Crash Helmets

This is the passage I referenced in my sermon on Pentecost--crash helmets indeed (and here I go, trying to get more people to take pictures of our events!):

"Why do people in church seem like cheerful, brainless tourists on a packaged tour of the Absolute? … Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. 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 wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us to where we can never return.”

—Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), pp. 40-41.

Sometimes The Spirit Catches Me

Little mite,
Solid and serious presence
Big, brown eyes.
Daring me to deny her
the passion of the Spirit.

Sometimes the Spirit catches me
and I cry.
So, don't worry, it's just the Spirit.
Earnest face nodding, sisters gathered round,
It's true, it's true.

Five or six at the time.
A recent vision at fifteen--
With hand on jutted hip,
Jaw moving wildly around fruited gum.
Watching the boys, all basketballs and muscled arms.

It's true, it's true.
Slim fit jeans,
Adorning her sass.
Don't worry.
But I do.

Catch her, Spirit,
Do.