questions, crises

 

Luke presents the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost to a Greek audience as the Church becoming the new Delphi, or site of pneumatic utterances; and to a Jewish audience as the Church becoming the new Creation/beginning/Genesis 1, with the Spirit/wind/breath of God hovering over what is as-yet unformed and calling it into being with a word.

That word — whether the utterance of an oracle or the series of “Let there be…”-s in Genesis 1, empowers the addressee to venture into the unknown, to become. In this, there is release, and a great deal of freedom, of choice.

If you could ask God anything, in relation to your life, what would it be?

Life has many stages of becoming, and each stage has its own crisis to which we need an answer, the very first of which — in the first eighteen months of life — is, am I safe? For young adults — which today, in the West, probably lasts until around age 40 — a key question is, am I loveable? Not just in regard to romantic relationships, but friendship, wider family, even whether we are able to love ourselves. For those in middle adulthood, the question is something to do with significance, whether anything we create will outlast us, or have a positive impact on the world. Whether we will accomplish anything. For the older generations, a key question is, am I content? Have I been able to answer that earlier crisis around accomplishments, and am I able to accept the inevitable losses of life, which accelerate at this stage?

These are all questions we might ask of our oracle of choice, or, indeed, bring before God.

These are all questions God cares about, because God cares for you intimately. These are crises the Spirit of God empowers us to face, wrestle with, and overcome — though not necessarily in the ways we might have imagined.

These are questions and crises the Church should be asking and discerning an empowering word and a faithful, if necessarily improvised, response to that word, together.

If you could ask God anything, in relation to your life, what would it be?