Fire?

One of my favorite songs is called “Empty Me”. It’s a fairly simple song, and it goes as such:

Holy fire, burn away
My desire of anything
that is not of you and is of me
I want more of you and less of me, yeah....

Empty me, empty me, yeah
Fill, won't you fill me
With you and less of me, yeah

Succinctly simple. I’ll often listen to this song in the morning to just help get in the state of mind/heart that I want to be in to pray. I’ve come to realize in the last year that I often bend toward viewing the physical world is as a metaphor for spiritual things. This comes from discovering that I naturally tend to have this drive to find connections with things and form mental associations. It’s cool, but sometimes exhausting. But anyway, this part about me, I’ve found, very hugely translates over into my spiritual life.

I’ve been thinking the last couple of days about this “holy fire” thing. This metaphor is found absolutely everywhere in scripture nearly from beginning to end. Funny how things common like that become so rote and trite often unless we choose or are prompted to more closely examine what they really mean....it’s been coming to mind a lot:

Fire is beautiful. And powerful. And painful. All of these things. What more is “Holy fire”? And why is it that metaphysical pain sometimes hurts so much more than physical?