Hey, Holy Ghost?
Don’t leave me hangin’.
If you haven’t been blessed by the melancholy verses of Aaron West and the Roaring Twenties, please literally stop whatever you’re doing (hopefully, that’s reading this post) and listen to Grapefruit before moving on with your life. Actually, listen to the whole damn album We Don’t Have Each Other, littered with cradle Catholic imagery quite tastefully woven into a tragic tale of love and loss and learning how to be okay again. Try not to spiral into depression while you’re at it.
The song opens with an existential gut-punch that I presume has ravaged the hearts and minds of every Christian that’s ever walked this earth. Brace yourselves:
Hey, Holy Ghost,
why’d you leave me?
Where’d you go?
I know we ain’t spoke in so long,
but I gotta know
if I’m alone.
Talk about walking through the valley, amirite?
This song has held a sacred space in my life since the moment I first heard it, and I’ve been reflecting upon these chosen words as we approach my son’s holy baptism — in layman’s terms, his receiving the Holy Spirit. I am not naive enough to think that he will always feel the comfort of the Comforter, or that he will not make decisions that call the permanency of this ancient practice into question, but I want to equip him with the armor of grace that he’ll need to make it through this life. I want to give him a fighting chance. It’s the least I can do as his first advocate, his earthly protectress, his appointed vessel into the outside world. Because I know the pains of human labor all too well. I know the feelings of abandonment by my Father above as well as the one whose DNA courses through my body.
My circumstances have not been easy, not ever. My life has been marked by misfortune, even amidst all of the blessings. But I have never been truly abandoned. During one of the many dark periods of my life when I was in my late teens, I visited the National Cathedral for the first time and stumbled upon Psalm 116 in a Bible laying open unattended on the Holy Spirit Chapel altar. If you are unfamiliar, as I once was, it is yet another of David’s desperate cries for help unto the Lord.
What struck out to me so fiercely and spoke life back into my veins was verse 10, which reads:
I kept faith, even when I said,
“I am greatly afflicted.”
Oh, was I greatly afflicted.
Afflicted by my own sin and shame, by the sin and shame of others. Seemingly discarded as unworthy without any hope of sanctification. What was sanctification? I’m not confident that I could have articulated it at the time. Thank God — literally — for gently correcting me as He continues to do every day. For reassuring me in the darkest valleys that I am not alone. That experience still haunts me, because in that very moment I knew the Comforter whose solidarity I had somehow forgotten.
I knew the love I’d been robbed of so many, many times.
I am now entrusted with the arduous task of communicating unadulterated love to my son; furthermore, I am tasked with striving for holiness. For his sake and for mine. For my husband and our marriage, for how we choose to parent with grace and truth. With the blessing of his baptism, I pray that he is predisposed to the guidance of the Holy Spirit and that he knows the depths of God’s unending love for him. And ours. Even more, I pray that he has patience with me. I’m still living in that shadow of doubt, my resolve to remain faithful ebbing and flowing like the living waters of the baptismal font.
