Pentecost 2021
The gift of the Spirit. Jesus is teaching us how to desire.
Think of how much of our consciousness is governed by desire -- acting on, negotiating with, being driven or guided by...
The Feast of Pentecost is the day in the church's sense of the cycle of time when the powerful gift of the Spirit is observed and given thanks for. What is this gift?
Our texts point in several directions, telling several stories.
There's the famous story from Acts: the disciples are proclaiming the kingdom of God and are doing so in a polyglot city. Everyone is powerfully affected by this proclamation (love! justice! mercy!), and sees these preachers and proclaimers as aglow with light! and everyone hears them speaking in words they can all understand, each in her own language. They quote the Hebrew prophet Joel: I will pour out my Spirit on all creatures! Young people will have visions! Old people will dream dreams! (What about the middle-aged, I wonder...)
Psalm 104 tells how this Spirit renews everything -- 'all the face of the earth.'
Paul's Letter to the little community in the city at the seat of Empire - Rome! - assures them that even when we do not know 'how to pray' (what to desire, how to order our relationship with what really matters, the sublime, with God, one another, with our sister creature the Earth...) not to lose heart, for this Spirit breathes and sighs in us -- prays in us, and with and for us -- in ways beyond speech and language. Pre-linguistic, or extra-linguistic, '...with sighs too deep for words.' This Spirit is active, and moves toward us.
Most particularly, John's Gospel has Jesus saying farewell to those who follow him, assuring them that it is good that he goes away from their bodily sight, and that they will become his Body, as in his absence the Spirit will come. This Spirit leads continually into all truth, all of which they can never comprehend at one sitting, or lifetime.
This spark of the divine shines and shimmers in all things and reveals the reality of God ('the kingdom of God'), constantly, and training our eyes to see and our hearts to behold is our primary task as creatures. For, seeing and living in this reality leads us into all truth and compels us to work for the liberation of all creation -- a cosmos groaning in chains, or like a woman in labor (as Paul wrote). Having glimpsed this reality and been breathed-in-by-this-enlivening-Spirit, we can not but respond and say: make use of me, O Holy One. Make me an instrument of your peace.
When Jesus - John's telling - tells the disciples that he is 'going away' and that it is good that he goes, he is signaling that they - and we - have much to learn about how our own sense of longing and desire can 'lead us into all Truth.' Desire and longing can be holy, and can point toward greater revelation of God's presence within and among us -- sexual desire, certainly, and every other register of desire. Perhaps a broad-brush contrast between a pop-Christian and a pop-Buddhist sensibility is that instead of suggesting that desire is what causes suffering through continual attachment to the material world (...my terrible summation, with profound apologies to my several Buddhist friends), rather than 'rid me of desire' the Christian tradition suggests that our prayer might simply be, "Lord, order my desires."
Make my first desire for your presence, your enlivening, your reality. All things flow from this profound desire and longing, and all desires find their place and relationship in this first orientation toward the source of all, the source of all desire. St. Augustine may have messed up Christian thinking about sexuality for centuries (thanks, man!), but he points to the truth of daily existence when he famously wrote in North Africa in the 4th/5th century: 'You have made us for your own ends, O Lord, so that our souls might be restless until they find their rest in You.'
This spirit is restless. The medieval mind wonderfully would depict the Spirit as a wild goose.
Trust over time that the Spirit of All Desires is leading you to greater union with the Source of all Desire; give yourself over to this ordering spirit of God whom Jesus calls Love. Be re-ordered daily. Come to see that this deepest reality of the cosmos is love, and is desiring you, actually -- loving you and me, and the great leviathan and the stars into being, loving us into fullness of life for all things.