For those of you who were at our bishop’s consecration now seven years ago, you know what a grand event a consecration can be. Even though we met in Shapiro Field House down the street, we transformed that space into a holy place for the two hours we were there.
Imagine then being in a cathedral of the English Gothic style. St. Luke’s, Portland, was the first Episcopal Church in the United States to be built as a Cathedral. Its cornerstone was laid on August 15, 1867, and St. Luke’s began its life of worship on Christmas Day, 1868. It’s not that the architecture screams out, ‘church!’ (though I certainly have a partiality toward Gothic architecture) but that this cathedral has 140 years of history of people’s lives contained within its space. Just as people can sense that holy history when they walk into here, one can feel it in that cathedral, even when it is crawling with people as it was last week.
After the sermon and the Nicene Creed, the bishop-elect knelt in front of the Presiding Bishop. All the other bishops present stood to the right and left of the Presiding Bishop. The congregation sang the Veni Sancte Spiritus, after which a period of silent prayer followed. Our Presiding Bishop, who has such an elegant innate sense of liturgy, let that silence settle on our shoulders like the proverbial mantle. The silence covered us and we still lingered in that silence, beckoning, invoking and waiting for the Holy Spirit to come and fill that space. I don’t really know for how long we remained in silence; what I do know is that the cathedral became still and I was unaware of the usual creaks, sneezes, coughs and all those other little noises that normally occupy a silence. The congregation felt as one.
When the bishops all laid their hands on their new brother bishop, said together the middle part of the prayer of consecration, and when the Presiding Bishop concluded, her voice growing louder and more joyous, I found myself weeping. My tears were for the same reason as when we baptize someone here, I can look up and see moist eyes in the congregation. The tears come from beyond the act of baptizing (usually) an infant; they come from our encounter with the Holy Spirit who comes to us not always as a fire or burst of wind but also in the small still voice of God. When we encounter the Holy Spirit in those moments, we are touched beyond our verbal capacities.
Later I mused on how the prayer book rubrics for the ordination of a bishop, priest or deacon all include the provision for a moment of silence. Why don’t we do that for baptisms as well? After the blessing of the water, why don’t we also invoke the Holy Spirit to come in the same way? It is from baptism, after all, that an ordinand’s journey begins. You cannot be ordained if you haven’t been baptised. We haven’t changed that yet and I doubt we ever will. Just as baptism is the root metaphor for the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, so is baptism the root of all we do and are as Christians. We ask the Holy Spirit to sustain the newly baptised in his or her life in Christ. So how do we invite the Holy Spirit to be present? And why and when do we invite the Holy Spirit into our midst?
It seems that at these major life moments we are the most aware of the Holy Spirit. Maybe our hearts are more open to receiving its in-breaking. Our guard has been let down; we shift from our logical and rational thinking to our heart.
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The church, in its wisdom, has us focus at least one Sunday a year, today, on the gifts of the Holy Spirit and how the Spirit lives and moves within us and our community. There’s this one Sunday but we should be aware of the Spirit with us every time we gather together and then some.
The gospel reading from John, which we also hear on the Second Sunday of Easter, makes clear how we get this Spirit. When Jesus appears to the frightened disciples in the upper room, he tells them peace is with them and then he breathes on them saying, Receive the Holy Spirit. This is a very different understanding of ‘spirit’ of which we hear just three days earlier on Good Friday when Jesus gives up the spirit and dies on the cross. Here, on what some people consider the actual moment of the disciples receiving the Holy Spirit, Jesus breathes into the breath of life, the animating force of God that catapults them, the church and the world into a new way of being. Things have never been the same since.
Given the power of the Holy Spirit, and how when the Spirit is fully unleashed all sorts of things can happen, we prefer to think of the Holy Spirit as a nice simple dove.
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Carl Daw, the writer of the words to Hymn 513, ‘Like the murmur of the dove’s song,’ explains how he came about the words to this hymn and the history of the imagery. He said of this hymn in October 1986:
‘The opening phrase is derived from my recollection of the following passage concerning the Holy Spirit in Louis Evely’s book, A Religion for Our Time: I have learned that the image of a dove was chosen not because of the shape of the bird, but because of the moan. The dove murmurs all the time. It is because the Holy Spirit moans all the time that [it] is represented under the form of a dove; it is a verbal and not a plastic image. The Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit… intercedes for us “with sighs too deep for words.” (Romans 8.26)
‘The first stanza presents both the aural and the visual aspects of the dove as a symbol of the Holy Spirit, as well as the other two traditional images of wind and fire, thereby portraying the “how” of the Spirit’s coming. The second stanza turns to the “where” aspect, and affirms that the Spirit is a corporate gift to the whole church. The third stanza concerns itself with the purpose for which the Spirit is given (the “why”): for reconciliation, prayer, divine power, and quiet confidence. Like the ancient hymn, “Veni Sancte Spiritus,” this new hymn pulls together diverse images of both the Holy Spirit and the People of God in an attempt to suggest the scope of divine power and the depth of human need.’ (1)
Nancy Roth describes the Holy Spirit’s presence as mourning doves, or sometimes ‘insistent, like a sudden strong wind,… that literally sweeps us off our feet, in order to deposit us elsewhere. At these times, the Spirit seems to bring, not peace, but chaos. But is a chaos out of which something new is born. Or the Holy Spirit may be like fire, its warmth fanning the small flame of a thought until it becomes a conflagration in the form of something we feel impelled and inspired to do. We cannot predict which symbol will best describe Holy Spirit’s next visitation to us: the dove, the wind, or the flame…. (2)
And sometimes this visitation comes in the form of deep silence and brings on holy tears and wordlessness. If that happens, know that the Spirit is close and real.
Whenever, however, for whatever the Spirit arrives, welcome the Spirit, with the words, Come, Holy Spirit, come. And then set the world on fire with that same Spirit.
END NOTES
(1) Nancy Roth, New Every Morning (New York: Church Publishing, Inc., 2000), 124-25.
(2) Ibid., 126.
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