Shrinking Happily
We often find ways of building ourselves up. I know the value of lifting my own image. People want to feel strong and valuable enough to have a sense of well-being. When you succeed at this, you help yourself, but you help others also. You feel full and well enough to do for others.
But there is something quite different that can happen to a picture of ourselves: nearly opposite, yet benefiting us greatly. It happens best when it occurs spontaneously out of our awareness of a power outside of ourselves, which is infinitely other and more powerful than ourselves. To encounter this awareness is to shrink in profound humility, but to feel lifted in a sense of belonging, to the Other.
On Pentecost, we place ourselves before an experience of the disciples of Jesus. In the story Luke tells, his followers are among a great many pilgrims in Jerusalem for Jewish holy days. Some sights and sounds go with their experience of God: a play of light, like tongues of fire resting on each one, and a sound like that of rushing wind. I want to give attention to what they do. Each of them, being filled with the Holy Spirit begin speaking about the great things God has done. They spontaneously tell aloud God’s deeds of power.
We could say, they all dropped the usual human agenda of elevating self-importance, shifting to the greatness of God. Sometimes the soul magnifies the Lord, and our spirits rejoice in God the Creator and Savior. The importance of what they shared is clear from the feature the Holy Spirit allowed the acclamations to be understood by all despite language differences. See how Luke tells of it in The Acts of the Apostles:
Are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear, each of us, in our own native language? … in our own languages, we hear them speaking about God's deeds of power." All were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, "What does this mean?" (Luke 2:7-8, 11-12).
What the Spirit has done with the disciples (I maintain it is more than the Twelve, including all the assembled believers, women, and men—Acts 1:14) has a spill-over effect on all who are witnessing this. Witnesses are perplexed, amazed, and wondering about the meaning. It is an occasion of the awesome power of God. When someone has a brush with divine power it immerses them in the reality of the greatness of God and provides them with their relative smallness.
You have had this, I am sure. I have had this—a remarkable shrinking feeling. A twentieth-century German theologian proposes to call it creature-consciousness or creature-feeling. “It is the emotion of a creature, submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures.” (Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy, 1923) With this in mind, I love it that in our celebration of Pentecost we take a portion of Psalm 104 upon our lips, praising God who marvelously made so many creatures. Look at these three verses:
25 O Lord, how manifold are your works! *
in wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
26 Yonder is the great and wide sea
with its living things too many to number, *
creatures both small and great.
27 There move the ships,
and there is that Leviathan, *
which you have made for the sport of it.
I like Hebrew scholar, Robert Alter’s translation of verse twenty-seven, speaking of the huge sea creature which is terrifyingly awesome to humans: “There the ships go, this Leviathan You fashioned to play with.” What is a giant monster to humans is God’s delightful plaything. Sometimes our observation of the wonders of nature makes us aware of the power that brings about all these wonders.
Twentieth-century theologian and mystic, Evelyn Underhill describes life in the Spirit as “a person’s vague, fluctuating, yet persistent apprehension of an enduring and transcendent reality; it is a person’s instinct for God.” The apprehension is limited, that is, human-sized and what we can survive personally, but it still connects us effectively to the power utterly beyond us. She says, that in various ways we “realize our limited personal relations with that transcendent Other which we call divine, eternal or real.” She says it is an “inflowing power” going further to describe it as…
… a veritable accession of vitality; energizing the self, or the religious group, impelling it to the fullest and most zealous living out of its existence, giving it fresh joy and vigor, and lifting it to fresh levels of life. (Evelyn Underhill, The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-Day, 1922)
If that is what our celebration of Pentecost is about, if that is what openness to life in the Spirit is about, I hope we encounter exactly that. I feel our lives, and our life as a community realizes purpose most completely as we ready ourselves to receive the outpouring of the Holy Spirit promised by Christ to his disciples. Perhaps the most powerful ancient prayer is “Come, Holy Spirit.” Let these three words be our prayer indeed. Let us pray it earnestly. We might get that shrinking feeling before the grandeur of God, but it will be a happy shrinking. Will it come with the light show complete with tongues of fire, or an audible rush of wind? That is up to God. I am convinced we will know God’s inflowing power, and the apprehension of vitality and joy in our life together.