The Liberating Breath of God

Pentecost is the celebration of the liberating breath of God. We sing words like, “Breathe on us breath of God.”

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I can breathe now

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. These were the last words of George Floyd as he lay dying in front of a number of people and now in front of the world.

Perhaps what we have been hearing during this time of pandemic is a voice, a new mantra being spoken by so many in this world. “I can’t breathe.” And along with that outcry goes the added, “Can’t you hear me? Can’t you hear us?”

So many writers have spoken about how the pandemic is revealing all the fault lines in our world…the fault lines of poverty, of race, of the earth being treated as a commodity. Perhaps the mantra of it all has been given to us by George Floyd, “I can’t breathe.” We can hear those living in poverty saying, “I can’t breathe.” Indigenous peoples in Canada, “I can’t breathe.” The over 400,000 people who have died globally in part because human beings did not believe in the possibility of such a destructive virus also were saying, “I can’t breathe.” Our planet being choked by human activity, “I can’t breathe.” And perhaps when we hold ourselves as powerless, “I can’t breathe.” For, after all, one can only hold one’s breath for so long.

The story of the pandemic, the story of racism in Canada, and beyond, the story of us is still unfolding…and the Pentecost story again shakes us into participating in a way that we might do the hard, searing, and transformative work of ushering in a new mantra:

I can breathe…I can breathe…I can breathe.

-Sister Margo Ritchie, csj

Welcoming the Wild Goose: An Invitation For Pentecost

Sunday, May 31st this year marks the celebration, in the Christian Church, of the Feast of Pentecost commemorating the descent of the Holy Spirit on the followers of Jesus in Jerusalem. There is something striking about the chosen Scripture readings for the celebration. They present a seeming contradiction! In the selected Gospel (John 20: 19-23) we read of the resurrected Jesus entering the locked room in which his disciples are hiding in fear. It is Jesus in this narrative who breathes the Holy Spirit on them offering them peace as he sends them out. It’s a comforting story. Isn’t it also the way in which we so often depict the Holy Spirit as a peaceful dove; a soothing Presence? Of course, many of us will have experienced God’s Presence in that real, appropriate, and peaceful manner. But there is more …

By contrast, the reading from Acts recounts the “arrival” of the Holy Spirit as “like the rush of a violent wind … as divided tongues of fire”. This dramatic portrayal of the Spirit is a quite different experience. It represents a disturbing, disruptive event.

Pope Francis in a 2013 homily resonates with such an experience of the Holy Spirit. He says, “The Holy Spirit upsets us because the Spirit moves us, makes us walk, pushes us forward.” But “we want to tame the Holy Spirit, and that is wrong.” In a similar vein, the late Irish poet John O’ Donohue remarks, “I think there is a wonderful danger in God that we have totally forgotten. Because one of the things humanoids like to do is they like to bring in the tamers to tame their deities.”(See: John O’ Donohue, “Imagination as the Path of the Spirit” YouTube) There is, O’ Donohue says, a wildness in God and we are called to “make God dangerous again.” The image of the Holy Spirit as a dove isn’t the whole story!

In Celtic Christianity, the wonderful portrayal of the Holy Spirit was rather that of a” Wild Goose”. When I first encountered this early spiritual image, I was taken back to my childhood growing up in Cambridge, England. Often, my mother would take me on walks to the University grounds, to the beautiful so-called “Backs of the Colleges”. We would enter through the gates of Queen’s College where a gaggle of geese (albeit somewhat domesticated) stood guard. They were noisy, erratic, frightening animals. They definitely seemed dangerous to a small child. I couldn’t wait to hurry past them. Perhaps that is also our motivation when we avoid or resist the wildness of God. It is much more comfortable to be with the gentle dove. The dove may comfort me as God comforts, but the dove may not call me to the fullness of the dynamic relationship to which God calls each of us. The Wild Goose does.

The Wild Goose is untameable, uncontrollable, sometimes frightening, a dangerous creature! The Wild Goose invites us to let go of all that is static, to live life on God’s terms rather than from our preconceived and safe ideas of how life should work out. This alternative image of the Holy Spirit beckons us toward the unexpected, to life’s ultimate questions, to fresh horizons and perceptions, to grow into the dynamic world of the Spirit. It calls us to be open to a “dangerous” journey; one in which we have to trust God wholeheartedly remembering at the same time that geese also protect; to a divine adventure impassioned by the Spirit with the tongues of fire gifted to the disciples.

Perhaps this Pentecost invites me to go on “a wild goose chase” where not I but the goose does the chasing - of me!  On this Feast may I welcome the Wild Goose. May I let God act, call me to be and do something different, to risk life in the Spirit, to embrace a dangerous God, but a God, nonetheless, who remains with each of us on the wild and wonderful journey as a dove of peace sending us out like the first disciples, to love and live in freedom and joy.

A prayer of an Anglican priest, writer and founder of a contemporary Celtic community, Ray Simpson, says it all:

Great Spirit, Wild Goose of the Almighty.
Be my eye in dark places;
Be my flight in trapped places;
Be my host in wild places;
Be my brood in barren places;
Be my formation in the lost places.

(Ray Simpson, “A Holy Island Prayer Book: Prayers and Readings from Lindesfarne, Church Publishing Inc., 2002)

A blessed, happy, peaceful, and dangerous Pentecost!

-Sister Mary Rowell, cjs

(Photos: Courtesy of Unsplash.com)

And now the Fire is with us

"And now the Fire is with us...as though through a sacred door opening to the Universe, God passes through...and spreads RADIANCE."  

These words of Teilhard de Chardin were written by him on the battlefield, of all places--where he was a stretcher-bearer during WWI. They speak loudly of the fierce and ever-present passionate love of God for us, everywhere and in all things.  And perhaps they speak especially to us now in the midst of an unprecedented upheaval of soul, of consciousness, and of governments presently happening in Holy Earth. Now the Fire is with us, Holy Fire, Spirit Fire, an energy, a radiance!  Now the sacred door has been opened to the Mystery and majesty of the Universe. We are the first generations to be flooded and filled with the radiance of this Divine revelation….God passing through, entering us.  A Pentecost.

Can we turn our attention to this fire, this power at work within us?  Can we turn from the terrible “too-small” worlds of politics and division, finance, fear and ambition?  Can we let ourselves be seized, animated by this Great Love alive within in us. This fiery love has power to heal our divisions and make us one! What can we do with so great a love?  We can burn with love for the whole Sacred Earth and all its beings!  We can burn with Love for the ONE who loves us so! We can become LOVE!

 - Mary Southard, Pentecost 2018

Reflection and Artwork (titled    Le Puy, Thank You) by Sr. Mary Southard, CSJ (used with permission). Mary Southard Art   www.marysouthardart.org