When the winter winds rise and the wild geese migrate overhead, domesticated cockerels become restless, flinging themselves flapping frantically into the air, sensing some long-forgotten ability to soar.
When we meet certain people, or when the seasons change in our lives, something similar may stir within our souls. Forgetting what we aren’t, we remember something very ancient about what we could once have been. Old dreams flutter to life and, in spite of ourselves, we imagine another geography for our domesticated lives.
When the respectable Pharisee Nicodemus came to find Jesus one night, wrapped in the cover of darkness, he was flapping like one of those cockerels, sensing in Jesus the call of the wild.
“The wind blows wherever it pleases,” confirmed Jesus. “You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
Wild Goose
A mark of those born of the Holy Spirit, according to Jesus, is spontaneity; the wildness of wind.
Perhaps this is why Celtic traditions represent the Spirit as a wild goose instead of a dove.
When the first disciples were born of the Spirit on the day of Pentecost they found they could fly. A deep, migratory impulse overwhelmed the rest of their lives. Peter quoted the Prophet Joel predicting that the outpouring of the Spirit in the last days would be marked by an era of imagination. In every walk of life, he said, there would be a release of fresh vision, new dreams.
A kind of blasphemy
In the light of such Biblical depictions of the Spirit-filled life, it’s disappointing - to say the least - that we as Christians tend to be so tediously unimaginative, so predictable and stubbornly resistant to change. All too often our default position is one of suspicion towards the disruption of new ideas, unfamiliar language, or any kind of edgy artistic expression.
And it’s actually a travesty - a kind of blasphemy - when people who claim to be filled with the Creator Spirit, animated by the imagination which made 25,000 species of orchid, are some of the least creative, most innocuous souls on earth.
Maybe Marx was right and we’ve been opiated by religion, conned into conforming with the tyranny of social liturgy.
It’s embarrassing. Like domesticated cockerels we strut around pecking in the dirt. Utterly unlike the wind we are entirely predictable. Earthbound we have forgotten how to fly.
It hasn’t always been this way. Surely the Spirit stirred when Julian of Norwich inspired by visions wrote the first book by a woman in the English language, when Palestrina sought to capture the polyphonic sounds of monks singing in tongues, when Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of All Saints church in Wittenberg, when Isaac Newton began asking questions and refused to stop, when Amy Carmichael set sail for India, when Gaudi started sketching his basilica in Barcelona, when John Coltrane picked up his trombone in Dix Hills on Long Island.
Where, we must ask, are those in our day born of the Spirit who will rise up on eagles wings, blowing wherever He pleases, going wherever he carries them, showing the world a wilder and more wonderful way to be fully alive? And where are the communities willing to innovate, pioneering today as a prophetic minority with spectacular inefficiency for the sake of the world to come?