Together on the Journey: A Weekly Blog from Fr. Andrew Sheldon
One of the most compelling renderings of the Day of Pentecost I have read is according to the prophet Dr Seuss. It is his well-known book The Cat in the Hat. It tells the story of a brother and sister on a day when their parents are out and: ‘The sun did not shine. It was too wet to play. So we sat in the house all that cold, cold, wet day.’ And then the Cat in the Hat and his companions, Thing One and Thing Two, show up and chaos descends. The children are delighted, but the goldfish is certain the parents would be less so and protests: ‘No, no! Make that cat go away! Tell that cat in a hat you do not want to play!’ But the cat does not go away, and things only become more chaotic.
Now, we have no idea what the weather was like that spring day in ancient Israel, but we do know there was a bunch of people sitting in a house. They, too, had been left behind. Ten days before, Jesus had left them and – for all we know – they had spent that entire time huddled in that room wondering what to do next. And then, there was a knock on the door, and whoosh – in waltzed the Cat in the Hat. Well, actually, it was the Holy Spirit, but the resulting chaos was pretty much the same. Thing One and Thing Two were out of the bag.
And this is something I hunch we have lost: the wildly unpredictable, somewhat chaotic, entirely subversive nature of the Holy Spirit. We have tamed the Spirit. So much so that the symbol of the Spirit is a dove – gently cooing.
In the Celtic tradition, the Holy Spirit is also represented as a bird – but not the peaceful and serene dove landing on Jesus at his baptism. For their symbol of the Holy Spirit, the Celtic people chose the wild goose. Why did the wild goose speak to those ancient Celtic Christians?
To begin with, wild geese aren’t controllable. You can’t restrain a wild goose and bend it to your will. They’re raucous and loud. Unlike the sweet and calming cooing of a dove, a goose’s honk is strong, challenging, strident and unnerving – and just a bit scary. In much the same way, the Spirit of God can be compelling, demanding and unsettling.
That Spirit takes discouraged people closeted in an upper room and it sends them rolling down the stairs and out the doors to instigate a benevolent mob scene. With great joy, and with wind and fire and Spirit, making them look like a bunch of happy drunks in the midst of a numbingly sober and sour world.
What happened to that kind of witness? Can you imagine anyone stumbling into St George’s on a Sunday morning and mistaking us for drunks? Hung-over, maybe, but drunk? We tend to be a bit more like that goldfish: No, no, we do not want to play!
Nonetheless I know many of you well enough to know that your Christian walk does bring you joy, and I do enjoy our lively celebrations on Sunday morning. I wonder, however, what it would look like to push that envelope a bit more? What it would look like to welcome a bit of chaos? To let the Cat in the Hat in?
Andrew+