Get on with it…

One year for Christmas my Dad gave my brother a book of scripts from a BBC radio program from the 1950’s called the Goon Show. The book sat on a shelf for a long time, so, I picked it up. My Dad saw me reading it and asked what I thought, I told him that it made no sense. He said, I guess you need to hear the voices.

Not long afterwards I noticed that CBC radio was playing old Good Show programs on Sunday afternoons. I tuned in and was hooked. For the most part the scripts were written by Spike Milligan. The most famous person from the cast was Peter Sellers (Pink Panther). Fans of Vision TV might know the third member, Harry Secombe of Songs of Praise.

Once and a while, Sellers and Secombe veered from Milligan’s script. I knew this because I became a collector of the scripts and sometimes tried to follow along. These adlibs were sometimes funny and they were usually caused because someone had botched a line. More than once, Spike Milligan could be heard to mutter, “get on with it.”

That’s how it is sometimes, with a journey in faith, we just want to get on with it. Sometimes in scripture and in our prayers we hear, “in the fullness of time.” It is an all too human way of saying, when God got on with it. One promise that God has gotten around to is to be present with us through the Holy Spirit. God’s Sprit was with God in the beginning of creation, with John at the baptism of Jesus, with the disciples in Jerusalem and with us in our lives today.

Not everything Milligan wrote was funny, or intended to be, some of it was profoundly true, like this line from a poem, “God made night / But man made darkness.” Just as a Goon Show script is difficult to fathom when it is out of context, so too scripture is brought to life by the Holy Spirit. “Get on with it,” is a prayer today for the Holy Spirit to do what she does best, opening our hearts and minds to the incarnate Word of God.