“The wind blows wherever it pleases,” Jesus once said to Nicodemus, “You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going.”  (John 3:8  NIV)

As I am writing this I look out the window and watch the last of the lovely New England leaves falling down in the face of a stiff wind along with the occasional batch of snow flurries. I cannot see the wind, but I can see the trees swaying from its power and the leaves coming down.

By analogy (and not a pristine one, I admit) we cannot see God’s Spirit, but we can (and do) see the effects of it in our lives and our world.

Both the Hebrew word and the Greek word for “spirit” also mean “wind” and “breath,” all very real but unseen.  Like the wind God’s free activity is real but unseen.  But unlike the wind, God’s activity is not impersonal.

It is a temptation to imagine the Spirit of God as impersonal, something like “the Force” in Star Wars, but that would be a misrepresentation of God, at least of the Christian God revealed in Jesus Christ.

If we stay with the wind analogy we can see that God’s Spirit acts on both us, and our world, in unseen but real ways from outside ourselves.  So we cannot possess the Spirit of God, which presents a real problem for contemporary Americans because we are so very much into possessing.

We have even turned the word “spiritual” (a word that should be approached with great caution) into a human attribute, something we possess.  But if we think of God’s Spirit as like the wind, the truly spiritual person would be the one not possessing some intrinsic attribute, but the one most open to being moved by the unseen but real activity of God.

We might call this openness to the unseen activity of God “faith.”  If we project this openness into the future we might call it “hope.”  And this is where I think that the Spirit is a resource for hope.

Going back to my first post on hope eight weeks ago I named a faithless attitude “functional atheism,” which refers to the belief that it all depends on us.  I wrote that this attitude is even alive and well in the church.  Of course, you can go too far in the other direction.

Which is what I like about imagining the Spirit’s activity to be “wind-like;” we are not pressed into a kind of determinism that robs us of our freedom.  The opposite of “functional atheism” might be ideas of God that understand us to be mere marionettes that God moves around at will as if by strings.  A God of holy love does not coerce us!

When I am hopeless about the future it is often because I am projecting the way things are (in myself, in my society, and in the world) into an imagined future that is more or less the same (or worse!)

But openness to God’s Spirit means that the future is not just the present projected into the future.  The unseen but very real personal activity of the living God is working in us and around us to insure a far different future than we could ever imagine from looking at our present.

Faith is not just passively waiting for that future to appear, but to be actively working (as best we know how) for it to come about.  This is why Christians pray, “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Who knows where the fresh winds of God’s Spirit will be made manifest?  That gives me hope.

(This is the eighth and final guest post I am blogging for an eight-week series called: “Hope-A Pessimist’s Guide” on Darkwood Brew, which describes itself as “a renegade exploration of Christian faith for the modern world which blends ancient contemplative practices with cutting-edge interactive web technology, world-class music, arts, biblical scholarship, and special guests from around the globe via Skype.”)

Scott Russell Sanders tells a charming story about his daughter’s wedding.  He is in the vestibule of the church with the wedding party. “Clumsy in my rented finery—patent leather shoes that are a size too small and starched shirt and stiff black tuxedo—I stand among these gorgeous women like a crow among doves. I realize that they are not gorgeous because they carry bouquets or wear silk dresses, but because the festival of marriage has slowed time down until any fool can see their glory.”  (Hunting for Hope, p 140)

Time doesn’t really slow down, of course, but we all know what he means. New Testament Greek is better at this than English since it has two words for time.  There is chronos, which is sequential time, “clock time” we might say, and kairos, which is special time, “the fullness of time.”  Chronos is quantitative and kairos is qualitative.

Sanders’ perception of the beauty of the wedding party is a moment of kairos, and his image of time slowing down is wonderfully descriptive of how kairos feels.

It is also apt that Sanders links this imagined slowing down of time with beauty, because the New Testament Greek word for beautiful derives from the word for hour.  To be beautiful was to be “in one’s hour.”  Ripe fruit was considered beautiful, and a young person trying to appear older or an older person trying to appear younger was an offense against beauty,

Another place where time can seem to slow down is in worship, when the distance between time and eternity is collapsed, and we get a sense of being part of a great company of saints living and dead across the span of time and space: the “mystic sweet communion with those whose rest is won.”

These moments of kairos, whether at a marriage or at a church service or eating a ripe peach, are gifts of insight that help us make sense of the rest of our time, the quotidian chronos of living.

Christians have long imagined themselves as participants in God’s greater story, with its trajectory through time from Creation to Consummation.  Along the way there are wonderful moments of kairos, such as the coming of Christ, described beautfully here in the first verse of Carl Daw’s Advent/Christmas hymn:

When God’s time had ripened,
Mary’s womb bore fruit,
scion of the Godhead,
sprung from Jesse’s root:
so the True Vine branches
from the lily’s stem,
the Rose without blemish
blooms in Bethlehem.

(This is the seventh guest post I am blogging for an eight-week series called: “Hope-A Pessimist’s Guide” on Darkwood Brew, which describes itself as “a renegade exploration of Christian faith for the modern world which blends ancient contemplative practices with cutting-edge interactive web technology, world-class music, arts, biblical scholarship, and special guests from around the globe via Skype.”)