Pentecost

"The Kingdom of the Spirit has no frontiers. It is present in the order and beauty of the world as well as in the revelation of history, to be fully revealed in the wind and fire of Pentecost. It impregnates Christ's whole being and springs forth from his pierced side, but if we know that it comes from the Father and leads to the Father, we also know that it blows wherever it pleases, and that our hands, our thoughts, can no more grasp it than they could clutch a stream of living water."
Patriarch Ignatius IV of Antioch, 1989.

"It is clear in the New Testament that the Spirit is a gift, not a reward. The descent of the Spirit upon Jesus during his baptism in the Jordan, often depicted as a dove with wings outspread sailing downward toward him, comes before his initiatory period of testing in the wilderness, not after. It most initiation sequences, one would expect the order to be reversed; after testing and trial, one is confirmed with a new cloak of blessing. But the empowerment of the Spirit is not earned, it is freely given. And so with the early church at Pentecost. It was not their courage or clarity that evoked the blessing of the Spirit, for they were vulnerable and confused. The Spirit is a gift, not a possession. The spirit inspires and gives the breath of life to the church, but the church does not encompass, contain, or own the Holy Spirit. The path of the Spirit certainly does not lead us only from church to church. For those of us who are Christians, we understand it to be the Holy Spirit that drives us beyond the comforts and certainties of what we know to the very boundaries where Christians and Hindus and Muslims meet." Diana Eck, Encountering God, 134.

"In listening for the language of this energetic, fiery mystery of Spirit in the Hindu tradition, I have often been moved by what they call Shakti--divine energy, female energy. Remember that ruach, the generative breath that moved upon the waters as the dawn of creation, is a feminine noun. In the course of time, and no doubt in the interests of patriarchy, she became neuter in the Greek (pneuma) and eventually masculine in the Latin (spiritus). Some of the same church patriarchs who even today become indignant when the "He" language of the Father and Son is tampered with by feminists in the church are nonetheless unapologetic about the linguistic sleight of hand that changed the gender of the Holy Spirit. Of course, as we have seen, whether we use father or mother language in speaking of the Divine, we must be clear about the fact that it is our language. It is relational language, and it enables Christians to think analogically about our kinship with God. Like most theological language, it is more poetry than metaphysics."
Diana Eck, Encountering God, 136.

Summer Reading – Steinbeck's East of Eden

Let's read a classic piece of literature in this space this summer: John Steinbeck's masterpiece, East of Eden.

We will kick off the 8-week series (it's a long book!) on Monday, June 1, with an introduction to the book and the series. No need to read ahead before June.

A Benediction (Or Miscellaneous Thoughts)

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