The Spirit is Multilingual

This was a sermon that I gave for Pentecost 2023, at Wallingford United Methodist Church, where I am the Music Director.

Thank you for having me, and I want to thank Pastor Phil for giving me the opportunity to preach to you today.

The first thing I feel I need to say, and I feel safe saying it here at Wallingford, is: I am not a Christian. Even by the inclusive, open-ended, welcoming way that word is used here at Wallingford, that label simply does not carry personal meaning for me.

I am, however, a long-time student of religion in general–my own deepest religious inspirations and practices in my own life come from Buddhism and Hinduism. I’m a big fan of Carl Jung and his student, the religions scholar Joseph Campbell. Campbell, in his prolific life of writings and lectures, advocated that we should read the world’s religious teachings symbolically and find their metaphoric application to our own life. I have spent so much time around the teachings of Christianity, thanks to my many years of work as a church musician in Episcopalian, Unitarian Universalist, Lutheran, and Catholic churches. In all that time of close contact I have had the opportunity to contemplate and deeply appreciate the teachings of this beautiful religion.

I just wanted to clarify my position with respect to the home tradition of this congregation, so that you know where I’m coming from. 

Pentecost is today, and of course, Pentecost is the day most closely linked with the idea of the Holy Spirit. And so what I am preaching today is something like, “a non-christian’s view of the holy spirit,” or “a metaphorical interpretation of the holy spirit.” I hope this metaphorical approach will enrich your own appreciation of the idea of spirit, whether Christian or not.

In the Inuit-Aleut languages of Arctic North America, there is an astounding proclivity for adding meanings to a word by piling on suffixes. For example, the Iñupiaq language of northern Alaska. Often, ideas that in English would take a sentence of several words to say, can be said in a single long Iñupiaq word. For example, the single word niqiłiuġñiaqtugut means “We will definitely prepare a meal.” In Mandarin, on the other hand, words can’t really bear any suffixes or markers at all: even the “s” that makes nouns plural (think of how “book” turns into “books”) has no equivalent in Mandarin. So, the word “shū” can mean “a book,” “the book,” or “books.” Iñupiaq and Mandarin represent two vastly, fascinatingly different ways of being a language.

A plant’s DNA and your DNA are made of the exact same structure and four base pairs. Although you move, speak English or Iñupiaq or Mandarin, and eat other organisms for nutrition, and a plant stays stationary and photosynthesizes, you share the exact same ingredients and, evidence shows us, descend from a common ancestor. All bacteria, fungi, algae, protozoans, and animals also probably descend from that same common ancestor. Humans and plants (and bacteria and fungi) represent vastly, fascinatingly different ways of being a living organism.

If you trace its origins, the word “spirit” refers to breathing. Notice the common root with the word re-SPIR-ation. From this same Latin root–breath or breathing–come our words in-SPIR-ation and per-SPIR-ation. Ex-SPIR-ation is when someone “breathes their last.” The original New Testament Greek word that is translated as “spirit” is “pneuma” – guess what? – it also means breath. Pneuma is the root of our word pneumonia as well as our word pneumatic. We also sometimes use the phrase “Holy Ghost.” “Ghost” descends from the Old English gāst which also means–you guessed it–a breath or wind.

I think there is a very good reason why we use words associated with breathing to address this aspect of God. In Hindu thought, they have the notion of “prana,”--also meaning breath, but meaning moreover the whole energy system of the body. The word “prana” literally translates to breath, yet the Hindu thinker can also refer to the “pranamaya kosha”--or literally, the body that is made of breath. This is what is called in other traditions the “subtle body,” or “energetic body” — the body in its aspect not as a lump of solid matter, but as a moving, dynamic energy system.

Science makes very clear why breathing is the perfect metaphor for the energetic flow in the physical body–the exchange of gases in and out of the lungs provides the flow of fuel that, chemically speaking, makes all the other working processes of the body possible. We could think of our lungs as a pair of bellows, blowing air not in and out of the nose, but rather, blowing it inward, toward every cell of our body, making possible the metabolic processes which are, quite literally, our life.

To me, the Holy Spirit is that aspect of the ineffable divine which is aimed not at the heavens, nor at the higher planes of abstract reality, nor either at the moral dimension of life, but simply toward life as such: the dynamism that makes our biological aliveness, and all the hustle and bustle of living creatures, possible. How many of you ever recited the Nicene Creed? It says, “And we believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord the…??!!!...

That’s right, “the giver of life.” Jesus is said to have been “conceived”--that, afer all, most biological of acts–by the Holy Spirit. So the Holy Spirit is that aspect of the divine most tied up in this business of aliveness. The mystery of the first unicellular Adam that begat all life, that mystery of the 100 plus pounds of protein and calcium and water that somehow turns into the wonderfully active animal or human person–the pranamaya kosha, that energy field surrounding and sustaining the body—this is the divine mystery of the Holy Spirit. The real incarnation may, after all, not be God incarnate in the historical person of Jesus, but the spark of divine activity incarnate in every bacterium, fungus, plant, and animal.

The image of the spirit descending on Pentecost as fire is, in this light, also an extremely apt metaphor: fire is a quite-literal analog to the metabolic processes that occur in our cells. As the saying goes, we “burn food for fuel,” “burn sugars,” or “burn fat”--and this really could not be more literally true. We are unleashing the chemical energy in these sources through just the same sort of reactions that release the energy in a burning log of firewood. Fire is the essence of life. Breath is the bellows that sustains the burning. Spirit is a word for the mystery that either should exist at all. Put another way, the Holy Spirit is the ultimate metaphor of the holy entering into, and taking up residence in, the mundane, as the spirit did into the disciples on Pentecost.

So what are the qualities of this spirit? And what, after all, does it have to do with Iñupiaq grammar? At this point I’d like to invite you to take a look at the two images shown on the front of your bulletin.

On the left you see a representation of the family tree of the Indo-European languages. 6000 years ago, some population in southeastern europe or central asia was speaking the language that would eventually give rise to all the terms “spirit,” “pneuma,” “gāst,” and “prana”--in other words, the parent language called Indo-European, which would branch down through the centuries into Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and the proto-Germanic that turned into Old English. Down small in the corner of that image, you can see that the entire Indo-European family tree is in fact one small branch on the tree of all human languages—the tree that would connect us Indo-European speakers to those speakers of Iñupiaq and Mandarin, of Hebrew and Aramaic, and of all other human languages.

Look at the right hand side—here the tree is even more comprehensive and shows a much longer span of time. This is a tree, not of languages, but of life itself. This tree shows all the groups of plants, fungi, animals, algae, and protozoans, branching off from our earliest single-celled ancestor.

I suggest that this image of the branching tree is the perfect image for the activity of the Spirit. What does the spirit do? It diversifies. The nature or life is to change, to branch, to become ever more multiple, to flower forth into more and yet more manifestations. Over here, a single-celled algae, over here a furry mammal, over here a flower, and over here a field of grass. It’s no wonder to me that Pentecost is a springtime festival–the time when everything is branching out and flowering forth. The spirit is always doing this: Over here, a human speaking a language with no verb morphology, over there, a human speaking a language with unbelievably complex verb forms. 

Over here, christian liturgy, over there, Hindu yoga, and over there, Japanese poetry. This is why I think we view Pentecost as a festival day especially for arts and music. Arts are culture forms, like language, which never hold still, which branch and multiply, which diversify and become, over here, western classical music, and, over there, the dance music of latin america, and over there, African drumming, and over there, Tuvan throat singing.

To me it is no wonder that linguistic diversity is central to the story of Pentecost. The spirit loves to become various. At the beginning of the Bible, the SPIRIT of God moves over the waters, maybe awakening that first single-celled ancestor in the primordial ocean, and, 3.7 billion years and uncountable branchings later, Iñupiaq and Mandarin nouns share the earth with the whole bubbling teeming bustle of life’s magnificent diversity.

And the arts. The arts are those human activities we privilege to remind us of this reality. At a time when so much of our cultural messaging tells us about the crappiness of the world, the sadness of life, the unholy state and trajectory of creation in 2023, the arts and music, like what we’ve tried to put in front of you all today, descend like tongues of fire, to rekindle our admiration for the surprising holiness of living itself. Life is various, and the spirit is multilingual.