I’ve just now returned home from a long and exciting and difficult trip, and I’m reminded of a passage I greatly love from this book which concerns transition:
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Colin Turnbull, in his marvellous accounting of the Mbuti peoples of Zaire, passes along to us their understanding of the dangers in transition. The Mbuti see the person as being in the center of a sphere. In moving from here to there, the sphere moves too and offers protection. If movement in time or space is too sudden or vehement, we risk the danger of reaching the boundaries of the sphere too quickly, before the center has time to catch up. When this happens, a person becomes wazi-wazi, or disoriented and unpredictable. If you pierce through the safe boundaries of the sphere into the other world, you risk letting in something else which takes your place. If the Mbuti know of and guard against such violent and sudden motion ~ and that without the experience of automobiles or jet planes ~ what do we, the so-called civilized people of the world, know of our transitions in space and time? I think we are a whole society in a state of wazi-wazi, beside ourselves, and possessed by imposter selves.
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I’d say I’m in a state of wazi-wazi right at the moment. I think I’ll go read the rest of the chapter while soaking in a hot tub.

I’ve had this book on my bookshelf for years, and I really love it, though I’d forgotten about it until recently. I got it down once again to read during Lent and Easter this year, and wrote about it a little bit under this goal.

Today I read the chapter on Pentecost, which is coming up soon, and so now I’ll put this book back up on the shelf for a while. Here is a short excerpt from that chapter, on “knowing the Spirit” (page 190):

The Spirit, elusive and “blowing where it will,” is not as unknown to us as we sometimes think. That we cannot confine and define its nature does not mean we do not know it. Curiously, we know and recognize the Spirit manifest in the light and liveliness, the creativity or energy, the wisdom or the reverence in the life of the other. For it is through others that the Spirit ministers to us. And it is we who can draw out the Spirit in the other. We know it less well in ourselves and squirm self-consciously when others mention our own creative Spirit. But the Spirit dwells in our hearts so that it can minister beyond itself, so it can “matter” in the life of another.”