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)