Come, Holy Spirit
A Pentecost Meditation
“To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”[1]
The Feast of Pentecost celebrates the gift of the Spirit that is given to each of us. Jesus promised his disciples that when his part in the work of salvation was finished, he would be present with them in a new way and empower them to continue his work through the gift of the Spirit. We are all gifted by the Spirit, in different ways, to participate in God’s project of renewing the world.
How do we experience the Spirit in our lives? It can be a difficult thing to describe. We hesitate to talk about it for fear that others will not understand us, or think we are out of our minds – which is how some people responded to the disciples when they experienced the Spirit on the Day of Pentecost! They sneered at them and accused them of being drunk! But others were amazed and perplexed by the Spirit’s power. That is how it feels when the Spirit is at work in us.
I struggle to put language around my own experience. I can say that I don’t have any control over the Spirit’s movement. There are things that I do that seem to make me more open and available to the Spirit’s work in my life, but the Spirit blows where she will. At times my sense of the Spirit’s presence has the felt quality of being awash in love. This can be overwhelming, or it can be quite subtle; it is always very tender and precious. It can happen when I am alone. It can happen I am with others. It has happened more than once when people gather around the table for Holy Communion.
I sense alignment with the Spirit when I seem to know more than I can know or do more than I can do. This occasionally comes through in a sermon or other interaction, in which something said touches a deep place in another about which I was unaware. Whenever someone says, “That was exactly what I needed to hear” – that is the Spirit, not me. The artists and poets in the room will know what I am talking about.
In the Spirit, things that seem impossible become possible. Dying is one of those things. It is incredibly hard work. It is lonely work. But within its ambit, healing and learning that might have taken years seem to occur within moments. Here I think of Jane, the first person whose dying I accompanied as a priest. Threads of her life that had been tangled for years gently began to weave themselves together in patterns of forgiveness, understanding, and acceptance. It wasn’t anything I did. I simply bore witness – amazed and perplexed. Jane, in her dying, was teaching me. Her death became a gift of the Spirit.
Jane lost a son to AIDS early on in the pandemic. Caring for him in his dying was a wrenching experience. But she resolved that no one should die stigmatized, outcast and alone. Jane went on to accompany dozens of young gay men in their dying, many of them friends of her son who were rejected and abandoned by their own families. Again, I was amazed and perplexed. How could she do it? It wasn’t her. It was the Spirit at work in her.
Even in what is dying – as so many of our institutions and even our civilization appears to be – the Spirit is at work to bring new life, resurrection, new creation. Can we walk with the Spirit through these deaths, pay attention, and open ourselves to her power in new ways? Can we learn from our loss how to renew life? That is, I think, what this moment calls for.
“To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.”
Here is the thing about the gift of the Spirit that I am slowly learning. It is never for my benefit alone. It is always for the benefit of others. Our life and our death are with our neighbor, as one of the Desert Fathers said. The Spirit brings us into relationship – often just at the right time, providing just what we need – and forges connections across differences and boundaries that otherwise keep us isolated and separate from each other. Sometimes these relationships are with other people. Sometimes they are with other sentient beings and communities of creation, especially in this time of climate crisis. We find ourselves able to communicate in new ways across barriers of language, nationality and even species.
It is the Spirit’s pressing across boundaries that so stunned the ancient world after that Day of Pentecost when the disciples first experienced the gift of the Spirit. It transcended the barriers between men and women, slave and free, rich and poor, Jew and Gentile, forming a new community of freedom, equality and mutual respect across differences. The Spirit creates unity while honoring diversity, weaving together new forms of community and drawing us into deeper levels of communion.[2]
Jesus describes this gift of the Spirit as a river of living water flowing from the hearts of believers. He recalls the words of the prophet Isaiah, promising that the Spirit of God will be poured out on God’s people like water in a thirsty land and streams on dry ground.[3] He recalls the experience of God’s miraculous provision of water in the wilderness, to slake the thirst of God’s people as they journeyed from slavery in Egypt to constitute a new community of holiness, freedom and equality in the Promised Land. Jesus renews the promise of God’s Spirit working through us with power as we seek to recreate the Beloved Community in every age.
If you want to know where the power of the Spirit is at work, look for the places of tension and resistance to the Beloved Community. The backlash against women’s bodily autonomy, the refusal to acknowledge the history of racial injustice and efforts to revoke voting rights, the scapegoating of genderqueer people, many of them children, the demonization of migrants and refugees, the continuing denial of our kinship with the earth community; all these are but instances of those who sneer at and dismiss demonstrations of the Spirit’s power to break through barriers and enlarge our sense of communion.
Let them sneer. Our responsibility is to focus our attention on the Spirit’s work and to align ourselves with her movement. We cannot control her, but we can watch and listen and become willing to follow her lead. When we do so, we discover that we know more and can do more than we can ask or imagine. We become useful for God and for the common good. God never leaves us bereft of the Spirit’s guidance and consolation. She is coming with power to renew the face of the earth.[4] Come, Holy Spirit, come.
[1] I Corinthians 12:7.
[2] Acts 2:1-21.
[3] John 7:38; cf. Isaiah 44:3.
[4] Psalm 104:31.