” or “sudden intuition”.
I’ll give an example from my own experience of how this thouhgt process can work. I was once at mass at a church near my home parish. It is a rather odd-shaped church with the altar directly in the middle of the sanctuary and with circular (actually four directions) seating all around. The presider was the regional bishop in my area (it was a special occassion) and he was in the middle of his homily. Because of the odd shape of the room, the bishop rotated as he talked, so that he could face the congregation and not have his back to one section of the room the whole time. The layout distracted me, and the impression I had was of a giant “lazy susan”, with the bishop rotating like a salt shaker on the edge. I admit I was plainly distracted by the room and its layout, and a thought stuck me: “Where is the crucifix?” There is no wall behind the altar for it to hang on, so I found it high up on the ceiling, hanging at an angle (it depends on where you sit) on a rafter. When I looked at the crucifx, however, I was suddenly struck (see, it sounds more dramatic to write this way) with a thought that faith is something we might be called to die for. More specifically, I had the thought that I, personally, could one day face such a choice, and that at the bottom of Christianity was this fact: martyrdom is a testament to the faith.
Please note, I am not claiming that the Holy Spirit was necessarily speaking to me at that point. What I wanted to illustrate is how my thought proceeded, and that the feelings and emotion followed. The incident was so striking that, even though it happened years ago I still think about it today. Intellectually, it was probably not the fist time I thought about martyrdom, but it might have been the first time I understood it as “Hey, this could mean me.”
