Breath

In the middle of one night when N was about four years old, I awoke to find him standing next to our bed. I had been sound asleep, yet in that deep sleep I heard him breathing. He was quiet, barely audible even when I was fully awake, but it was his breath, and as a parent I knew that he was there and needed something. So I woke myself up.

Throughout N’s youth he had a “reactive airway” – not really asthma, but enough to give him an inhaler. And a cough. In a roomful of noisy children, R could pick out his cough and know he was there.

We don’t usually think of breath as being distinctive. Breathing is just something we do. But anyone with asthma or COPD knows how important breath is. Anyone who takes a CPR class learns how to breathe for someone else. Anyone who has been present at a death, whether of human or pet, knows the finality of that last breath – “a breath that goes forth and does not return,” as the psalmist says.

Several languages, including Greek and Hebrew, use the same word for breath and spirit, recognizing that the spirit departs when the breath ends. This multivalent meaning for one word creates some interesting ambiguities. In Genesis, God’s Spirit moves over the face of the waters. Or is it his breath? Does God give breath to Adam, or spirit? God speaks the Word in creation, but to speak God must use Breath/Spirit. And so the Trinity is present right from the beginning of creation.

This Sunday is Pentecost, the festival that celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit to the disciples of Jesus (and thus to the Church). The familiar version of that story, in which the disciples speak in different languages, is told in the Acts of the Apostles. Sunday’s Gospel reading from John has a very different tradition. John says that on the very day of the resurrection, Easter itself, Jesus came to the disciples through closed doors, stood and their midst, and said “Peace to you.” Then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” He breathed on them. In Greek it’s the same word used for God’s breathing life into Adam, and for the breath that Ezekiel prophesied into the dry bones in the valley. It’s the breath of life. But this breath comes from the resurrected Jesus. It is a new creation, new life, a new spirit that Jesus breathes.

It’s a Spirit that does not go forth, never to return. In baptism we are marked as Christ’s own forever. The Holy Spirit remains with us throughout our lives and beyond. Yet I often wonder how well we listen to that Spirit. Are we like a watchful parent, waking up when it is there next to us? Can we pick out the true Spirit in a noisy culture calling to us with many spirits that are not from God?

N has long since grown up and moved away. Given how loudly I snore now, I don’t know if I’d hear him anyway. Yet I still work to hear that voice of God, to breathe that breath of Jesus, to have the words “Peace to you” in my ears. Baptized in the name of the Trinity, sealed by the Holy Spirit, marked as Christ’s own forever, we are all part of the new creation. And that’s true no matter what language we speak.

[Pentecost: Acts 2:1-21; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-13; John 20:19-23.]