Electrical Storm By Pete Greig

Pete Greig, May 4th, 2009

"Let’s see the colours that have never been seen.

Let’s go places no one else has been…

Well if the sky can crack there must be some way back,

To love and only love.”

U2, Electrical Storm

"Standing on the spectacular cliffs of Cape St Vincent that night, I had no idea that my life was about to change.  We had pitched our little tent on the most south-westerly point of Europe, far from the lights of any city and beneath a canopy of unusually bright stars.

For days Nick and I had been travelling west along the coast of the Portuguese Algarve, among in the cliff tops looking out to sea and cooking fresh fish on an open fire.  By day we would hit the beaches, often leaving our backpacks on the sand to plunge into the sea.  Having recently graduated from university on London our futures stretched out before us like those long, straight, empty roads you see in photographs of Montana.  We were tanned and dirty, the sea had bleached our tousled hair and we were having the time of our lives.  After so many days of travelling with the ocean on our left it had been exciting to catch the first glimpse of sea to the right as well.  Gradually, over recent days, the land had tapered to the point where I was standing now, where a solitary lighthouse puts an exclamation mark on Europe, and the oceans collide in rage.

There is something absolute about Cape St Vincent, its lunar landscape, the ceaseless pounding of the waves against nature’s vast battlements and even the black ravens circling majestically below as you look out to sea.  Few things in life are so certain as these rocks.  It isn’t pretty, but it’s real with a menacing that everyone senses and perhaps no one can quite express.

People have always been drawn to this mysterious wasteland, which has been battered for thousands of years by the collision of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean seas.  Bronze age tribes buried their dead here and erected standing stones.  In AD 304, grieving monks brought the body of St Vincent the martyr here and, according to legend, ravens guarded his bones.  The place took on the martyrs name and became a place of Christian and Muslim pilgrimage for centuries to come.  The Romans quite simply thought it was the end of the world.  Here their maps ran out and their empire marches relentlessly into the endless sea.  It would be centuries before Europeans ‘discovered’ the Americas beyond the blue curve of that deadpan horizon.

But standing there that night I knew none of this history.  I only sensed something unfathomable sad and special about the place.  Nick and I had pitched our little green tent right there on the cliffs, laughing that we were to be the most south-westerly people in all of Europe for a night.  But, unable to sleep, I had climbed quietly out of the tent, leaving Nick gently snoring.  A breathtaking sight had greeted me: the vast, glowering ocean glimmering under a shimmering eternity of stars.  It was like being lost in the branches of some colossal Christmas tree.

To the south of me the next great landmass was Africa.  To the east it was America.  But I turned and with my back to the ocean imagined Europe, rolling away from my feet for 10,000 miles.  From where I stood, the continent began with a handful of rocks and a small green tent, but beyond that I could imagine Portugal and Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany eventually becoming Russia, China and the Indian sub-continent.

Visualising nation after nation I raised my hands and began to pray out loud for each one by name.  And that was when it happened.  First my scalp began to tingle, and an electric current pulsed down my spine, again and again, physically shaking my body.  Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, and it was years before the spiritual excitement associated with the Toronto Blessing would appear to plug millions into the mains.  I could hear a buzzing, clicking sound overhead, as if an electrical pylon was short-circuiting, and I seriously wondered if I was about to get fried.  As these strange sensations continues I received a vision.  My eyes were open, but I could ‘see’ with absolute clarity before me the different countries laid out like and atlas and from each one a faceless army of young people was rising out of the page, crowds of them in every nation awaiting orders.

I have no idea how long that vision lasted – it might have been a minute or as much as an hour – but eventually I climbed into my sleeping bag next to Nick, who was quietly snoring, and with my head still spinning, I drifted into a deep sleep.

My life would never be the same again.”

Extract taken from Red Moon Rising by Pete Greig.  Read the story of the genesis of the 24-7 Prayer movement and find out more about how 24-7 is coming back to our vision for Europe ten years after our birth.