“Nature’s peace flows into us,” says the naturalist John Muir, “like sunshine into trees.” The introit for Holy Mass on the solemnity of Pentecost elevates the sentiment to grace and phrases it like this; “The Spirit of the Lord fills the world, alleluia, is all-embracing, and knows man’s utterance, alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”
The power of God is inscribed into his creation. We feel it profoundly when we attend closely to the beautiful things he has made, the sun and trees and birds among all of his menagerie of creatures, his goodness poured into wild prodigal handiwork. This is why people love nothing more than getting out into the woods for an afternoon, or sitting by sea, or retreating to a mountain vacation. We feel something of the divine.
That’s one of the aspects I’ve always loved about running and riding bikes long distances. You to move through landscapes that would blur past if all we were to do was drive a car from point A to point B. Occasionally, I manage to get pretty far out into the middle of nowhere on my bicycle, and there have been times when I’m hot, tired, dehydrated, and chastising myself for making such unfortunate choices with my free time and what I’ve chosen to call “fun,” and I’ve looked up and there are vultures circling overhead. I wonder if that’s a bad sign. They sense I’m going to fall over from exhaustion at any moment and they can pick my bones clean. It gives me renewed energy.
The movement of birds in the sky (and look, there used to be a drinking game at Epiphany when I was pastor there in which the parishioners joked that every time Father Michael talks about the sky or beauty or an obscure poet or mentions Yale during a homily you have to drink. I never approved of it, but I think today’s homily would be difficult for those folks), anyway, I’m fascinated by birds in the sky.
Birds of prey float in slow circles, silent sentinels pitched up there in the glare of the sun. I shield my eyes to catch a glimpse of winged hunters stalking the fields with unyielding gaze. I always wonder how they view me, what they think of me down below, sitting there by the lake with my pink-and-blue whale-patterned swim trunks and a hipster-grade IPA beer in hand, reading some obscure book on liturgy. Do the hawks think I’m completely absurd? An anomaly, a temporary blip of oddity on the landscape? Or does the hawk have more pressing, primordial concerns watching for the fast movement of a rabbit drawing out a line across the meadow. Am I simply too languid for the hawk to have any concern for me at all. We humans exercise control over so many things, but hawks escape our dominance. We really are irrelevant to them.
It’s as if the birds are tracing out a foreign language, a message lingering for an instant, carved into the blue before disappearing, a hymn of praise that creation is upheld by a strong and righteous hand. The Spirit of the Lord truly fills the earth.
Because of that whiff of the divine trailing in their wings, birds of prey were always an object of fascination to ancient man. Many of the false gods were given bird-like features, the desire to fly led many a reckless young man to jump off a high ledge with cardboard wings, Icarus fell to his demise because he could not control his impulse to go higher, and ancient temples were built up into high places because in the heights is power.
In modernity, we’ve lost that sense of mystery. For us, what is hardest to see is what is really there, because we have ideas of what things should be or ought to be that are shaped by our preconceptions, arrogance, what we see on television, learn in academic theory. We have a mental picture of a hawk, but to actually stand still for even a few uninterrupted minutes and watch one, the line of its flight, the curve of the beak, flow of wind in hits feathers, the graceful watchfulness of how it rides updrafts, and then, finally, to perhaps witness its speed and aggression. To perceive this takes all our concentration, what a hawk really is.
Now, picture the Holy Spirit, a holy dove, a phoenix, a hawk hovering, watching, stirring us to life. He’s not a vague, cuddly fuzzy feeling, or a nominal ethereal concept, an “It.” The animating fire breaking from him is more lovely and dangerous than any of our tame concepts would ever hope to contain. He imparts sacred knowledge unknowable and inexpressible, this Spirit who hovers over the waters and in the same way over the Eucharistic species, under whose wings the unformed uncreated surface flutters to life, who descends on Our Lord at his Baptism with golden sun in his feathers, the same Holy Spirit who unfurls an infinite reality within us, who we receive at Baptism and Confirmation, this same Holy Spirit who descends upon the apostles and pushes them through locked doors to preach the Gospel, who has placed spiritual gifts within you, within each and every one of us, that defy our ability to encompass of our own strength but are gifts undeserved and unearned but meant for the building up of God’s goodness within his Body.
There’s a book called The Peregrine, written by a man named J.A. Baker, who was basically a car salesman but his true passion was bird-watching, in the book he writes, “I have lived among the hawks for so long that I feel more at home in their world than in my own.” When I read that, it got me thinking – what if that was our experience of the Holy Spirit? That we become so infused with his presence that our entire perspective shifts? That we ceased to live for the things of this world but for God alone?
I suppose that’s where I want to leave us this morning, with the understanding that the Holy Spirit is all-embracing, the font of wisdom who plumbs to the depths of this mystery we call life and God’s love for us. If we really apprehend him as he is, it would set our hearts on fire. Like a hawk, he strikes home like an arrow, the hunter of human hearts, the God who is relentlessly seeking us out, to catch us, and dwell with us, and craft within us God’s own pure gold.
Pondus Meum Amor Meus 