Reflection: Inspiration

Sacred Text: "Be Your Note"

I have this habit of getting a bit grumpy, that I can feel distant from God too often. After a long day of working with data, I schlep home and feel tired. The spirit is not there, I am un-inspired.

The theme for tonight, was imagination, until I accidentally wrote a reflection about inspiration. Now tonight’s theme is inspiration. Breaking apart words can give shades of their meaning. Inspiration comes from the Latin word “to breathe”, and spiritus is the same word for breath as for spirit. Similarly in Hebrew, ruach. Thus the passage at the beginning of Genesis can be read “The spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters, or the breath of God, or the wind of God was moving of the face of the waters.”

This is why I love the Rumi poem: it has such vivid imagery of the spirit, the breath of God blowing through us.

I like the metaphor that God’s inspiration brings us alive. “God picks up the reed-flute world and blows”.

There’s mutuality in the metaphor: the flute/ the world makes no sound unless God blows through and resonates, setting us alive with sound. But so too for God: without us, the breath of God can blow this way and that and yet make no sound.

Rumi’s metaphor also points to a deeper truth about God. Many understandings of God seem to locate God outside of creation, as though God were watching the play that is humanity, and dipping in now and again to intervene in the plot. There are certainly voices in the Bible that promote this, but this vision of God is inadequate for me.

I need to be reminded of God’s mystical presence in the world: that the world is inspired by God. The presence of God is very much here—if I stop, if I look, if I listen, listen for the symphony—or is it cacophony—around me.

And if God is the breath that makes my note, then it is not a God that forces rules on me (do this/don’t do that) from afar: rather, the way I should live is a question about how I should be “be my note”, how to be the kind of person, the kind of community filled with the spirit of God. How to capture the breath of God and turn it into beautiful music.

Prayer is too is no longer begging someone— God— to intervene and fix things (Through who wouldn’t want that, it just doesn’t seem to happen). This Rumi helps me to think of prayer as getting in tune with God. In prayer, I come close to the spirit, bringing my needs to God, listening for God’s response. I try to let the breath of God keep flowing through me, “not trying to end it”.

And so, go up on the roof at night, go out into your yards or onto the streets. Sing your note, attend to the beauty of God flowing through you. Honor that spirit. Be your note, and God will show you how it is enough. And then listen to the singing around, the wonderful harmony of God setting each of us alive.

Amen.