Faces on Faith: ‘Blowin in the Wind’
“The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.”
-John 3:8
Those of us of a certain age were surprised and pleased when Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature last week, even though the Swedish Academy can’t seem to find him to tell him that he won. The curly haired troubadour of our youth was and continues to be his own person, still marching at the age of 75 to his own drumbeat. Bob is kind of like the wind of the spirit that blows where it will and you don’t know where it is coming from.
When Christians think of the Trinity (if they think of it) they can be a little confused. God the Father/Mother you kind of get, or at least have some idea, even, anthropomorphic as it might be. We like Jesus because he’s so human and after all, we’re human and so we get it, at least until we start picking apart the Nicene Creed. But the Spirit, well that is a different thing and so we often relegate Spirit talk to the realm of those folks who wave their arms in the air and “speak in tongues.” The Spirit is a mystery for us and that is just fine. Mysteries aren’t mean to be solved, that’s why they are mysteries.
Yet, the Spirit is important for us whether we are believers or not, for it is the way that the Holy often comes to us in ways which we can’t fully understand. Sometimes the answer is “blowin in the wind” and sometimes we can understand it and sometimes we can’t. In the third chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus is trying answering the perfectly understandable question of Nicodemus about being born again. It’s a rational question without a rational answer, a mystery to be lived and not solved.
In the Fellowship Hall of the Church I served for 29 years there hung a banner that said: “God’s Spirit is with us in many ways.” I looked at that banner over the years and more and more it spoke to me of the many and varied ways that this is true. Yes doctrine is important. It is the way that we seek to understand the faith we live and yet so often, we seek to contain faith in the neat categories we create, but sometimes “the answer is blowin in the wind.”
John N. Cedarleaf, Captiva Chapel by the Sea