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| The Descent of the Holy Spirit, Joseph Matar |
A Thought for the Day for the week between Ascension and Pentecost/Whitsun offered during Holy Communion at St Olave Hart Street on Tuesday 3rd June 2025 and St Giles-in-the-Fields on Wednesday 4th June 2025
Every time I feel the Spirit moving in my heart I will pray.
The refrain from a popular African American spiritual, famously
recorded by the likes of Nat King Cole, Paul Robeson and others – ‘Every time I
feel the Spirit’ provides an appropriate soundtrack for this moment in the
church calendar.
Last Thursday, forty days after Easter, we celebrated the
Ascension of Christ – the end of his earthly ministry and his return to the
Father. This coming Sunday, fifty days after Easter, we celebrate the Feast of
Pentecost or Whitsun, if you prefer, commemorating the descent of the Holy
Spirit upon the apostles.
In these days in-between those two feasts, the church calls on us
to pray particularly for spiritual renewal and anticipation that more people
may come to know Jesus Christ today. There are lots of resources online to help
us to do that – google “Thy Kingdom Come” to find them.
Every time I feel the Spirit moving in my heart I will pray.
The Spirit draws us in to the divine relationship that we call the
Holy Trinity, so that we may be one as Jesus is one with the Father. Uniting us
with the very life of God; the ultimate object and origin of all human desire.
The Spirit draws us to him, alongside his Son in prayer, even when we don’t
have the ways or means to do so ourselves. It does so through what St Paul
describes as “sighs too deep for words.”
Even the
most faithful among us may feel uneasy about letting go – relinquishing control
– to the mysterious work of the Holy Spirit; and we are not alone in feeling
that anxiety. Since the earliest days of the church, the dynamic, universal and
transforming power of the Spirit, which is spilled out upon all regardless of
gender, colour or creed, has been seen both as liberating and threatening –
especially to the men who were concerned with maintaining order in the
church.
Some speculate this is why the spirit is feminised in literature -
and in works of art depicting the Holy Trinity, the spirit is often relegated
to a small symbol in the background or even not shown at all. Not just because
it’s hard to paint– but because of a reticence to confront its power; a
reluctance to accept its equality in the divine relationship to which we attest
in the Creeds and its ability to draw everyone into it.
Today,
reports of being ‘moved by the Spirit’ may still be viewed with suspicion by
some, especially when such movements are accompanied by ecstatic and dramatic physical
acts.
Spiritual songs can provide a means to help us recover our
understanding of the Spirit – to become more comfortable engaging with and
speaking about its work. It’s no surprise that these have their origins in
African expressions of Christianity – from a continent where the separation
between the physical and spiritual realm is less distinct than in cultures
influenced by centuries of dualistic Greek and Roman thought, which have led to
a separation in the understanding of our spiritual and physical selves. In
African-American Spirituals our conception of God cannot be separated from how
we feel his presence at work in the world. We feel him through the Spirit
as intercessor, healer, comforter and liberator.
The final
verse of ‘Every time I feel the Spirit’ – like many spirituals - refers to a
train, running to heaven and back – a symbol of freedom from the oppression of
slavery.
Listening to Spirituals we feel the joy – and pain of those inspired
to first sing them. Here the Spirit is at work as a conveyor of wisdom, leading
us to truth. The truth that is divine love.
Perhaps you
might spend some time this week engaging with these spiritual songs? Doing so
can help us to reflect on where we have felt the power of the Spirit at work in
our own lives.
For my
part, I have felt the Spirit at work through a nurse who offered to pray overnight
for a friend at the point to death; their body miraculously brought back
to health - to the great amazement of the hospital staff who had all but given
up hope. The spirit felt as intercessor and healer.
I have felt
the Spirit at baptisms and weddings - when the very nature of who people are is
changed by its work. The spirit felt as an encounter with the joy of true love.
I have felt
the spirit pour over me as a torrent of love, drawing the different threads of
my life together. Leading me towards a new path, a new vocation. The spirit
felt as a new sense of meaning and purpose in my life, the conveyor of wisdom.
I have felt
the Spirit urge me to go and speak to a man sitting in the churchyard, to find
that he was mourning the death of his Son and to give me words to pray with
him, to plan a memorial service, to help him to express his grief. Here the
Spirit was felt as liberator and comforter.
This week
as we anticipate the celebration of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the
apostles, let us pray that we may all discern its work in the world around us,
drawing us ever closer in unity to one another and to our risen and ascended
Saviour, Jesus Christ.
Every time I feel the Spirit moving in my heart I will pray. And I
pray that you will too.
Image : The Descent of the Holy Spirit by Joseph Matar
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