YeKengalé

Undoubtedly one of the most refreshing publications to come across my path recently is Church on Fire: Australian commentary on renewal and revival, an anthology edited by Geoff Waugh. Indeed, my Christian walk owed its beginnings to a similar publication, Like a mighty wind – a first-hand account of the Indonesian Christian revival by Mel Tari, equally replete with astounding miracles and stories of profound, life-transforming, destiny shaping, simply amazing and wonderful experiences of men, women and children caught up in the outpouring of the Holy  Spirit in Indonesia.

In fact, my entire life since 11 years old, can be summed up in a singular search for such a God-encounter in the space of my island home-Jamaica. It was never enough for me, once my imagination was lit with the God possibilities within a culture, to be satisfied without exploring fully such possibilities within my own context. Those who have read my own life accounts in Natural Mystic will detect distinctly that yearning and expectation.

All my life efforts and decisions  … my entire life focus, replete with mistakes, failings, missed opportunities, besetting faults and all, have all been invested in pursuit of this one outcome  – the maximum experience of the Presence of God my culture and generation can contain.

One hopefully can find it possible to pardon me, as I have had to pardon myself, if and when I have appeared to be jaded, cynical, or judgmental, because the fact is, I have come to recognize the thought forms, habits and lifeways that stand as an obstacle to the breaking forth of this kind of experience. And I do ask the pardon of those to whom I have appeared to be disdainful, or high minded or self-righteous, or hypocritical, for the truth is, whenever heaven makes its way down to earth, it is truly not by might, nor by power, but by the Spirit of grace only.

And pardon me  also for not being able to avoid a clear minded assessment that what some folk consider religious revival has come to mean next to nothing to me today. If revival means churches filling up with new converts to Christianity, if it means an explosion of deep personal piety within a populace, as good and as needed as both such experiences are within our culture, neither former nor latter will presently satisfy my hunger and thirst for the God presence I anticipate as Justice flowing down like a mighty stream in Jamaica and flooding throughout the Caribbean region.

A little more than 100 years before I was born, there was such a moment in Jamaican history, in fact two…. within two consecutive years. And yes, there were outbreaks of the supernatural in normative human experience, and churches filling up with new converts, and religious fervor and zest invigorating Christian churches island-wide, with everybody deeply delving into learning and practicing Christian doctrine and seeking to pattern Christian behavior as interpreted from pulpits throughout the country.

Should such a thing occur again, as much as I have come to love the Divine Presence, if all that men can conceive that divine presence capable of is the  reform of bad  personal habits, attitudes and behaviors with respect to a very narrow spectrum of lower order social and personal contexts: i.e. those for whom Christianity means no club, no bar, no smoke, no sex outside of marriage, no steal, no lie, no tantrums etc.   (by whatever process the mandate of heaven came to be so foolishly defined, yet the truly weightier  issues of justice, truth and love be ignored and apparently less important, for a long time now I have considered such kinds of  ‘revivals’, for all their temporary benefits, a complete waste of time.

Even outbreaks of the miraculous, as amazing and culture-shifting as they are, can also become in the end insipid, man-centered, personality-driven, and ultimately  a waste of time.

Consider the futility of the Jamaican grounded spiritual outpourings of 1860 and 61. Recognize that by 1865, only four  years later, these same professing Christians, white and black, were butchering and burning  each other in the streets in one of the most bloody conflagrations of violence Jamaica has ever known. (The Morant Bay War) The kind of Christianity that is concerned with personal piety but not with social justice has absolutely no appeal for me.

If all the Christian God can do is heal the sick, and cure bad habits, not only am I unimpressed,  but at this stage, uninterested. However,  if the Maker of heaven and earth who put mankind in a garden of delight in the beginning can restore him to that glory in the here and now, that is my hope …  still…. and my expectation…. and towards that hope and expectation, I sincerely extend to all who read this, an invitation to hope with me and to expect such a divine intervention…. And may it begin this year.

For all willing to share that hope, I commend the highlighted publications, in the hope that they will inspire, and strengthen our common thirst to experience a God not only willing, but able to manifest himself in our time in ways bright, brilliant and glorious enough to confound our understanding, to destroy our cultural delusion…. our addiction to crime, our cult of control, our false belief in what we call material reality (the work of our hands and product of our imaginations), and our blindness to the Kingdom of God made manifest in the life of Jesus Christ.

Spend the time.  Download and read:

Church on Fire: Australian commentary on renewal and revival

Like a mighty wind

Natural Mystic