Communion Of The Faints

What. What in the heck is going on, I wonder, when the people in the church—my former church—begin dropping like flies doused with a good strong squirt of bug killer. Slain. Slain in the spirit, I’m told. Or crying. Balling their eyes out in their chairs there. One. Two. Ten. What. What in the heck is going on, I wonder, when my niece answers me by saying that her father is in his study praying, rolling around on the floor. A perfectly reasonable and rational man. Rolling about in a vision of something or another. Involving Jesus, I learn later. What. What in the heck is going on, I wonder, when as I’m listening to U2’s How To Dismantle An Atomic Bomb, Jesus sits down next to me to listen also. Or someone I take to be Jesus. He may be someone else dressed in Mid East robes. Some other spirit being. Some other God being. This is in my family room, mind you. In my house. In this world. This world that surrounds us right here with things and people we can touch and taste and hear and see. In the actual, knock-on-Formica material world.

Oh, please. Pulleaze. I’m thinking. Pulleaze God, clarify. But of course I might as well be. Oh, I don’t know. Speaking gibberish. For all the good it does. Babbling like a brook for all the response he makes.

Then yesterday some woman I barely know but normal. And what I mean by normal is just like any other middle aged woman you might meet anywhere. Her mind on children and whatever else middle aged women occupy their minds with. I actually have no idea. A woman who gets up in church, on the invitation of the pastor, and tells about how her husband and she are walking on a track down to Iowa City with a lot of other people with nothing better to do, and a man goes down in front of her onto his hands an knees, his chest heaving like an accordion in a polka band. And she goes up to him and an inner sense comes to her and says, Just pray over him. Go ahead. Real gentle. Go ahead and pray for the poor guy, who seems to be having a lot of trouble breathing. Who then collapses face down on the track. And the woman puts her hand on him and asks out loud for God: Help him breathe. God help this man to breathe. And then he stops breathing and lays real still. Totally still like the world’s just completely stopped for him. And so now she thinks, Oh boy. I’ve done it now, haven’t I. But then it’s very odd. Then it’s like some invisible giant picks him up by the belt. Stands him right up. And he’s fine. He’s just as good as new. Breathing normally and everything with the crowd that has assembled by this time standing all around. The track-walking crowd. The man saying, What are you doing standing around me like this? What’s the matter? I’m fine. I’m completely fine. What’s happened here? I feel fine.

Or what about the woman who tells about her son who has been in an auto accident and whose head has been really given a good whack and who the doctor thinks won’t maybe pull through the operation he’s about to do. A woman who isn’t particularly churchy or anything. A woman who hardly has ever gone to church at all. Who puts her hands on her son’s head and says to God silently, Oh please heal my son. And feels. It’s quite odd. A feeling she’s never had before. Who feels something go out of her and into her son. And then she tells the doctor not to worry. Really there’s no problem at all. He’s going to be okay, she says. Really. You shouldn’t worry. And she has no idea why. And of course she’s right. Her boy is fine. Her boy is healed.

And this goes on and on. The experiences go on and on. The feeling when I worship of a cat. A lion, really is what I’m thinking as I stand here singing to God. A big lion walking all about, rubbing itself against me, making my skin tingle. The back of my knees weak and my neck and back and the arms and legs tingle like somebody’s sort of tickling them, some huge great beast that isn’t exactly safe but that I can trust to be good. I think. But that rubs up against me regardless. Whatever it is that I might think at the time.

And the sense when one prays and when one experiences these things that one is connecting. That isn’t right. One is becoming. Maybe. One is entering some new kind of place. Is being transported out of one’s literal life and into a figurative, other-worldly place that is here. Right here. Right inside or along side the literal world. A place we all inhabit also. One foot in the one world and the other in the other, so to say. Straddling the literal and the figurative, the temporal and the eternal, the dangerous and the gentle, the alone and the together all at once. Like here is the left and here is the right. Like here is the dark and here is the light. Like here is the traffic noise and here is the sound of a flute playing somewhere off in the woods. Like here is lust and here is love. Here is the beach, and here is the sea. Well. A sort of sea. A sort of communion sea, maybe. Where we all are wading or swimming. Going deeper. Some of us. Going out deeper and deeper. Wherever this is.