Inhaling Life

On the Holy Breath and the Connections Made of Air | Pentecost, Year C

Note: Most weeks paid subscribers to The Way We Practice get an audio version of each essay. Due to time constraints and some technical difficulties I couldn’t get that together this week. Sorry for the inconvenience. I should be back on track next week along with some other new audio content.

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The tree was suspended in a circle set against clouds—whites and grays like a coming storm. Deciduous, its bark was gray and white, but the leaves were golden, beginning to turn toward the shortening days of autumn. Within the circle, in squares and rectangles, the tree was flanked by a pond, water reflecting the sky, and an image looking up into the tree’s wide branches.

It was the summer of 2021 and I was in Santa Fe with my family visiting friends. One afternoon, we explored the town’s central square, and came upon the New Mexico Museum of Art. My oldest daughter wanted to go in, so she and I left the rest of the group to wander through shops and churches, while we entered the museum. They were holding an exhibit titled—“Breath Taking.” An appropriate theme for those days when we were just emerging from the COVID pandemic and black men were seen on the news begging for air.

The collection of sculpture, video, photographs, paintings, and installations was eclectic in the best sense. From political word pieces to videos of floating bubbles, the art invited a wondering: What is breath? What does it mean?

The answer that came from the image of the tree is that breath is life. The piece was from the artist Meridel Rubenstein, a part of her Eden Turned On Its Side series. In other, accompanying pieces, the point was made clearly. In one, Rubenstein photographed herself with an oxygen mask, the tube attached to a tree. In another, a group of people in the woods were pictured with IVs running from trees to their veins. It was the image of the tree itself, however, the half dome of its leaves filling the frame like a gibbous moon, that spoke loudest—we breathe in connection and community, our breath is dependent on the breaths of others.

This is old wisdom. It reaches back to the story when the first living things were made from the soil, and given the breath of life.

…you take away their breath,

and they die and return to their dust.

You send forth your Breath, and they are created;

and so you renew the face of the earth. (Ps. 104:30b-31)

Except that second Breath isn’t what is found in the Psalter, at least in the Book of Common Prayer. There we read “Spirit.” Whatever it meant in earlier times, we now read that word as a disconnected thing. Spirit stands apart, not mixing the material world, not caught up in the exchanges of life. Most of us are captive to the Gnostic idea that the spirit is the best part of ourselves, just waiting to get free of the disgusting stuff of flesh.

But breath, it belongs to a body, it interacts with the world, shaping it, powering it. Think of the breath inhaled, the red of oxygen rich blood, giving the necessary air to each part of the body before traveling back to the lungs and getting filled with breath again. Think of the wind, the breath of the world, powering a sail boat across a sea or ripping through a building with speed and strength.

In the Hebrew of the Psalms, breath and spirit and wind are are the same. It’s a synonymous link that keeps spirit tied to bodies, rooted in the earth. This connection is shared with the Greek of the New Testament, where John’s Spirit of Truth could just as well be called the Breath of Truth, and Paul’s Spirit of God, could be named the Breath of God. In both cases, this Breath/Spirit invites us toward connection rather than a separation into the ephemeral.

Who is the Holy Spirit, the Sacred Breath that we celebrate this Pentecost Sunday? Of the persons of the Trinity, the Father and the Son are easier for us to grasp—a supreme deity is the common fodder of religion, and though God’s presence in the incarnation is hard, we can know the person of Christ as a man who lived in a place, who shared the same basic realities of a body as we do. But the Spirit? Like wind and breath, we only get occasional glimpses in those moments when there is fire and smoke, when air is caught in the wings of a bird. And yet the Spirit’s activity in the world is necessary and dynamic, it through inhaling the Holy Breath that we are connected into the common life of God.

I think what caught me about Rubenstein’s tree was the way it breathed. Though a static image, the circle and clouds, the leaves spread wide like lungs, moved with the truth that air is an exchange. My breath out becomes a tree’s breath in, the tree’s breath out becomes my breath in. And this mix and exchange, repeats a trillion times among a trillion creatures, some giving oxygen, some carbon dioxide, each involved in this common breath of life, each a part of the larger Breath of God.

Jesus showed us how to be fully alive as human beings. He stands before us, an image of imitation to whom we apprentice our lives. From Jesus we learn how to live from love, how to resist evil, how, in the end, to become God’s children. But it is through the Spirit, the Holy Breath of God that our blood burns red with air, our bodies are connected to the God who is life. The Spirit is God within us, God’s breath mixing with our breath, joining us in the circle that is Love.

The Spirit is not an ephemeral mystery to be grasped, captured like a specter to be analyzed in a lab. The Spirit is God’s Holy Breath, and as such, our response should be to breathe in the Spirit’s life, to let its energizing, active presence move in our bodies and connect us to the world that God is even now resuscitating.