Come, Holy Spirit

God in wind, fire and breath

When we love someone, we reach for them. We take a hand. We put an arm around their shoulder. The instinct is older than language and we never outgrow it. To be near what we love is not enough. We want to touch.

And then there is the Spirit. Of the triune Persons we confess, the Spirit is the one we cannot picture. We can picture the Son. He had a face, ate fish, wept. We have some sense of the Father, because the Son has taught us to speak that way. But the Spirit… Close your eyes and try to see the Spirit, and you will find no face appears. The Church has understood this for a long time.

And yet we keep the feast. We bring out the red. We read the noisiest chapter in Acts. We celebrate what we cannot bring before the mind’s eye.

The Air in the Room

So read chapter two again, and this time do not look. Feel.

Acts does not say the disciples saw something. It says the sound of a violent wind came and filled the house where they were sitting. Begin there. They are indoors, and the air itself begins to move, and it does not move past them. It fills the room they are in. You would feel that before you understood it. The pressure of it. Moving air against the skin before the mind has found a word.

Then the fire. Notice what it does. Luke does not say it blazed in the center of the room for them to behold. He says it rested on each of them. Rested on. One flame, settling, on each head. That is not a thing seen across a distance. That is a weight that comes down and stays. Warming. Contact, given one by one.

And when Peter stands to explain it, the words he reaches for are Joel’s. I will pour out my Spirit. Within a single passage the Spirit has been moving air, settling fire, and water over the head. Pressure, warmth, water. Three sensations. No face.

Close Enough to Feel

The other Gospel appointed for the day goes nearer still. In the locked room, the risen Christ does not show the disciples the Spirit. He breathes on them. Receive the Holy Spirit. Think about what that asks. To breathe on someone you must be close. Close enough that they feel the warmth of it, and the damp of it, on their skin. It is almost too close. We do not breathe on strangers.

And the word John reaches for is the word from the second chapter of Genesis, where God leans over the clay and breathes, and breath is the very first thing the dust of us ever feels. This is John, remember. The Gospel of put your finger here. Touch the wounds. Receive the breath. From beginning to end, a Gospel you are meant to feel.

At the Edge of Attention

The psalm set for the day has known this all along. You send forth your Spirit, and they are created; and so you renew the face of the earth. The word is ruach, the breath that moved over the waters before there was anything to see. You take away their breath, and they die, the psalm says a line before. Send it forth, and there is a world.

Here is the part that should unsettle us. Breath is the most constant sensation we are given, and the one we never feel. You are not feeling yourself breathe right now. At least you were not, until I said so. It has kept you alive this whole time at the very edge of your attention, asking nothing, announcing nothing. You notice it only when you turn toward it, or when it labors, or when it is gone.

That is exactly the manner of the Spirit. Even Paul, setting out the gifts, says we were all made to drink of one Spirit. Taken in. Not held at arm’s length and admired, but received into the body and kept there, below notice, doing its quiet work.

The Distance Required for Sight

We have been asking the wrong thing of this feast. We have been asking to see, and there is nothing to see, and we have called that absence.

It is not absence. It is nearness. An image is a thing you stand back from; you need the distance to take it in. The reason there is no face is that the Spirit will not take the distance. It is the air in the room, not the figure across it. It is the breath in you, not the form in front of you. We cannot see it for the same reason we cannot see the thing pressed against the eye. It is too near to see.

Given to Live By

The difference becomes clear in the dove. The one time the Spirit comes as something to look at, a dove descending, it is at the Jordan, for the eye, a sign given to a crowd on a riverbank. But when the Spirit is given to the Church to live by, it does not come as a bird to watch. It comes as wind and fire and breath. Things on the skin.

Which is why faith has never been only a thing we think. It is a thing we feel for. The water on the forehead at the font, cold and startling and real. The press of a full pew on a feast day, shoulder against shoulder, more bodies than chairs. The goosebumps that rise as we sing He is Risen on Resurrection morning.

You will not be shown the Spirit. There is a reason its oldest sign is the one you are doing right now without trying. Breath does not ask to be watched. You feel it only when you turn toward it, or when it labors, or when it is gone.

That turning is the whole of it. Not to see. To notice. And to find that, underneath everything, you have been held the entire time.