“Paul passed through the interior regions and came to Ephesus, where he found some disciples. He said to them, ‘Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” They replied, “No, we have not even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.’” – Acts 19:1-2
Without the Spirit,
God is far away,
Christ belongs to the past,
The Gospel is a dead letter,
The Church is a mere organization,
Authority takes the form of domination,
Mission is turned into propaganda,
Worship is reduced to bare recollection,
Christian action becomes the morality of a slave.
But in the Spirit,
God is near,
The risen Christ is present with us here and now,
The Gospel is the power of life,
The Church signifies Trinitarian communion,
Authority means liberating service,
Mission is an expression of Pentecost,
The Liturgy is a making-present of both past and future,
Human action is divinized.
– Ignatios IV, Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch1
Even on Pentecost, it is hard for preachers to know what to say about the Holy Spirit. We preach the usual Pentecost sermon, of course. We retell the famous story, the rushing wind, the tongues as of fire, the diversity of cultures gathered in Jerusalem, the amazement in hearing the gospel proclaimed “in our own languages,” the pouring out of the Spirit. And then we become partly mute. Searching for what to say, it is as if we shield our eyes from the blinding glory of the story and run as fast as we can to the relative safety of ethics, to the matter of what we are supposed to do about all this. “The church should honor diversity,” we say. “We should seek a unity that doesn’t melt away differences, a common life and faith that continues to respect the particularity of cultures, gender, race.”
Good moral advice, certainly, but it is finally only our side of the equation, what we should do, our deeds, our responses, our righteous action. What often gets washed out of our preaching on Pentecost is the event itself, the initiating force that opens humanity and beckons us to respond, namely, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit’s deeds, the Spirit’s initiative, the Spirit’s righteous action. Pentecost is an event that is not our own doing, a divine interruption we could never have predicted. Once it happened, we could see how it rhymes with what prophets like Joel promised, but no one in that house in Jerusalem would for a minute have guessed that a power like wind and fire would course through them that very day and revolutionize human life. After all, they had just cast lots to select a new apostle to replace Judas. The last thing most of us church folk anticipate is that a church business meeting to elect new officers would be followed immediately by a jolt of divine voltage that blows all the fuses.
Willie Jennings noted in his brilliant commentary on Acts that we sometimes speak of Pentecost as the birthday of the church but forget that “this child was not expected.”2 Pentecost did not emerge from our moral imagination but from God’s unpredictable will. The central question of the Pentecost story, Jennings asserts, is What is God doing? “The meaning of the speaking in tongues,” he says, “is so obvious, so powerful, that it was missed. The Holy Spirit has come …” Yes, there are ethical implications, but they do not spring merely from our principled character or our ability to moralize the Pentecost story but are instead driven by the gale-force wind of the Spirit itself. As Jennings says,
Now love of neighbor will take on pneumatological dimensions. It will be love that builds directly out of the resurrected body of Jesus. It will be love, as Karl Barth says, that goes into the far country. This is love that cannot be tamed, controlled, or planned, and once unleashed it will drive the disciples forward into the world and drive a question into their lives: Where is the Holy Spirit taking us and into whose lives?3
Jennings has it right. The challenging question of Pentecost is, Who is the Holy Spirit and where is the untamable wind of the Spirit taking us now?
Part of our inability to preach clearly about the Holy Spirit comes because the task requires exercising at least some vision of the Trinity and the relationships in the Trinity, and, for most of us, Trinitarian language is not our native tongue. Even those preachers who, perhaps on Trinity Sunday, pull out their seminary notes and then stand in the pulpit, clear their throats, and doggedly march through an attempt to teach the people some basics about the Trinity sometimes come across as if they had pried off the back of an old Swiss pocket watch and now were patiently explaining to the congregation the bewildering ways the gears mesh and the springs flex.
Actually, there is no shame in being a little tongue-tied here. As theologian Robert Jenson observed, even the bishops who worked out the great definitions of divine relationships found in the Nicene Creed were not all that clear about what they meant. “If you were to grab some of those bishops and ask what does homoousios mean,” said Jenson, “you would have just gotten a stutter” or perhaps, “I do not know, but it sounds well, does it not?”4
Nevertheless, the stakes are high. Thomas Aquinus warned that if the church ever quits paying close attention to the distinctions in the Trinity, the biggest price would be the loss of a sense of the Holy Spirit. To some extent that is what has happened to us, especially in the old traditional Western churches. Leave talk about the Holy Spirit to the charismatics and Pentecostals, we say; we’ll stick to the less frenzied stuff.
But’s it’s Pentecost, and we very much need to talk about the Holy Spirit.
To do so faithfully requires walking a tightrope. On the one hand, it is crucial to have a vision of the unity, the oneness, of God. We don’t want to talk about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as if they were separate divine chess pieces that move independently across the board of history. As St. John Chrysostom vigorously preached, “It is not possible that where the Spirit is to be found Christ should not be found as well.” Likewise, where Christ is found, the Father is at work as well. Where one person of the Trinity is present, the whole Trinity is present. “One is the gift and the power,” said Chrysostom, “of Father, Son, and Spirit.” Irenaeus of Lyons employed a wonderful image to emphasize the intersection found in the life of the Trinity. He described the Son and Spirit as the two “hands” of God the Father. So, when a Christian is presented the Zen riddle, what is the sound of one hand clapping?, we must confess that, when it comes to the Trinitarian God, we have no idea. God the Father is always clapping with both hands at once.5
On the other hand, walking the tightrope also means recognizing that, even though Father, Son, and Spirit are One and indivisible, the New Testament doesn’t hesitate for a minute to talk about the distinctive work of God the Father, of God the Son, and of God the Holy Spirit. Yes, the three persons of the Trinity are inseparable, but the gospel story speaks of them in different ways and with separate roles. For example, Jesus says that “the Father is the vinegrower,” while Jesus himself is “the true vine” (John 15:1). The Father sends the Holy Spirit in Christ’s name, and the Spirit, in turn, “will teach you everything, and remind you of all that [Jesus] said to you” (John 14:26). As for Pentecost, it was the Father who promised the power that came at Pentecost (Luke 24:49), it was Jesus Christ who urged the disciples to wait in Jerusalem for it to come (Luke 24:49), and it was the Holy Spirit who came to the disciples that day, filling them with divine power and turning Babel into blessing.
The question for Pentecost, then, is who is this Holy Spirit who animates the Pentecost story? That’s easy, we say. The Holy Spirit is one of the three persons of the Trinity. But, wait, we must be careful here. Even the tried and true Trinitarian language can sometimes trip us up. We may sing in the words of the great hymn, “God in three Persons, blessed Trinity,” but it is becoming ever clearer to us now that the old formula of the Godhead being an assembly of “persons” may no longer work as well as it once did. In our day, the word “person” has packed up its bags and left its ancestral home, migrating toward new individualistic and personalistic meanings that end up savaging good Trinitarian theology.
Today “person” inevitably means a discrete and autonomous individual. I am a “person” and so is my brother Bill and so is Taylor Swift and so is Barack Obama. Sure, we share something, we are members of the same species. Bill, Taylor, Barack, and I are “persons,” whereas the Rock of Gibraltar, a Honda Civic, and a cocker spaniel are not. But after that one nod to commonality, the similarity abruptly ends and “person” shifts swiftly toward uniqueness. I want to be my own “person.” I am the singular, peculiar, and idiosyncratic Tom Long, and I am definitely not Bill Long, Taylor Swift, or Barack Obama. As the old SNL gag goes, “I’m Chevy Chase, and you’re not.” To call me a “person” is to draw a circle around the distinctives and to underscore the unique collection of qualities that make up the one and only me.
That is most certainly not what the church wishes to say about Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
To find fresh language for talking about the Trinity and, thus, about the Holy Spirit, we can look with new eyes at the work of the brilliant young fourth-century pastors and theologians known as the Cappadocians: Basil the Great, his younger brother Gregory of Nyssa, and their close friend Gregory of Nazianzus (we should also include Macrina, sister of Basil and Gregory. She was a vital theological thinker and a significant conversation partner in their trinitarian deliberations, but she often gets dimmed out of the history). The Cappadocians engaged in creative thinking about the phrase that God is one being in three “hypostases.” In contemporary English, the best way to express the Capadocians understanding of “hypostases,” suggests Robert Jenson, is not “persons” but “identities.” Jenson says if someone were to ask, Who is Robert Jenson? you can answer in various ways. He is the funny guy with a beard, the seminary professor, the husband, and so on. In other words, one guy, the same guy, but with a number of different identities. Jenson goes on to say about the trinitarian God,
Now there are three identities of the one being of God. Who is this God?
Well, he is God the author of the story with his people. Who is this God?
He is God settled into that story and an actor in it. Who is God? He is the wind of God that moves history. Or in the language that came to be standard,
Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And any one of them is a perfect and complete identification of the one God.6
Catholic theologian Herbert McCabe provides a helpful illustration of how the notion of identities is always relational. McCabe supposes that his niece is soon to deliver her first child and that next week he will become for the first time a great-uncle. This week he is not a great-uncle, but next week he will have a new identity as a great-uncle. It would be misleading to think that great-uncle Herbert is a different person from pre-great-uncle Herbert. “My becoming a great-uncle,” he says, “involves no change in me at all; it is entirely a matter of a change in my niece Kate and what is occurring in her womb.”7 In other words, McCabe will not be a different person but will have a new identity because there is now a new great-nephew or greatniece, that is to say because a new relationship has been formed. McCabe cannot be a great-uncle all by himself; no, that identity needs a great-niece or nephew. So it is with the trinitarian God. God is One, and there is only one God, God has three identities, Father, Son, and Spirit, three relationships within the Trinity.
Without getting too deep in the weeds here, this notion of God as one with three identities, if left alone and defined in a weak sense, could flirt with the old heresy of modalism, the claim that what we call Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are merely guises that God assumes from time to time. The notion of divine identities gets stronger if combined with another helpful image some recent theologians have proposed, that is to understand the Holy Spirit, along with the Father and the Son, as dramatis personae in the gospel narrative. In a novel, a play, or a short story, the characters are distinct and have substance and integrity on their own, and yet they are defined only in relationship to the other characters and as they play out their roles in the fabric of the whole plot. Shakespeare’s character Hamlet, for example, is sometimes described as an “anti-hero,” but, if so, his anti-heroism develops only in relationship to what he does or doesn’t do about his dead father, his mother, and the other characters in the fabric of the whole play. Hamlet is a distinct character; he is not Ophelia, he is Hamlet. But who he is as a character, his identity, is constituted only by his relationship with Ophelia and the other characters.
The inner life of the Trinity is a ceaseless interaction and interpenetration of Father, Son, and Spirit, and this unified life of the Trinity, this One God in three, is projected like a movie onto the screen of history. What results is a story, the gospel story, a narrative that is told in Scripture, in which Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are actors, characters, different dramatis personae, in the story. “‘Father, Son, and Holy Spirit’ is a very compressed telling of the narrative by which Scripture identifies God,” says Jenson.8 Or, as Jürgen Moltmann puts it, “The New Testament talks about God by proclaiming in narrative the relationships of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.”9
To tell the full gospel story, then, we are called to let the plot unfold with the entire array of divine personae, to show their interactions and relationships, including those of the Holy Spirit. Preachers tell and retell the story of God the Father and the story of the Christ, but we should not neglect, perhaps especially but not only on Pentecost, to tell the full story including the story of the dramatis persona called the Holy Spirit, who filled the disciples with power, gathered three thousand people for baptism, performed wonders and signs through the apostles, and created a new community of worship, generosity, fellowship, and goodwill (Acts 2).
Sometimes we unintentionally narrow the narrative. Even those preachers who have zeal to keep their sermons theological, and to ground always the ethical vision of the Christian community in the action of God, can still travel almost exclusively in the lane of christology. We speak vigorously of Christ but in ways that can easily exhaust the full range of possibilities of “God with us.” Christ fills up our hearts, we say. Christ creates unity where there is broken community, Christ makes peace where there is enmity, Christ offers himself to us at the table, and so on. What role, then, is left for the Holy Spirit, except perhaps to bring a “sweet, sweet spirit in this place”? Sometimes we preach as though Christ constantly taunts the Holy Spirit with a ditty from Annie Get Your Gun: “Anything you can do, I can do better. I can do anything better than you.”10 The whole story requires a telling not only of the wonders of Christ, but the wonder of the Father and the wonders of the Holy Spirit.
In the gospel story, there is God the Father, but God is called Father only because God has a son. And the Son is called the Son only because he has a parent. OK, well and good, but the relationship Father-Son, and the relationship Son-Father, we get that. But what about the Spirit, and what about relationships defines the Spirit? That’s harder to grasp. How do we speak of that?
Imagine an earthly father who has a son, but a son from whom the father is estranged. They haven’t talked and haven’t seen each other in years. The emotional life between them as father and son has grown cold. Now imagine also a friend who loves them both, a friend who is heart-broken that the father and son have grown distant. So, this friend decides to do what she can to reconnect father and son. She goes to the father, whom she loves, and pleads with him. “Remember that your son is your son, that he is a part of you, that he is a child of your love.” Likewise, she reaches out to the son, whom she also loves, reminding him of the father he once loved, the father who once was close and loving toward his son, the father who is not only loving, but loveable. Finally, through the efforts of this friend, father and son are reconciled and the loving relationship restored.
A rough analogy perhaps, but the Spirit plays the part of that friend in the life of the Trinity. Now, in the divine circle, Father and Son have never been estranged, have eternally been in loving relationship, but this is because the Spirit has been eternally interceding between them, always presenting the Father to the Son as the loving Father in whom the Son has life and always presenting the Son to the Father as his Son begotten in love. “So we must learn to think,” says Jenson, “the Spirit is indeed the love between two personal lovers, the Father and the Son … [the one] who in his own intention liberates Father and Son to love each other …. The Son adores the Father, but it is the Spirit who shows the Father to the Son … as the available and lovable Father.”11
It’s a beautiful picture, the life of the Trinity, a web of loving relationships. God the Father has a Son, and the Son has a Father. They both have the Spirit, a lover who liberates Father and Son to love each other. But what difference does this make to us? Very little if the primary purpose of the Christian faith is only to enable us to be better people morally, prepared to engage in the tireless struggles for justice. Then all we need is for Jesus to be a teacher, a sage, who by word and deed shows us an example of righteous living. Indeed, Jesus as sage is a popular view among many progressive Christian. Yes, the Christian faith empowers us to be seekers of justice, but God wishes to give us an even larger gift than moral teachings and example, the gift of God’s own life. That happens because God astoundingly wishes to draw us into the very life of the Trinity. Christians work for justice not because of rectitude, but because justice is at the heart of God’s life, and we are drawn into that life.
As we are gathered into God’s life, we do not become, of course, the fourth member of the Trinity. Our point of entry is through Jesus Christ. As the Book of Hebrews so powerfully portrays it, Jesus says he is not ashamed to call human beings his siblings, for it is true that all humanity has one Father. Hebrews goes on to affirm that Jesus stands in the midst of the Trinity with his arms embracing all human beings and announces, “Here am I and the children whom God has given me” (see Hebrews 2:11-13). John Calvin said that all that Christ did for us is “nothing to us until we grow into one body with him” and that it is by the “secret energy of the Spirit” that Christ’s redemption becomes effective for us, the Spirit making it possible that we might receive “the benefits of the salvation which Christ has purchased.”12 Our reception of the full life of God is dependent upon the love of Christ for us and our love for Christ, and a love that is repaired, liberated, and energized by the Holy Spirit.
When the Holy Spirit came to those at Pentecost, it gave the disciples the power to speak in tongues, and it was not the gibberish of fevered and random glossolalia but the word about “God’s deeds of power,” now accessible in all the languages and to all the peoples gathered in Jerusalem that day. When Peter, emboldened by the Spirit, stood to preach, his sermon shows that, “God’s deeds of power,” meant nothing less than “Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with deeds of power, wonders, and signs that God did through him among you” (Acts 2:22). When the hearers, cut to the quick, exclaimed, “What should we do?” Peter significantly responds, “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
There it is, the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The Spirit, as a lover, repairs our broken love for God in Christ. Thus, the first command of Peter is “repent,” come home to God’s love in Christ and be restored. But the Spirit not only repairs us but sends us forth to live God’s promises in Christ. Therefore, Peter’s second command is “be baptized,” be joined to the name of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit that you may radiate the life of God in your own life.
When the great teacher of Eastern Orthodoxy at Oxford, Kallistos Ware, looked for guidance about our relationship to the Holy Spirit, he was drawn to a prayer of Saint Symeon, the Byzantine mystical monk, who was called “the New Theologian.” He was named “the New Theologian” not because he composed a systematic theology but because he spoke of the immediacy of God in his own experience. To the Holy Spirit, Symeon prayed,
Come, true light.
Come, life eternal.
Come, hidden mystery.
Come, treasure without name.
Come, reality beyond all words.
Come, person beyond all understanding . . .
Come, unfailing expectation of all who are being saved . . .
Come, invisible whom none may touch and handle . . .
Come, for your name fills our hearts with longing and is ever on our lips; yet who you are and what your nature is, we cannot say or know . . .
Come, Alone to the alone . . .
Come, for you are yourself the desire that is within me . . .
Come, my breath and my life . . .
Come, my joy, my glory, my endless delight . . .13
Ware found in this prayer three significant affirmations about the role of the Spirit in our lives. First, the Spirit is the source of gladness and rejoicing among the faithful. The Spirit is “my joy, my glory, my endless delight.” Jürgen Moltmann wrote, “With Easter the laughter of the redeemed, the dance of the liberated, and the creative play of fantasy begins.” Moltmann cites Hippolytus’ great image that Christ is the leader of the great mystic round-dance, dancing with his bride the Church. Moltmann assures us that this vision is not some otherworldly wish but is a matter of everyday life. How? The “creative Spirit” makes the resurrection of Jesus Christ a present reality to us, and we break out in song, joyful dancing, and holy laughter.14
Recently my wife served as a church-appointed mentor for a Presbyterian ministerial candidate from Ghana. When he finished his studies, he was ordained in a service held in a Ghanaian church in Delaware, and my wife was present. At one point in the Presbyterian ordination service, after the candidate kneels for the laying on of hands, the candidate stands again and is formally proclaimed a minister of the gospel with the words, “You are now a minister of Word and Sacrament, in the church of
Jesus Christ.” Most Presbyterians observe this moment with reverent silence, but not the Ghanaian congregation. My wife reported that when their friend now stood before them as a newly ordained minister, they burst into spontaneous and joyful song and suddenly rose from the pews and filled the room with free and jubilant dancing. The choreographer of the dance was, of course, the Holy Spirit.
Second, the Spirit as the “unfailing expectation of all who are being saved,” makes present to us now the hope of God’s promised future. In the words of the old African American spiritual “That Great Gettin’ Up Morning,” “There’s a better day a-comin,’ Fare thee well, fare thee well. There’s a better day a-comin,’ Fare thee well, fare thee well.” The Spirit teaches us the truth that there’s a better day coming in God’s future and liberates us to sing in the middle of a dark and broken world, “Fare thee well.”
A few days after Renee Macklin Good, a mother of three, was unmercifully shot and killed in Minneapolis by ICE agent Jonathan Ross—a violent moment in the midst of terror unleashed in the city by federal immigration agents—New Hampshire Episcopal Bishop Rob Hirschfeld joined others in his community for a vigil. When he spoke, he denounced the “cruelty, the injustice, and the horror … unleashed in Minneapolis.” Then he turned to specifically address his fellow clergy and told them that, even though he had himself many times signed lofty church statements calling for social justice, “It may be that now is no longer the time for statements, but for us with our bodies to stand between the powers of this world and the most vulnerable.”
As some of the ministers present gasped in surprise tinged with fear, Hirschfeld told the clergy to get ready for “a new era of martyrdom.” He said they should be sure that their affairs were in order and their wills written. The clergy looked at each other with uncertainty, wondering just what they were hearing from their bishop. Hirschfeld then quickly added that he was not suggesting that they seek out death or martyrdom but instead that their faith be so strong and sure that, as they served God courageously in these convulsive times, they would not fear death.
This confidence in Christ’s promise of life in the face of death is of course the work of the Holy Spirit, who makes Christ’s promises so real and present to us that we walk through the valley of the shadow of death fearing no evil, knowing that God is with us.
Finally, Ware heard in Saint Symeon’s prayer to the Spirit the paradox that the Spirit is as close to us as our hand to our face, “the desire that is within me . . . my breath and my life,” and yet, at the same time, is veiled from our sight, the “hidden mystery … treasure without name …reality beyond all words … person beyond all understanding.” As for Jesus, we saw him, saw him face-to-face. As John says, “The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (John 1:14), but the Spirit is as invisible as the wind. Ware says that this paradoxical closeness and hiddenness is because the Holy Spirit is …
a kenotic Spirit, who hides himself in revealing himself. Ever present, he yet effaces himself; working within us, he adapts himself to us and so remains concealed. With total immediacy we feel his presence and we know his power; yet we do not see his face, for he shows us always the face of Christ(cf. Jn 15:26; 16:13–15). He is a free Spirit, constantly crossing boundaries, not to be controlled and classified, baffling our card indexes and confusing our computers. The wind of the Spirit, as Jesus affirms, “blows where it wishes; you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going” (John 3:8).15
Puerto Rican-born church historian and theologian Zaida Maldonado Pérez, underscores this idea that the Spirit blows like the wind, undeterred by boundaries, when she writes in her book Latina Evangelicas: A Survey From the Margins, that the Holy Spirit is the “wild child of the Trinity”:
I love the Holy Spirit. She is like the wild child of the Trinity, anywhere and everywhere moving, calling forth, and stirring things up. She is wonderfully illusive yet also fully present. She is untamable, full of possibilities and creative potential. She is the salsa beat in our daily foxtrot. She is and will be unconventional, even uncultured. She is the wonder that moves our questions from, what does this all mean? to, what shall we do? She can forever alter our lives and change our world. She is life-giving breath, wind, and fire. She is the ruach elohim, the flaming divine pneuma that is always“going native” because she wants to be encountered by all. She is calming Spirit amid the storm. She is wisdom.
When Dhananjay Jagannathan was working on his PhD in philosophy in Chicago, a friend asked him if he had ever had anything like a religious experience. He quickly answered “no,” but then, after a little reflection, said, “I’m not sure.”16 Today Jagannathan, who teaches philosophy at the City University of New York, is a member of a quite unusual New York City choral group, the Renaissance Street Singers. The group sings Renaissance polyphonic compositions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but they sing not in concert halls but on the street corners and subway stations of New York City. They sing Renaissance works amid the hectic flow of the city. Many people just pass them by, but a fair number stop to absorb the enchanting beauty of the music, sung on the gray streets of New York.
Because their repertoire includes the best music of the era, it is mostly music composed for the Christian Mass. Thus, the group sings frequently of the gospel and of Jesus Christ, but they sing this music because of its musical excellence, not its message. Most of the singers in the Renaissance Street Singers are non-believers. A few are Jewish, but the others are atheists, as was Jagannathan.
Jagannathan, however, was curious about the music he was singing and wanted to know more about the liturgical context for which it was composed. That meant going to churches to learn, and he learned quickly that his strong tenor voice was a coveted asset in church. He joined a choir. Just to learn, mind you, but then, “Before long, I realized I wasn’t there just for the music.”
I tried explaining to people that, while I still considered myself a nonbeliever, it felt important to go to church. I tried pointing to various things churchgoing afforded beyond membership in the choir: a connection to a wider community—especially important for those like me who were prone to being trapped in a university bubble—an opportunity for service to others, time set apart for nonproductive activity. But in reality, I couldn’t fully explain it to myself. I felt closer to understanding why when I was singing with others.17
Jagannathan gradually became aware that he had grown discontented with the rigid pieties of university culture, where religious belief is automatically dismissed as superstition. This worldview was making less and less sense to him, but he had no good place to turn, no alternative that felt worthy of his deep commitment. But then he saw that singing in a choir in Christian worship was creating a new reality for him. “It took some time for me,” he says, “to realize that I was already pursuing that alternative in the Christian communities I was a part of and that I was in fact already committed to it.”18
The Spirit continued to work in the crevices and places of curiosity in Jagannathan’s life, and finally, Dhananjay Jagannathan presented himself for Christian baptism. The wind of the Spirit blows where it will, here opening up to a non-believer singing of Christ on the streets of New York the reality of that very Christ drawn near.
As a continuing part of the Renaissance Street Singers, Jagannathan often sings William Byrd’s “Ne irascaris, Domine” on the streets of the city. “I have seen children, pets, people busily striding to their next appointment, and others lazily strolling on a sunny day all come to a halt in wonder,” he writes. “One does not need to know Latin to sense the earnestness of Byrd’s (and Isaiah’s) plea for the restoration of Jerusalem.”19 “As I am often reminded,” he continues,
…we live in a broken city, a desolation for too many of our fellow citizens, in a broken world … But in Byrd’s hands, Isaiah’s plea is not only urgent, a quiet and insistent prayer, but also a vessel of the hope we need in order to cooperate with God in bringing about his kingdom and his restoration. Each time we sing “Ne irascaris”—and other compositions like it—on the streets, a little of New York City is made beautiful, even sacred, by the joint attention of those who are present. From time to time, I think, we might also make the lives of one or two of those who listen different.20
Director Angus MacLachan’s small jewel of a film, A Little Prayer, is about a dysfunctional family in Winston Salem, North Carolina. Bill, a Vietnam veteran, owns a sheet metal factory and lives in a modest suburban neighborhood with his wife, Venida. Their son, David, a veteran of the Iraq war, works as a manager in the plant, and he and his touchingly gentle and lovely wife Tammy, a young woman raised in humble conditions in the Southern Appalachian mountains, live in a cottage in his parent’s back yard. The family, once churchgoers, has ceased to attend. Bill tells Tammy at the breakfast table that he doesn’t miss going to church or singing the hymns, but that he does miss the Christmas carols. He then sings quietly, for her but also to himself, a hoarse rendition of the French version of “Un flambeau, Jeanette, Isabelle”
Bring a torch, Jeanette, Isabella
Bring a torch, come swiftly and run.
Christ is born, tell the folk of the village,
Jesus is sleeping in His cradle,
Ah, ah, beautiful is the mother,
Ah, ah, beautiful is her Son.
Life for this family is gradually falling apart. David is unfaithful to Tammy, having an affair with another employee at work, which agonizes Bill because he adores his daughter-in-law. Bill and Venida’s youngest, a foul-mouthed daughter with a spoiled daughter of her own, shows up unannounced, having abruptly left her drug-addicted husband in Virginia, and she and her bratty daughter selfishly disrupt family life. Bill, as it turns out, has his own sense of failure as a father, and the family turmoil seems irreparable. “This is the kind of movie where you’re on everybody’s side,” writes film critic Matt Zoller Seitz, “because life is hard and nobody’s perfect and none of these characters are irredeemable and you wouldn’t wish suffering on anyone who’s just out there doing the best they can (maybe on anyone, period). The movie, Seitz says, “prompts you to consider your own imperfections.”21
As all of this family chaos unfolds, a strange element occurs in the story. On many mornings in Bill and Venida’s neighborhood, an ethereal voice, seemingly coming from the sky, can be heard vigorously singing spirituals and other songs that lift the human spirit. One morning, Bill and Tammy walk the neighborhood trying to track down where this mysterious voice comes from, but they can’t find the source. The timing and origin of the voice remain a mystery. It seems to come from beyond. “Come, hidden mystery. Come, treasure without name,” Symeon prayed to the Holy Spirit.
Family life moves along, but we are not sure where. Perhaps the level of pain will finally erupt and destroy all. Or perhaps they will simply manage one more day with the blend of suffering and hesitant hope found behind the front door of almost every home. In a moving scene near the end of the film, Bill receives an unexpected phone call at his office. We don’t know who has called, we can hear only his end of the conversation, but he seems both surprised and delighted, ending the call with, “Well, OK, I’ll meet you there at noon.”
It turns out that Tammy was the caller, and she had asked if Bill would like to join her at a local art museum, her request perhaps out of a desire to be with the one member of the family she trusts and loves completely. In the museum, Bill and Tammy move through the galleries. One piece of art particularly arrests them: Frederick Church’s “The Andes of Ecuador.” The painting situates the viewer in a valley. Two small figures, almost hidden in the bottom left of the painting, are kneeling in prayer in front of an old stone cross. But the perspective of the painting beckons the viewer across the valley to the mountains in the distance, and then to the sun just above the mountain ridge, and ultimately to an infinite expanse of light beyond. The painting evokes metaphorically both the completion of creation in Genesis and the promise of a new creation.
As they look at this scene, Tammy reads from the plaque next to the painting. The painting, it says, is “one grand panorama. The infinite botanical detail, the terrifying depths of the abyss, and the overwhelming sense of unlimited space combine to communicate a powerful sense of the sublime.” Tammy confesses that she does not know what “panorama” means, and Bill gently says that “here, it’s the whole picture, as far as you can see.”
As they leave the museum, Tammy holds up two brown lunch bags she has packed. Bill says he knows just where to go to eat. They enter a nearby forest and follow a nature trail to a wooden bench where they sit down to eat and talk. In the solitude of the forest, father and daughter-in-law speak to each other words of tender affection and loving wisdom. Finally Tammy tells Bill that the mountain folk she grew up with would say that they are “kindred spirits.”
They leave the bench, walk farther down the trail, and soon they come to a meadow. On the far end of the meadow there is a break in the trees, and gauzy sunlight streams through. Tammy says in surprise, “Look, an open panorama … right here.” The soundtrack begins to play softly “Un flambeau, Jeanette, Isabelle.”
To the eyes of faith, “A Little Prayer” is a powerful metaphor for the work of the Holy Spirit, who not only teaches us the grand panorama of God’s recreating the heavens and the earth, but also opens up, along the everyday trails we are traveling, in the middle of life’s messiness, “an open panorama … right here.”
As Peter, swept up in the power of the fire and wind, ended his sermon that Pentecost Day, “You will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to him” (Acts 2:38-39).
