The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
— T. S. Eliot, Little Gidding
I think I’ve already talked to you recently about the church at Little Gidding, but on this weekend of Pentecost I have another story about it for you. It’s a story about the work of the Holy Spirit. In 2008, after a year and a half of not knowing what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, I took a trip to the UK and ended up at the church at Little Gidding — setting of the T.S. Eliot poem and home of the 17th century Anglican clergyman Nicholas Ferrar. (Ferrar, as you might recall, was the first to re-institute something like a post-Reformation monastic community in the Church of England.)
Anyway, I was eating breakfast in the kitchen of the tiny retreat house at Little Gidding when a gentleman walked in and sat at the table. He wasn’t a guest, but was apparently a priest who lived in the neighborhood. We began talking, and he asked me where I was from and why I was there. I told him a little about myself, and that I had just left my job with the government and was trying to figure out what might be next. Then, completely out of the blue, he said “you should get a PhD in theology and then you can do something very special for the Church.” Hearing this was alarming — and not a little terrifying. It was certainly unexpected.
Friends, I only vaguely considered going to seminary at all at that point. That encounter, with a man I had never met before and have never seen since, was one of the clearest examples of the Holy Spirit’s work in my life that I’ve ever experienced. It was the moment I received my vocation from God, though I only could clearly realize that in retrospect. But as Eliot describes the descent of the Holy Spirit in the excerpt above, there is something frightening about it. All too often we can sentimentalize and domesticate the Holy Spirit, turning the third person of the Trinity into a generalized source of good feelings. While it’s true that the Holy Spirit is named in Scripture as the Comforter, this is a comfort far different from what the world knows. The Holy Spirit opens up to us possibilities we never could have imagined, drawing us closer to God in ways that are not always easy or pleasant, but which are always sanctifying.
Where might God be speaking into your life, calling you to things you never thought possible? Where is God inviting you to draw near to the purifying fire of the Spirit that does not kill, but gives eternal and abundant life? This week, look around and listen. You might hear something unexpected, too.
Yours in Christ,
The Rev. Cn. Dr. Kara Slade, Associate Rector