Leashes and Magical Thinking

This week, my efforts to come up with an interpretive/metaphoric frame for my sermon kept frustrating me. It wasn't that my Tuesday morning scripture reading and meditations didn't yield anything. It's just that I didn't like the result. The operating metaphor that kept surfacing in my head to articulate the role of the Holy Spirit was...a leash.

A leash? Me no like! Controlling! Authoritarian! Annoying! But no matter what I did, I couldn't come up with anything else. It bugged me, nattered at me. I read, reviewed commentaries, and still...nothing but leash.

Gah.

During my morning meditation on Thursday, I thought to myself, you know, my daily readings in "The Diary of an Old Soul" (Mystic George MacDonald's book of spiritual poetry and conflict) have often proven oddly reflective of what a day is like. So, like a shaman reading entrails or casting the Ummim and Thummim, I flipped forward to the poem intended for today, Sunday the 23rd of May, to see if there was any language in the spiritual poem of the day that might..err...lead me away from the language of the leash. This is what I read:

Ever above my coldness and my doubt
Rises up something, reaching forth a hand;
This thing I know, but cannot understand.
Is it the God in me that rises out
Beyond my self, trailing it up with him,
Towards the spirit-home, the freedom-land,
Beyond my conscious ken, my near horizon's brim.

Sigh. So leash it was.