John 14 • Pentecost
Dear Community of Christians,
Today is the Pentecost, the fiftieth day after Easter, Whitsun! This year, we are more in sync than we ever have been with the circle of the disciples who had to experience the loss of “life as they knew it,” and go and wait, and pray, and try to remain connected with their fellow human beings as best they could without the presence of He who called them, united them and given them purpose. Watching and waiting. the community of Christ, holding their breaths. What should come next?
At this Fiftieth Day, their longing and their waiting and their praying was answered with the descent of the Holy Spirit, who brought them understanding, who transformed their deep inwardness into a readiness to go out into all the world and become Apostles and share the message of the death and resurrection of Christ, of His Ascension to embrace the whole world, and His now sending of the Spirit. The Christian religion began on that day.
Still, many hundreds of years later, it seems as though we are just still at the beginning. One of the most difficult festivals to understand is the Pentecost. Most people today do not even know what it is—and the only outer images we have for it in traditional art—where one can often gain much insight through the artist’s inspired depiction—really all we see there are the Disciples gathered, and tongues of flame appearing above their heads. Sometime there is a dove above them, just as is depicted at the baptism of Jesus in the river Jordan, when the Holy Spirit descends into Jesus, and He becomes the Christ.
Who is this Spirit, who is so often if depicted, as a dove, a graceful bird of the air? But who comes on the wings of a great and holy wind?
In the languages of the Bible, there is no distinct term for the Spirit; rather the idea is expressed metaphorically using the word for wind and breath. In Hebrew—RUAH, and in Greek—PNEUMA. Our word in English, spirit, comes from the Latin word for breath—SPIRITUS. This great breath within the world we call wind: wind is a great force of nature. And how wonderful that the wind suddenly picked up last night as the evening turned from Ascension to Pentecost, continuing today, as the wind whooshed through the leaves of the trees. Wind can completely be an unstoppable, uncontrollable force of change—as with a tornado or a great storm. But it can be harnessed also to fill a sail and propel a boat forward; it spreads the seedpods of a tree across many miles, carrying the pollen of the flowers, and gives the birds of the air currents to fly upon, and even, in its most delicate form—as the breath—it keeps us alive, and the trees alive, as well as all living beings—and in relationship with the world around us. We can recall the very beginning of the human being on earth:
Then the Lord God formed the human being of dust from the ground, and breathed into ADAM’s nostrils the breath of life, and ADAM became a living being. (Genesis 2:7)
Breath is the primal essence, even more so than water, which keeps us alive. This is also to say then, oozing to this passage of our very creation, that the breath and the Spirit of God are the very same thing. So is this to say that without the Spirit, we also would not live, as we cannot live without breath? For many seem to live on earth in a kind of spiritlessness… or do they? This is perhaps part of the mystery of our freedom—that we can appear to be able to live cut off from all spiritual reality—at least as far as we know, as far as we are conscious of. In truth however, we cannot live without the Spirit. Why? Because there is much in our own being which is carried and supported by the spirit. Where do we go when we sleep? We are having a spiritual experience. Who is carrying the functions of our most holy vessel: the human body, but spiritual beings greater than us? Where do our thoughts arise from? Our good ideas? Our bad ones? And how does healing truly work in the human being? Prayer to the Spirit has been shown to have a decisive effect, an increase in our healing. There is still so much, even with our great scientific achievements, that we do not know about the mystery of the human being. One thing we do know for sure: we have not reached our enlightenment—we are not yet fully permeated by the light of the Spirit, by the all-encompassing consciousness that knows the fullness of truth. This is the task of the Spirit, as we find it described in the Act of Consecration of Man: that the Spirit God enlighten us…we pray—and not only once, but eight times throughout the service.
The very constitution of the human being is made to be developed in the direction of this enlightenment. Breathing in and out are the ground of our existence. This breathing in and out is our foundational relationship with the world around us. From the world of spirit, all the way down through our relationship with other human beings, and to the realm of the pants and the earth, this breathing out and in is what gives us life and sustenance.
This great crisis of an illness which manifests itself in large part in a breathlessness, is this not also expressing that the human being, as we live more and more materialistically, is running out of breath? AS we live more and more selfishly is running out of breath, as we live more and more in disregard of the health of the earthly realm is running out of breath. And we have to note the amazing response to the coronavirus, whatever else we may think of it, this amazing response of shutting down the world, has been to create a kind of “breath-therapy,” by slowing down all our manic doing, all our manic consumption of the earth, all our incredible over the top busyness, and reestablishing breath. People forced to stay home, given the opportunity of resetting the breathing one usually has with the great wide world. And allowing us to rise to a questioning what kind of breathing our life before the coronavirus allowed among people, between people and the earthly world, between ourselves and that which is most important and essential to us.
In reality, we have been gradually suffocating ourselves for years. It is time to learn to breathe anew. Can the Spirit be brought into the center of our considerations as we recreate the world to be more truly human, to breathe in harmony with our fellow human beings and with the Creation—to recognize the Holy Spirit in all beings?
Pentecost is an essential festival to challenge and inspire us to become increasingly conscious of the breath of the Spirit. To understand what Spirit is, how it lives in us, and how it could live in us all the more, to help us to become truly and fully human.
In our Creed, we hear of two aspects that can also lead us to an experience that the Holy Spirit is transformed…becoming the Healing Spirit. Before Christ, the Holy Spirit still worked with humanity by ‘overshadowing’ us…as in, working into human destiny through the Unconscious, through the Will, creating destiny through the process of reproduction. We hear in the Creed the great final acting of the Holy Spirit in this way described:
The birth of Jesus upon Earth is a working of the Holy Spirit, who, to heal spiritually the sickness of sin within the bodily nature of mankind, prepared the son of Mary to be the vehicle of the Christ.
The Holy Spirit aided humanity by working from outside into the most intimate depths. But something changes through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Christ, for later we hear, speaking of the Christ:
Through Him can the Healing Spirit work.
Humanity now has access to the working of the Healing Spirit—we now, through Christ, have access to healing in a new, deeper way. Christ can bring a renewed breath into the center of the human being. We can become co-creators of healing, for ourselves and others. It is up to us to change our lives so that we can facilitate this new healing that is possible. It is up to us to come to know CHRIST IN US, and through this to breathe out an awareness of Christ in the Other, that through Him in US, we can make a new relationship to the world through which the Healing Spirit may work.
Yes, so be it.