Burn

As I type this, the sound of a “cozy holiday fireplace” is burning on my TV. The miracle of YouTube is providing an appropriate soundtrack to my contemplative mood. Amidst the faux sputtering and crackling of a yuletide log in an electronic fire, I’m pondering a recent conversation with one of my best friends. 

He said to me in a text: “Coincidentally, I had what one might call a spiritual experience this weekend… watched a bonfire burn with a couple hundred people.” What my friend Sam* describes as a “spiritual experience” is curious to me. As a follower of Jesus, one in whom “God’s Spirit dwells” (1 Corinthians 3:16), I have a certain framework for what constitutes a “spiritual experience.” And yet, Sam is not a believer in God, God’s Holy Spirit, or any part of the Triune God for that matter. 

I pressed in, warmed my hands by the fire of our friendship, and listened to his story. I wanted to know what this meant for him and how God’s Spirit inside me might prompt me to respond.

The experience Sam described is called a “burn,” and he taught me about this cultural phenomenon I’d never heard about. Like the popular music festival Burning Man, a “burn” is a gathering of individuals organized and run mostly by volunteers to foster art, community, costumes, and music. My friend described it as a “do-whatever-you-want for a weekend” sort of thing, even if that “whatever” included recreational drugs or other hedonistic moments of revelry.

But this isn’t a blog post about judgment. This is about curiosity and how Christ can use ordinary conversations about anything to point others to Himself.

Quite suddenly, I found myself with an entry point for the gospel in a conversation about connecting with others beside the fire. There was a way for me to talk about God in response to his stories of people at the burn holding each other’s sorrows and joys, revisiting old traumas, and feeling a mutual appreciation for the human experience. 

Sam loves people but in a detached way. His existentialist worldview leads him to believe that people make their own meaning and that his sole purpose in life is to find joy through connecting with others by any means necessary, regardless of ethical or moral implications.

I do not consider myself a strong evangelist by any means, but the Lord has equipped each of His saints to have the capacity to discern, to notice, and to press in with the help of the Holy Spirit. That word, connection, sent a million thoughts running through my head. Of course! Christianity is all about connection and relationship! It’s about God restoring His relationship to His creation: us. It’s also about healing relationships between humans that sin has devastatingly wounded.

I shared with Sam that being in nature, with others, can unlock some really special things, I think, because there’s far less to distract us.

So, I told him he was right. I have met unbelievers who were shocked at the declaration of a Christian that anyone else besides themselves could be right about things; it’s sad but true. I mentioned this famous quote by C.S. Lewis to Sam:

“If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” 

In the context of Sam’s experience at the burn, I see an effort to turn towards things that feel transcendent in light of a material world that so often lacks true satisfaction. We seek something deeper and more meaningful and are willing to burn the rest away. 

And we find glimpses of what we are searching for in other people. 

Why are we so DRAWN to each other? Like magnets. And not just for pleasure. But for pain. For humanity. Something beyond just empathy because empathy is draining. There’s something more there that we perceive if we’re lucky and if we slow down.

Romans 1:19-20 talks about it this way: “What can be known about God is evident among them (humanity) because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse.”

It’s a lovely pairing with the heart of why people are created in the first place: Genesis 1:27 explains that every person has a reflection of God’s glory embedded in them, “So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” That very interconnected image in each of us is like God’s calling card, His signature, and the thing that, once we see it, we cannot unsee.

I think this is the spark of light in our lives that everyone is drawn to because we seek deeper and deeper relationships. “Deep calls to deep,” the poets of scripture said. Whether a moth attracted to the flame or someone drawn close to the fire for warmth, we see that thing. And we want a piece of it because it’s familiar and seems sacred and holy. Like maybe we could begin to figure out why we’re all here and make out the face of our Creator.

It was getting late, and our conversation ended on a good note.

Now, I sit at the foot of my YouTube fireplace, thinking about Christmas, come and gone, and the cold winter months ahead. Thinking about the Light of the World and God’s promise to purge the world of sin through fire. None of that sounds morbid to me. In fact, for my friend’s sake, I hope that it’s all true. That there is salvation in Christ, that the Holy Spirit is like a flame and can direct even a simple conversation toward eternal outcomes. That everything in this world could burn to nothing, and I would still have Jesus next to me in the ashes.

And hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (Romans 5:5)

*My friend’s name has been changed for privacy purposes