Our son Mike and I were
home when the tornado came. Mike and I
and our menagerie, that is . . . And so our task was to get everybody into the
proverbial inside room with no windows, which for many of us in Tuscaloosa—land
of very-few-basements—passed for a storm shelter. But before we did, I looked out our front
door into the teeth of the storm and saw the stop sign acting like the one in
the Spielberg movie . . . You know . . . The one where the space ship sneaks up
on Richard Dreyfus while he's in his pick-up?
It was waving back and forth like that.
I closed the door and locked it (fat lot of good that would do) and started rounding up pets.
We got them into that
inside room—the bathroom, of course—and it was pitch black, the electricity
having gone out some time before, but when Mike slipped in the door one of the cats slipped out, so he went after her, and I had visions of the roof collapsing
on him while getting that darned cat, but he made it back, and the cats and
dogs were all snarling and snapping at one another in the dark, and then we
heard it come over, and they always say it sounds like a freight train, and you
know what? It did . . . It sounded like
a great, big, scary freight train bearing down on us all. And when it was over, and the animals had
scuttled off to hide under various pieces of furniture, Mike and I looked out
the front door, and that stop sign was twisted up like a pretzel.
I don't think the
apostles would have described the sound of the Spirit’s coming in just that way
. . . For one thing, freight trains wouldn't be invented for some 1800 years,
give or take a half century. There was no
“listen . . . Here comes the Bethany Limited” or “is that a fighter jet
engine?” and I wonder: did that help or hurt?
Did the lack of a human-made referent make it even more scary, even more
out of this world? All they could say
was that it sounded “like the rush of a violent wind.” Come to think of it, it was like they compared
the coming of the Spirit to a tornado,
or maybe a typhoon . . . Certainly the fisher-folk among them were familiar
with storms on the Sea of Galilee.
They'd just filled the
slot left open by Judas, and now they were back to 12, and you gotta think
maybe the new guy wondered what he’d gotten himself into with this Spirit business.
There they were, lounging around on Pentecost, maybe noshing on some
chips and dip, and then this happens. A sound like a violent wind . . . violent!
And notice that Luke doesn’t say what it was, just what it was like,
just like he says that the divided tongues weren't fire but were as of fire, they could have been big
slurping tongues, for all I know, especially given the multi-lingual event that
was about to happen. Just imagine it:
we'd be celebrating with dancing, streaming glottal appendages instead of flames. It just wouldn't be the same . . .
But Luke's inability to
adequately describe the coming of the Spirit, his reliance on simile
language—as and like—is typical when faced with the Divine. Later on in Acts, Peter is waiting for his supper
when he falls into a trance, and he sees something
like a sheet, not an actual sheet but
something like one, with animals
wiggling all over it. And Ezekiel beholds
“the likeness of the glory of the Lord” as something
like gleaming amber, in the middle something
like four living creatures, of human form
with four faces apiece, in the middle of them something like burning coals, like
torches moving to and fro among them, there were something like wheels within wheels, which moved with the four
creatures . . . and there was a lot more, but you get something like the picture. Whatever the Divine looks like, it's probably
not a sheet with critters stuck to it
or four, four-faced, winged creatures accompanied by fiery wheels (at least it didn't
look like a breaded, grumpy old man). The
transcendent is by nature indescribable, because it is outside our
experience. The best we can do is use
simile and metaphor.
As you all know, I've
been attending Richard Rohr’s Living School, and one of our tasks is studying Christian
mystics, and as good a definition of a mystic as any is one who has so-called
mystical experiences, who participates to some extent in the ineffable. And the thing is, though they often don't like
to describe these experience, when they do, they can be pretty vague. Some say it's like an emptiness. Others—sometimes
the same ones on different occasions—say it's a nothingness . . . Well, if the experience is empty or nothing, how
do they know they're having it? Clearly,
it's not really nothing or empty, but
describing it that way is as close as they can come.
It's why poets—dealers in
metaphor and allusion—are often the best guides to God, and Scripture is full
of great poetry. In the beginning was
the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. As the deer longs
for flowing water, so my soul longs for you.
But of course it's not just in Scripture: the medieval Hildegard de
Bingen described God like this: “O most noble Greenness, rooted in the sun,
shining forth in streaming splendor upon the wheel of Earth.” The Sufi poet Rumi wrote “You are like water
and we are like millstones. You are like wind and we are like dust. The wind is
hidden while the dust is plainly seen.”
And Rainer Marie Rilke: “My
God is dark and like a web of tangled roots all drinking soundlessly.”
What are your images of the Divine? How do you think of God, picture God, experience God as you approach the
almighty in prayer? It's Pentecost, and
the Spirit has come upon us like wind
and fire. Can we even imagine what that
might mean? Amen.
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