Polyglot Spirit

I returned from annual gathering of the Minnesota Conference of The United Methodist Church on Friday. Seeing friends and worshipping together are always highlights of Conference for me.

Sunday was Pentecost Sunday, that day when we tell again the story of God’s Spirit sweeping among the Jesus community like a strong, driving wind, and the creative chaos of multiple languages being spoken simultaneously, yet each person hearing of God in a way they could understand. God’s Spirit is polyglottal.

I experienced something of the polyglot Spirit while at Annual Conference. I especially experienced it on the last night of conference through two very very different gatherings. Thursday night was the ordination service – often a deeply meaningful and moving experience. I and many colleagues donned our clergy robes and processed into the service together. Singing, praying, walking, sitting together reminds us that we are a community, we United Methodist clergy in Minnesota, and on this night we welcome new members into that community. We often recall our own ordinations. I have developed a deep fondness for that part of the service where we sing the chant Veni Sanctu Spiritus – “Come Holy Spirit” as each person is ordained. The Latin chant, sung repeatedly, evokes for me the mystical dimension of God’s Spirit, the Spirit inviting us to transcendence, to deep transformation, to plumb the depths of the heart and mind and open them to new life.

After ordination, my friend Dale, my son David, and I met a few other friends at an off-conference site, a small establishment a couple of blocks from the convention center where the conference was being held. We talked and laughed for awhile, then musicians took the unobtrusive stage. The first was a sort of Tom Waits folk singer who played guitar and sang, accompanied by a single drum drummer. The drummer stayed on while a talented blues guitarist played and sang. This folk/blues music was another voice of the Spirit – reminding me that God’s Spirit works in the midst of all the circumstances of our lives, integrates into our spirituality the earthiness of our bodies, our sexuality, our friendships, our laughter, our disappointments, our failures, our loneliness. The work of God’s Spirit is integrating and integrity, it is wholeness and holiness. To paraphrase Tillich, a man is no bigger than the amount of diabolic in himself he can assimilate (Michael Eigen, The Electrified Tightrope, 9).

God’s polyglot Spirit continues to speak to me, and in me – uttering the prayer that I might be both more holy and more human.

With Faith and With Feathers,

David