A dear friend pointed out to me the wonderful content here. It's a story of discernment, honesty, and the Spirit's movement. It's a familiar story to me as an Episcopalian, but his telling of it is so fresh, in part because of how fresh it is for him, and because of his background. And, really, what makes this story sing out is the that somehow the Spirit is involved there.
How do we recognize the movements of the Spirit? I think that's one hell of a question, and maybe the question that most stumps us in the modern era, but on some level, it's the only one that matters to us. In the old days, you could roll out the urim and thummim to see where the Spirit was moving. Or turn the tea leaves upside down. These days, my rough impression is that only church nerds talk about discernment, about recognizing the Spirit's movement, in personal life. And in our post-modern era, almost everyone is reticent to talk about the Spirit's movement in creation or history--if those are actually different things--because it sounds prideful at best and Third Reich-ish at worst. When we do say "the Spirit was active there," we try to do it only when it seems uncontroversial or unchallenging of the status quo. It's all well and good to claim that MLK was a prophet, speaking with the Spirit, after he's dead. I've always thought that one of the reasons people struggle with liberation theology is because it claims to recognize the Spirit at work, and in the post-modern (and modern) era, we just "aren't supposed to say that."
Is the movement of the Spirit recognizable along the lines of the now-traditional definition of pornography--"I know it when I see it"? Although I find that a highly unsatisfying definition for a dozen reasons, I can't help but think that it's at least partly true. Before I can make a guess about what the Spirit is up to, I have to see what I'm evaluating. I can't just hear about it.
It's like Lolita: if you've heard about it, it might be hard to differentiate it from pornography. But if you've read it, the powerful penultimate closing image of HH standing on a mountain, hearing the tragedy that is the lack of a child's voice, you're much less likely to confuse Lolita with pornography. Seeing is a prerequisite to discernment.
That's not to say that some people might have different readings of the book. Seeing is most emphatically not believing. Not all who saw Jesus, in person or in resurrected person, believed. The gospels are careful to say that.
But it seems to me that the first step in discerning the Spirit is seeing, experiencing, being involved, encountering, beginning a relationship. Discernment walks a fine line between saying "we" and "you," without giving up either. Otherwise, it's just garden-variety judgment, and we know how well that comes off in the gospels.
