PENTECOST: A Holy Spirit Poem

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Acts 2:1-21

PENTECOST: A Holy Spirit Poem (in 50 Lines)

Holy Spirit, I can't put my finger on you

I can't get my mind around you.

But every time I charge into you, O Formless Mist, collapse into your abyss, 

     a little piece of you becomes lodged in my chest – reduced by an elusive Lover, 

     yet filled: with the heartbeat of God, with breath, with life.

I am Jacob wrestling the air, hip displaced all the same.

I am Abram in the presence of a divine stranger,

      but what does one give a ghost? Probably not a fatted calf

I am Elijah utterly devastated by a whirlwind and yet here I stand still.

Shaken and stirred, shaken and still – is this what you call peace or upheaval?

You have no name by which to address you – only adjectives –

      insufficient, incomplete, inconsequential? Maybe

There is no sacred name

No YHWH from the burning bush

No Jesus from the angel lips

Just Ghost or Spirit or Paraclete for those who are too well educated

And so what are we to say do be in your presence,

O you of the final Nicene paragraph?

be-re-SHIYT ba-RA eh-lo-HIYM, and you moved on the face of the great deep

like a water bug on my grandma's pond

you skated through the Creation

A curious role – not the Creator,

      not the Word through whom all things were made

Just the wind kissing the waves,

a dancer on a wet stage tapping out a victory dance, holding back the chaos 

     with each violent, graceful step.

And before a man was made, before a women was formed, you were gone.

Into the...I don't where

Back to your secret career.

A Ghost.

A Silence.

A mystery so tanglely tangled in the Godhead as to be indistinguishable

So caught up in the master plan I'm sure you have been busy I'm just not sure 

     what you have been doing

Sitting in the back row, whispering the answers, that part in the box that you 

     know must be important but you're not quite sure what it is.

Then, when the time was right, there were rumblings

That's what the crowds thought, heard

Rumblings

And a bird – a dove – is that a name, an adjective, a metaphor, a costume?

      Whatever it was it stuck. Dress up as a bird one time and no one let's you forget it

Or were you the thunder – shaking the worlds sight unseen

Like lightening wrapped in the sky, obscured by the clouds

A portent in the heavens – a threat? or a promise?

Both, I suspect

O Great Infiltrator

You do seem to specialize in breaking and entering

Finding your way into closed places

Virgin wombs, sealed tombs, Upper rooms,

Our hearts

And always, always, always to make new life

O Holy Disturbance – (I think the name suits you)

I do not know why you are here

Do you come in peace?

Or do you come to light heads on fire and make saints stumble through the streets 

     like drunkards and create some of the chaos you stomped down in the beginning?

Are you gift or ghost?

And should I be afraid every time I invoke your nameless name, wave my feeble hands, 

     over our bread and wine and over us – so unsuspecting in our old wooden pews, 

     with plans for this afternoon?

Do you come to comfort us through our nightmares? Or rouse with new dreams?

Holy Spirit, I can't put my finger on you. But I think I need you, want you to get your hands on us.