The Cartwheeling Priest

When God Tells You To Cartwheel, You Cartwheel.

Today I am sharing with you a short story I heard as I was scrolling the interwebs. I loved it because it was about one of the things I love the most: the mystical and miraculous shenanigans and delights of the Holy Spirit. Sometimes, now as I think on it, the Holy Spirit appears elvish (elfish?)… like an elf… whispy, whimsical…filled with wonder and awe.

And with big ears.

The story goes like this:

A priest decided his life was too predictable so he made a pact with the Holy Spirit of Spontaneity and promised that no matter what, when he felt called upon by the Spirit to act or told to do something, quite simply, he would do it.

The same priest finds himself at a gas station. As he is filling up the tank, he gets this wild impulse to do a cartwheel.

(Oh boy. When you tell old HS that you are willing… can you imagine the places you will be taken?)

What do you think that priest did?

He walked over to an appropriate spot and cartwheeled his heart out. Then he went back to filling the tank.

As he walked into the convenience store to pay, a woman approached him with tears in her eyes.

The priest, concerned, asked her what was wrong.

“Oh Father, I have been an atheist all my life and as I looked out at you I thought, ‘if there is a God, make that priest do a cartwheel.”

---

I kid you not. This really happened.

God knows what will get our attention. God knows what we cannot ignore (which is different for everyone.)

What if the priest settled for predictability? What if he hadn’t done the cartwheel?

If you’d been there, what would you have thought? That he was a nutter? That he was disgracing and making a mockery his vocation?

Here’s what I know. God put him and that woman there on that day for that reason; to open the door for this woman to His love, power, light, and truth…

by making a priest do a cartwheel at a gas station.

In a session with a client recently, I spoke of God and referred to God as “Him” to which I heard her quick (corrective) reply, “or her.” I wasn’t interested in a highjacking of the session through a theological game of chess (the enemy loves that - let’s distract everyone on the call with rules so Penny¹ won’t heal her heart from loss by knowing Who the Lover of her soul is) but did remind her that God was spirit and beyond gender². Our brains are so finite and as his precious creatures we struggle to grasp at just how profound this love and power is. You can’t box in the Holy Spirit.

Spirit speaks in cartwheels if necessary.

My husband and I are in some discernment. I often find when I am in states of change I start “receiving” songs upon awakening. It’s been like this since I was a child.

Are they hymns? So very rarely. Why? Because I’m a convert. I didn’t grow up in the church. I am still playing catch up with church hymns.

But as a musician and vocalist I do have a personal library in my brain.

Six years before I reunited with my husband I was in the throws of heartbreak - a hatchet of a heartbreak. For the first time in my life (a high percentage of my own doing) I woke up with physical pain in my chest near my heart. It was so bad that I wondered if I should get to the hospital. I was in the worst heartbreak pain of my life. I wanted to give up everything. I - the natural born cheerleader - had pom poms of wet spaghetti. Nothing to give. The pain lasted for weeks. The crying too.

But Spirit wouldn’t have that.

One morning I arose with the strangest and most random song in my head. It was “Lonely People”³ by America. Do you know it? Here are the lyrics:

This is for all the lonely people
Thinkin' that life has passed them by
Don't give up until you drink from the silver cup
And ride that highway in the sky

This is for all the single people
Thinkin' that love has left them dry
Don't give up until you drink from the silver cup
You never know until you try

Well, I'm on my way
Yes, I'm back to stay
Well, I'm on my way back home
(Hit it)

This is for all the lonely people
Thinkin' that life has passed them by
Don't give up until you drink from the silver cup
Never take you down or never give you up
Never know until you try

Holy Spirit, a person, is personal. This was my cartwheeling priest (though I didn’t quite know how much at the time.) I had to look up the lyrics.

Six years later, my single-hood would end in marriage to the one I met first but not before I moved back home to Texas and drank from the silver cup (the chalice) and converted. I also knew Spirit was encouraging me to never give up as long as I live. Also I felt in hindsight overtones of Jesus on his way, back to stay, on His way back home.

Would you have gotten that? Did the writers even mean that? It doesn’t matter because the Spirit was using whatever would speak to me at the time about things only Spirit could know about the past, present and future of my life.

Who cares if Spirit is a boy or girl. We are incapable of articulating because we are too small. Ever see Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull? Remember what happens to Cate Blanchett when she obtains all the knowledge of the universe? Not good. You don’t need to know everything. We need to know what God says we need to know at the time He deems we need to know it.

Back to cartwheels.

What was the very last thing God told you to do? Did you do it? Did you not do it?

There’s still time.

Because I think we can all agree now… someone’s life, someone’s joy and hope, may be depending upon it.

1. Name changed.

2. (CCC) #239 By calling God "Father", the language of faith indicates two main things: that God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children. God's parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood, which emphasizes God's immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature. The language of faith thus draws on the human experience of parents, who are in a way the first representatives of God for man. But this experience also tells us that human parents are fallible and can disfigure the face of fatherhood and motherhood. We ought therefore to recall that God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard: no one is father as God is Father.

3. Lonely People written by husband and wife team: Dan and Catherine Peek. Recorded by America.