“Spirit” by John Minott

Editor’s note: In this post, the author remembers one of FBC’s rituals when members blindly pick a star with a word which we can meditate with for a time. He shares his experience with the word as he connects it to his and our lives.

Spirit
By John Minott

My Star Word lies on my desk, sometimes buried by the detritus of a current project, or, more likely, by the daily mail. It continues to haunt me, not because of the mystical powers of the word, but because I don’t know what to do with it. I remember the Sunday I picked it up. It was a communion Sunday, and I was sitting in a usual place, at the aisle end of a pew towards the front. I was contemplating the word “spirit” lettered on the star on my lap. A voice I recognized as that of a friendly surgeon said over my shoulder as he processed down the aisle toward bread, wine, and his own star: “Not too much at one time”.

My star word has appeared again as I cleared my desk on a cold mid-winter afternoon. “Spirit.” What does that word mean? What does that word mean to me? What did it mean to the person who wrote the word on the star? Does it mean anything that I happened to pick that particular star? When you have an answer to any of those questions, dear reader, would you please whisper it over my shoulder? I will be sitting at the end of a pew, towards the front.

In my search for insight, brilliantly I turned to the dictionary. The word “spirit” has twenty different clauses of meanings – 3 and 7/8 inches in my fine print Webster’s! Roget’s Thesaurus has twenty-two synonyms. But no insights.

But now that I think about it, perhaps it is significant that there are so many meanings, definitions, and synonyms for the word spirit. It is an intangible, and kinda hard to pin down. In the spirit of playing fair with the folk who engineered the whole star word project, I should take this seriously. So, enter the Holy Spirit. Having the word on my star in my lap in the sanctuary immediately following receiving the sacred bread and wine, why did not this connection immediately lock in? Probably because I am not very religious.

But I do have a theology surrounding the Holy Spirit. I believe that the inspiration that transformed Jesus at the time of his baptism, and depicted in the scriptures as a dove descending, can be understood as a visitation of the Holy Spirit. For Jesus it was the inspiration, vision, commitment and purpose that gave birth to the Christ. That spirit became the life force of Jesus and became Holy.

I don’t really think that this moment of conviction for Jesus was quite as sudden as the story portrays. Remember it follows Jesus’ forty-day sojourn in the wilderness. In that crucible Jesus fought off the demons of his fears, questions, doubts, uncertainties. When he emerged from the wilderness, he had forged a commitment and sealed it with his baptism. And it was that spirit we now refer to as the “Holy Spirit” that guided him, enabled him and empowered him to become he whom we now acknowledge as the Christ. And it is that spirit that we accept as dwelling in us as we are baptized.

I believe that over the centuries the community of believers we call the church, gathered in the name of Jesus, the Christ, has committed a rather serious travesty. A kind of creedal consensus that the spirit that empowered Jesus was deemed available only to those who belong to the faith. The popular church song sung as “They will know we are Christian by our love” hints at this as it suggests that only Christians know how to love. Was it Mahatma Ghandi who said (something like) “I love Christianity. It’s Christians with whom I have a problem.” A God who can arrange the stars has to be bigger than our human imagination can dream, larger than our formulae for belief, and larger than our sectarian boxes and denominational biases.

In trying to define the Holy Spirit, or even the word “spirit” we are confined by our vocabulary. There is something more to the definition of the word than words can provide. Those of us who are inspired by the spirit that transformed Jesus into the Christ we try to follow can intuit a meaning of the word without the requirement of words. They may get in the way. But there is that within us that guides us, moves us, leads us, that directs us. It is spirit, holy or not.

There hangs an enormous, very well-known painting in the Marblehead, Massachusetts town hall (if memory serves – it often doesn’t). You would recognize it by its name “The Spirit of 76”. It portrays three Revolutionary war heroes marching through a battlefield with drum, fife, and flag, despite obvious wounds, bandaged up. I believe the artist (so famous I don’t remember his name) was portraying the triumph of independence, justice, and liberty for all, an altruistic hope for the new nation, a national pride: the spirit of America.

A French philosopher of the nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville once toured America and proclaimed “America is great because America is good. If America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” He was looking beyond (beneath?) the industrial power, the agricultural providence, the financial strength, the political structures, the military potential, the inventive genius and saw what he believed to be the American character, the “spirit” of America. I wonder as I observe our nation if America is still good.

Oh yes, we see that “Spirit of America” broadcast on every license plate we follow and get cut off by. If the spirit of our nation is proclaimed by Massachusetts drivers, well – de Toqueville, stay home!

Well, these are the “spiritual” musings of a 91-year-old man who sits each week, toward the front, seeking a renewal visitation of the spirit of his faith community, and thinking it’s time to look up the good doctor and share some spirit – but not too much at one time.