"Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied." I wonder what kind of proof Philip even imagined he was demanding, not just what its nature might be, but what it would have proven. Maybe he wanted to watch with Moses in the gaps where God had been. Perhaps he was hoping for an ecstatic experience in which the whole cosmos would be revealed and just as soon forgotten. The mind has no capacity to grasp God, so far as I can tell.
God is in all and through all: something of God, some energy, some breath, moves through all Creation and makes it not just mere, dead matter, but the stuff of Life itself. We’ve had some significant deaths recently, and I find myself lingering on the phrase “even in death, we are in Life.” To be in Life is not the same as to be alive in some kind of medical sense. Even in death, we are part of Creation, we are mixed up with God’s presence in being itself. Life is being itself. Even in death, we dance with existence.
Philip wants to see the Father, and imagines that satisfaction will be on the other side of that, and not just more confusion, more mystery. I wonder what Philip thinks it would be like to actually, really feel satisfied, and what, exactly, his satisfaction might be worth.
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I was speaking with our own Simon Wheeler, who as you may know had a truly special career as a commercial pilot, flying Boeing 747 “Jumbo Jets” around the world. I have to imagine that a pilot is a good person to consult if you want to think about the Holy Spirit, so often spoken of as like the wind which moves through Creation.
Simon and I talked about the phenomenon of “clear-air turbulence,” which is where you find yourself at the boundary between masses of air which are moving and behaving very differently, with no visible indication of the boundary. The forces where airs of different temperature and texture are passing alongside and over one another can be powerfully violent and sudden. You have no visual warning that you are about to enter into their midst and they will not show up on your radar, but you have to recognize quite quickly that in their midst, you are. With time, perhaps, you might develop some sense of where such turbulence is likely to show up, but now and then these great forces will make themselves known utterly and entirely out of the blue.
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When we talk about God, we are not talking about the man behind the curtain in the sense of the Wizard of Oz. That seems to me to be more about the gods as the Greeks knew them, as forces which actually rule the world, a way of talking about the emergent properties of existence, and the givens of our psyche like hubris, and what inevitably follows in its wake.
We confuse all these different ways of knowing and thinking about our being, our existence, and our life, and we talk about God as being the one who can ultimately bear all our hopes and fears and grievances. I wonder, perhaps, if what Philip was really asking was to see the manager. As the one who set all this, and us, in motion, I suppose that God must be prepared to answer for all the grief we carry with us, and the frustrations we accumulate along the way.
God may have to accept all the consequences of all our moments, but this is true of us, too. At some point, however much we might imagine things could have been different, there is nothing but what is, and God, like us, is much more to be found in what is, than in our dreams of what might have been.
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People do seem to want some kind of proof-of-God, though. I don’t know, I think more often what you fear and yearn for is a proof-of-absence, instead. If it really were all just chaos, if it really were all emptiness, then perhaps we would be justified in something unjustifiable buried deep within our hearts.
Existing is kind of at the heart of what we mean by “God.” If “God” does not exist, then that is not the God that we are talking about, we only mean to name what is.
God is somehow mixed up in the fact that we exist at all, that anything exists. There is some sense that God can hold us and contain us all. Beyond such vague gestures, there is little in specific that we can say about the Father. Indeed, our words fail us almost immediately, because there is so much bound up in our image of fathers that would have very little to do with God at all, from some human sense of gender, to the fatherhood known by so many in the world. The First Person of the Trinity would have to be bound up in abandonment, too, to be known as “Father,” by far too many.
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This is Pentecost, and so beyond and from the Transcendent, the Unknowable, we are left to contend with the Holy Spirit, and to let our words and images fail for the Third Person of the Trinity, instead.
The Holy Spirit is known in much the same way as clear-air turbulence. You may have some sense about where the Holy Spirit might be found, but your expectations will be subverted and inverted as often as not, and sometimes you will find yourself being thrown about in a familiar way, and in an unfamiliar place, and have to once again have no choice but to move through the disturbance, the disruption, the disorientation of these unspeakably powerful forces, and then proceed towards the next waypoint on your journey, perhaps a little changed by the encounter.
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I don’t know that we should really seek those kinds of encounters too casually, not just for their own sake, and certainly not just for our own sake. The Holy Spirit is a Comforter, and the Paraclete — an Advocate, a Helper. This is no ordinary help, however, and is not ours to harness or direct. The Holy is not some awesome, awful power which is waiting patiently to be claimed. Maybe like the First Person of the Trinity who passed by Moses, we can only really know the Third Person of the Trinity in having passed through the shearing power of the Wind that defies all knowing. Where God has been, there can God have been known.
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May you know that you are in Life, and be satisfied by what you have known. May you be disturbed as much as necessary by the Wind that blows, but not too much more than you need. May you know Comfort even in the midst of confusion, and have faith that something will yet surprise you, in an unexpected place and way, which will tell you something about your journey. May you be with the Holy Spirit, and may the Holy Spirit be with you.