The feast of the Holy Spirit, the feast of Pentecost
Pentecost is nearly upon us, the feast or celebration of the Holy Spirit. Who is this third person of the Trinity, the one who proceeds from both the Father and the Son, the third side of the triangle? This is the one usually represented in art by a dove (I have seen it referred to as the ‘holy pigeon’).
The Paraclete, the Advocate, the Comforter. Lots of abstract titles, but this most shadowy member of the Godhead (itself a difficult subject to grasp) remains unclear. The more we try to put it into words, the more it escapes us, and for once Jesus isn’t much help; he is responsible for some of those abstract nouns which we adopt to hide the fact that we are groping in the dark here. But this is the Holy Spirit who teaches ‘little ones to think and understand’, the one whose fruits are wisdom and understanding, not fuzz and confusion. So it’s worth putting some work in.
The Holy Spirit is not male
One of the reasons I particularly appreciate the Holy Spirit is that it is the least male Person of God. Although God has no gender, he is overwhelmingly referred to through male metaphors, including by Jesus, and although there are references to God as a mother in the Bible (e.g. Isaiah 66:13), these tend to get lost or ignored compared with the weight of male metaphor (but thank God for Mother Julian of Norwich). Jesus himself is incarnate as a human man (though one without the sexist assumptions of his contemporaries, which is pretty miraculous in itself, if you think about it), and he always talks of God as his Father. The Bible occasionally uses female imagery for God (Isaiah, Hosea), but does not refer to him as ‘she’. Some people use the feminine pronoun for the Holy Spirit, which I find tempting but a bit of a cop-out, as there is no evidence or tradition to justify it. I’m using ‘it’ to refer to the Holy Spirit precisely because it is odd and specifically non-specific, and one of the most important aspects of the Holy Spirit is its mysteriousness.
Numinous accounts of experiencing the Holy Spirit
All the accounts of the Holy Spirit are vague and baffling, and even the authors of them are frustrated by their vagueness. It is ‘like’ the rushing of a mighty wind. It comes down ‘as’ or ‘as if’ tongues or flames of fire (which is impressively inept as a description; as opposed to flames of water?).
It comes with a whoosh and completely fills the place it comes to, just like the cloud of God in the Old Testament, and it is most evident in its effect, making people speak and understand languages they do not know, in a reversal of Babel. (in a beautifully appropriate coincidence, Pentecost Day Mass is one of the incredibly few occasions when everyone with an Anglophone Lectionary sings exactly the same words at the Alleluia verse.) What they cannot do is explain coherently what happened to them, because the Spirit has not been sent for that, but to enable the important message to be passed on.
Even someone as brilliant, articulate and educated as Blaise Pascal, after an experience which sounds very much like the Holy Spirit, is reduced to an impressionistic babble of emotion and conviction, though the Pensees as a whole are almost forensic in style. Pascal is a mathematician, a philosopher, a physicist. This is like Stephen Hawking being reduced to incoherence and trails of dots on the page.
Experiencing the Spirit through wonder
This means that writing about the Holy Spirit does not get us very far. It is precisely the mysterious and ineffable aspect of God which we would be tackling. What seems to work better is to develop and express our sense of wonder.
Children tend to be much better at this than adults, because they accept the new amazing things that happen to them as new and amazing, without the cynicism which adults employ to prevent them looking silly when they come across something new. But we miss so much when we think like that. Creation can be the source of so much wonder, if we let ourselves feel it. Never mind the Northern Lights, dawn and sunset are totally amazing, and they happen every day. No-one before you has ever seen that new shoot in the herb bed that has come up overnight. Every new flower or fruit or leaf is as exciting as a baby, only we don’t appreciate it because there are so many of them. Tides, mountains, storms, creatures: all these are evidence of God’s Spirit moving, because the Spirit brings light, warmth, noise; it brings life. The Catechism calles the Spirit ‘God’s artisan’ (CCC#741 and #1091) and ‘the master of prayer’, as well as helpfully defining it as inexpressible. (That always makes me smile, because ‘inexpressibles’ was a Regency euphemism for trousers, but as I said, the Holy Spirit is in fact the least male Person of God.)
Expressing the Spirit in words (and music)
When I was thinking about the Holy Spirit, I realised that a lot of my ideas come through the Holy Spirit hymns, and when I looked for illustrations for this piece, I was delighted to notice how many Pentecost illustrations are on musical manuscripts.
Even if we restrict ourselves to English translations of the Golden Sequence, the Veni Sancte Spiritus, this is a rich collection of images and ideas, and these hymns make good prayers. Throwing up lots of images and letting them float in the air together is one way to approach the unsayable – this is what George Herbert does in his sonnet which attempts to define prayer, and it works better than anything else I know. If we put poems together with music, we are finding ways to tap into other ways of perception, and this also helps.
The Psalm for the Vigil and the Day Mass: same psalm but different
So we have Psalm 103/104, in different versions for the Vigil and for the Day Mass. The Response is the same both times, but the verses are different, enough so that I have set the psalms as though they were completely different. The emphasis for the Vigil is on God the Father, his greatness, the riches of his creation, and how well he looks after it. It’s like one of those beautiful pictures of the Peaceable Kingdom, with all God’s creatures disposed around, coexisting happily and being taken care of as a well-ordered household. God here is his own agent; he creates everything in the second strophe, feeds it in strophe 3, and the spirit only comes in the fourth strophe (once for US, coupled with ‘breath’, twice for everyone else; but no capital S). I’ve tried to keep some of the feeling of mystery by starting the Response with some growly chords and letting it move on and up as it renews the face of the earth.
The Day Mass psalm
I wanted to develop this more in the day psalm. The Response and the first two lines are the same as for the Vigil, but then instead of dwelling on God as Creator, we move on immediately to creation itself. There is now a slight problem in the verses for the US, because the order 1,2,3 in Year A is changed to 1,3,2 in Years B and C. I’ve had to alter the music so that the movement is still felt as forward throughout. I’m not sure whether the order change is deliberate, as it goes against the running order in the psalm itself, but both my Missal and the published Lectionary do it like this, so I have followed them. Everyone else stays with 1,2,3 for all three years, and the effect is strongly cumulative, as the second strophe (third for US) makes it clear that the Spirit is the source of life for all living things, not the food which God provides in the Vigil version.
The Day psalm is shorter, only three strophes: 1 is about God making everything, 2 is about the spirit being the only source of life, so its absence means death, and 3 is a paean of praise, like a mini-Doxology. That seemed to me to give a beautiful narrative arc, so I decided to make the music grow in the same way.
Making the music move
Most people can only sing comfortably in quite a narrow range, so when I wanted to move up the keys, I was very limited. I wanted to start deep and quiet, and I knew this would be the simpler music, so I could put this into a key I wouldn’t normally dare to tackle (all those flats). Each verse lifts into the next key up, and I still had to be able to play and sing it once it became more cheerful and more elaborate, so that’s why it starts where it does and ends where it does. The music at the beginning is meant to give the sense of the Spirit brooding over the face of the waters like in Genesis, dark and inchoate, and if you miss any of the flats here, it doesn’t matter because here we have primeval chaos. Accidental discords are a plus!
2nd strophe, and the Spirit goes out and starts working. Harmonies start coming into the accompanying parts, and even the voice part begins to move more freely. The recorder gives little twirls of dance : I’m trying to show things starting to grow, to sprout and to move.
3rd strophe and even more so : everything is beginning to dance and sing together and in patterns. Trying to give the feeling of ‘free form’ in a Responsorial Psalm is very difficult without the whole thing coming off the rails and the congregation giving up, so I’m suggesting, rather than going for the full effect here, but you should be getting a feeling of expansion, light and freedom. That’s what I’m aiming for, anyway.
The downside of this is that I can’t produce compacts, because I can’t stack the verses if they are in different keys. So I’m sorry about that, and you will need someone to turn over for the instruments, but I hope you will feel that it’s worth it. Think of it as a musical version of one of those little videos that people send instead of cards at Christmas or birthdays, where the picture is built up, bit by bit, or like a timelapse photograph of a plant coming into flower. Only this is Creation, and it’s a whole rose garden.
Come, Holy Spirit, the most mysterious Person in the Trinity, and possibly the most exciting. It is the one who starts things. Who knows what they will go on to be? Pentecost is the feast of unlimited potential.
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