Pentecost 2021
Do we live in a Spiritless world? There are many prophetic voices that speak in our language, but their source, unknown and untrusted. Many people, many gifts, but an unacknowledged Spirit. Works of unrestrained, self-centered liberty, as St. Paul told us: “…immorality, impurity, lust, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, rivalry, jealousy, outbursts of fury, acts of selfishness, dissensions, factions, occasions of envy, drinking bouts, orgies, and the like.”
O holy Spirit, Love of God, infuse Thy grace, and descend plentifully into my heart; enlighten the dark corners of this neglected dwelling, and scatter there Thy cheerful beams; dwell in that soul that longs to be Thy temple; water that barren soil, over-run with weeds and briars, and lost for want of cultivating, and make it fruitful with Thy dew from heaven. Oh come, Thou refreshment of them that languish and faint. Come, Thou Star and Guide of them that sail in the tempestuous sea of the world; Thou only Haven of the tossed and shipwrecked. Come, Thou Glory and Crown of the living, and only Safeguard of the dying. Come, Holy Spirit, in much mercy, and make me fit to receive Thee. AMEN.—
Beautiful, no? St. Augustine said it. He was the great mystic and analyst of the soul and its relationship to God. But Augustine was, not to be funny, just a saint – someone whose imperfections left enough room for God. That doesn’t mean he saw everything clearly. We still live with and reenact some of his damaging reflections on human sexuality, and his negotiation with the war-making of the Roman empire. But we also still build upon his notions of sacramentality.
He certainly knew the workings of Spirit in the soul. Again:
O holy Spirit, Love of God, infuse Thy grace, and descend plentifully into my heart; enlighten the dark corners of this neglected dwelling, and scatter there Thy cheerful beams; dwell in that soul that longs to be Thy temple;
It’s graduation weekend, and that’s what I’ve noticed many are missing….
They live between shame and shamelessness; I’ve spoken with student so uncomfortable with their sexuality that it emerges as anger and dogmatism. Between dignified personhood and unmoored identity; people trying to find themselves, but looking to the wrong place. Between negation and narcissism; either I’m worthless or I’m all that matters. They look for models, and choose manipulators who live in the same neglected dwellings as they do!Augustine’s got the inside part nailed. We need to cultivate that in friends, students, faculty. Perhaps they would respond to a prayer more easily that starts on the outside. Paul says the outside, creation, “groans,” it wants, it needs.
It is beset by persons and countries that that have made their neglected dwellings into false kingdoms of consumerism, tribalism, racism, totalitarianism, using the bricks of their dwellings as materiel for a wall rather than a bridge – as timber to fuel the fires of narcissistic rage, as placards to shout identity-dominated indifference to the other, as a ruse that exalts group over individual, as guns and bombs to allay the fear of a freedom that comes from a God-given, rather than a power-provided security. People know this intuitively. But they struggle against it without a deep sense if self.
O holy Spirit, Love of God, infuse Thy grace, and descend plentifully into the world; enlighten the dark corners of this neglected dwelling, and scatter there Thy cheerful beams; dwell in that good earth that longs to be Thy temple;
Maybe if we taught them about the world’s inner life, its life of the Spirit, they would begin to consider their own.
We come together on this day of the Spirit’s third investment: the first in creation, the second in the re-creative reprieve after the flood, the final, in Jesus’ dying and rising. Augustine would tell us, “Be what you celebrate”: be the investment that would finally tend to the neglected dwellings within and without, that would clean and restore the neglected dwellings at Niagara and elswhere.If we dare to continue this breaking of bread, which says yes to each person only in the bond of community, and affirms the only identity that matters and the only reign that lasts; that affirms our identity as beloved of God; that affirms with the Divine of the book of Revelation, in words that can be, at last, understood and experienced,
“Now have salvation and power come: the reign of our God and the authority of his anointed One.”
Let’s at least search out how we might make a beginning here. Let’s make a fourth investment, with the Spirit which has been given us. He has said it: “So I send you.”
