The Holy Spirit From Day One

Some fine people have published thoughtful reviews of  Forty Days with the Holy Spirit in the Patheos Book Club. Caryn Riswold. Lisa Burgess. Bruce Epperly. Today I want you to have the opportunity to read the book itself. So here is day 1 of a book about which Richard Rohr claims, “Here comes the return of the fire and wind.” Of course, this little book won’t prompt the return of the fire and wind if it’s left in crates. So, if day 1 grabs you, then grab a copy from Paraclete Press, Amazon, or Barnes and Noble, and get going.

The text we’ll meditate on during day 1 is Genesis 1:1–2:

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.

Here then are our reflections during day 1 of Forty Days with the Holy Spirit.

The Bible begins simply—with soup. Murky, muddy soup. Right where many of us live, smack in the middle of chaos, too much to do in too little time, expectations left unmet, disorganization and disappointment and disasters waiting to happen. The only glimmer of hope for creation rests in the appearance of the Spirit of God hovering over this primal soup, this abyss, this deep. The mere mention of the Spirit, in the Bible’s first lines, introduces the possibility of order, of birth, of meaning. But how can the Spirit put soup in order?

That is a question Priscilla and I have been asking for thirty-two years. We decided many years ago not to have two full-time jobs once our kids were born. We didn’t want to become the harried, two-career couple we knew we would easily become, given our intense personalities. We wanted the order of Genesis, not its chaos.

Then our daughter was born on a bitter cold March night on Chicago’s north side. We went from couple to family. From the moment of her birth, our heads began to spin, as nurses swept the tiny creature from her mother’s arms and away to pediatric intensive care for the next five days.

There were sleepless nights, of course, and the birth of our son afterwards and the first day of school for both of them and softball tournaments and choir concerts and puberty and algebra and adolescence (I’ve forgotten in what order) and college applications and goodbyes—too many to count. All of this on top of scrubbing pots and pans, slathering cream cheese on bagels, mowing the lawn, taking out the garbage, folding piles of laundry. And we aren’t getting any younger. When I asked the doctor why I was getting my first cortisone shot in my lower back for a herniated disc—L4-5 to be exact—he smirked, “Guys in their forties.” Sigh. That was a decade ago. Sometimes I’m exasperated by the utter chaos. I’m exhausted by the barrage of demands. My head spins like a top at the responsibilities we bear, not just for things, but for people in our charge.

How can the Spirit of God wrest order out of chaos?

By hovering. This is the Spirit’s first activity in the Bible

In The Message, Eugene Peterson translates Genesis 1:2 in this way: “God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.” Perfect! The verb hover or sweep—and here, brood—which offers the first glimpse of the Spirit’s activity in the Bible, occurs only once elsewhere in the Old Testament, when God is an eagle that “stirs up its nest, and hovers over its young; as it spreads its wings, takes them up, and bears them aloft on its pinions” (Deut. 32:11–12). This is tender care, powerful pinions grasping Israel’s neck to “set atop the heights of the land” (32:13). The Spirit of God, at the birth of creation, hovers over an expectant earth, broods like a bird over the watery abyss—an eagle-like Spirit poised with powerful wings over a fledgling creation.

When we first meet the Spirit, we encounter the majesty of a bird of prey plucking its young and carrying them to safety. The threat of chaos is simply no match for the eagle’s presence.

With nearly six decades under my belt, it’s no shock that I’ve met the disaster of chaos—dreams shattered and hopes crumbled in my clenched fist. I’ve been bewildered and confused deep in my soul at promises broken. My heart has ached, not metaphorically but physically, with disappointment.

But I’ve experienced, too, the Spirit of God hovering like an eagle, wings spread, pinions extended, ready to reach and pluck and soar. This isn’t the most inviting image of care I’ve ever known, but it may be the most potent because this Spirit, this eagle, is fearless, undaunted by unformed muck and mire. What threat can a bowl of cosmic soup pose to an eagle that rides the currents above?

At this point in the Bible—about the seventeenth word—God hasn’t yet dipped a ladle into the soup, pouring some out as mountains, some as valleys, some as coasts. But God’s Spirit is there already, above the dark deep with the promise of confusion come to order, with the hope of muck made into mountains and soup into seas. I know what that Spirit has meant for us, our family, for me over the years, and I hope to offer, too, something of what that Spirit can mean for you in the days ahead—a rare, elusive blend of stability, hope, and challenge.