If God Filled You Up, It Might Feel Like This

I’ve written before about the work of Andrew McNabb.  Andrew and I are friends, and we’ve shared our hearts–on Facebook and in person.  Once, when I was in Portland, Maine on business, Andrew and I sat and chatted in a coffee shop near his home.  And in December 2010, I wrote about my sheer delight with the stories in The Body of This, McNabb’s first published work.

Now, Divine Providence Press has released a combination text, Eight Days & Virtue.  Sort of a two-fer, the book includes Virtue, a long narrative poem, and 8 Days, a deeply personal spiritual memoir.

I appreciate good writing, the thoughtful turn of a phrase; and McNabb is a master at cramming a lot of meaning into just a few words.  Eight Days, though, was startling to read.  It describes McNabb’s personal experience of the Holy Spirit, over a period of eight days in 2011.

So what would it feel like if God were to visit you, to inhabit your body, smothering you with his grace, immersing you in his expansive love?  Maybe it would feel like this:

“…And then, at the very moment I typed the word that would complete the book, the Holy Spirit entered my body–my living soul–without warning and with such merciful fury that I was knocked to the ground in a fit of ecstasy.  Wind, so strong, so powerful, blew through me, completely and utterly hollowing me out.”  

I regret that I can’t confirm this phenomenon from personal experience–but if God were to make himself at home in my heart, I imagine that it would be a lot like this.

Andrew adds:

“Over these eight days, in addition to direct ecstatic union with the individual members of the Blessed Trinity, I was given key spiritual insights and illuminations, and was witness to awe-inspiring divine manipulations of both nature and humanity…(but) perhaps most disturbingly, in addition to all the good, I was also given an awareness of the real presence of evil-and even interaction with it.”

It’s not uncommon to read such other-worldly accounts in the lives of medieval saints; but today?  Here in America?  It’s a story to leave you breathless.

You’ll love reading Eight Days & Virtue by Andrew McNabb.