THE Pentecost story explodes into high drama. A ferocious gale
threatens to blow apart the upper room. Mysterious, incandescent
haloes of fire dance on the disciples' heads, and in a flash they
become multi-lingual. Not surprisingly, accusations of drunkenness
are thrown around. You could not ask for a more boisterous,
action-filled account of the Early Church getting off the
ground.
This outpouring is a follow-up to something even more thought
provoking. Turn to the first verse of the Bible, and there it is.
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the
earth was without form and void: and darkness was upon the face of
the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of the
waters."
Familiarity can easily blunt us to the mind-blowing significance
of this. Not only do we live in a Spirit-filled universe, we have
done so from the word go. In contemporary terms, it is like saying
that the Big Bang was not just a cosmic event of astronomical
proportions; it was embedded with the seeds of the divine from the
moment of its inception.
If ever there was good news, this is it. Contrary to appearances
the world is not doomed, dark, desolate, and forsaken, but enmeshed
with God's glory. What this means for the Christian pilgrim is made
explicit in Charles Wesley's theologically acute hymn "O thou, who
camest from above".
The Holy Spirit comes, "the pure celestial fire to impart",
kindling a flame of sacred love on every heart. The choice is
stark: we can take it on board, and cherish it so that it burns
"with inextinguishable blaze"; or we can bury it, and smother the
blessing with a dark veneer of greed, cruelty, egocentricity, and
wrongdoing. The pith of this is that nobody is totally beyond the
pale; for though the flame of the Spirit canbe stifled, and human
behaviour is sometimes utterly destructive, the rekindling of the
fire is always a possibility.
The Christian pilgrimage is not made in loneliness or aloneness,
the hymn-writer says. Our relationship with God is reciprocal: he
fires us with the Holy Spirit, and we have the capacity to respond,
allowingthe innate warmth and love to flow back, trembling, to its
source.
This enshrines the very heart of prayer. It is a continuous
interplay between our humanity and the being of God, a great rush
of swirling Pentecostal fire emanating from the Holy One being met
by a tiny, often somewhat ineffectual, and yet heartfelt response
from us.
This spoken or unspoken dialogue between the worshipper and God
brings fruit. "Jesus, confirm my heart's desire To work and speak
and think for thee." The 13th-century Cistercian and mystic
Mechthild of Magdeburg describes this spiritual see-saw vividly.
"The Holy Spirit is our harpist, And all the strings which are
touched in Love must sound."
This is at once both a tremendous challenge and a
fearful responsibility. The onus lies uncompromisingly on our
shoulders. We can drift through life ignoring or shunning the
Spirit, or we can allow it to transform our nature, constantly
guarding the flame against the world's darkness that threatens to
extinguish it.
It is a lifelong process, Charles Wesley says, till
"death thy endless mercies Seal and make the sacrifice
complete".
Mechthild expresses this theological mystery in
mellifluous verse:
Lie down in the
Fire
See and taste the Flowing
Godhead through thy being:
Feel the Holy Spirit
Moving and compelling
Thee within the Flowing
Fire and Light of God.
St Paul is more terse and down to earth. "Quench not
the spirit," he enjoins the Thessalonian Christians. Both are
right. It is the most precious gift that we possess.
The Revd David Bryant is a retired priest living in
Yorkshire.