The Spirit is a quiet presence
Liturgist or not, I didn’t actually intend to write about Pentecost. But this weekend at Mass, our priest got up and said, “As I’ve gotten older, the Holy Spirit has become my favorite Person of the Trinity.”
I thought, “This is why I love this man.”
Then I thought:
“I really need to write about the Spirit on Pentecost!”
When I think “Pentecost,” I think “loud.” People running around in the streets, shouting in many languages, upsetting the Roman apple cart, the start of a peaceful revolution. A giant cacophony.
Given all that, it seems slightly odd that to me, the Spirit is a quiet force.
In my early 20s, I was racked with anxiety. Spiritual attack, frankly, tied up in scrupulousness. You can read that whole story if you want, but for now what is relevant is that when I found relief from the screaming, shrieking banshee in my own head and heart, it came in the form of cool, quiet stillness. I first stumbled upon it by the edge of a creek along a bike trail in Cedar Falls, Iowa: a peace I had never experienced. It didn’t take away the roaring uncertainty. It was just this bubble of calm at the center of it all.
I called it “letting go.”
A year passed. I got married. The acute terror of the initial attack receded somewhat, but that hard, hot knot of anxiety was an ever-present companion. I served on the core team for Life Teen, and accompanied the teens to Steubenville St. Louis. There, as the monstrance processed around the gym, I witnessed the manifestations of the Holy Spirit: the giggles, the flutter of speaking in tongues, the faintings. I thought, “I want something… but I’m scared of all that.” The Eucharist passed. Nothing happened. A girl near me went into a trance. I didn’t even get that. I was disappointed. But I knew the Spirit only comes where the Spirit is wanted, so I had no one but myself to blame.
And then, late that night, sleepless on a hard floor beneath a row of high school lockers, I realized I felt calm. So very calm. Cool. Quiet. Despite being an introvert among thousands. And that it had begun in that moment on the bleachers in that gym, with the monstrance passing by.
I thought: Holy cow. All this time, what I’ve been calling “letting go” is actually the presence of the Holy Spirit, and I didn’t even know it.
Years later—four kids, infertility, and disability later—I started spiritual direction. I was in Anxiety World again. My head was a beehive of doubt. Which part of this shrieking banshee in my head was God, and what was not?
My spiritual director asked, “Is there any time in your life when you can say with certainty that you knew you were hearing the voice of God?”
I said “Yes” without having to think.
“What did it feel like?” she asked.
“Quiet,” I said. “Cool. Calm. Still.”
And I stopped, because that was the moment I knew: none of the buzzing beehive was God talking to me.
It was a watershed moment—a moment in which I realized I had my marching orders for the rest of my spiritual life.
People often wonder how I “do it all” (any other busy people out there who always get asked that question?).
I can and do say, “I get it done because I don’t use a smart phone and I don’t text.” But the truth is that the core of how I do it all is the Spirit. Anything good I have ever written—fiction, Intentional Catholic, music; any transcendence I glimpse, and occasionally manage to capture, through a lens—it is the Spirit working through me. I am a well-tuned instrument, but I am only an instrument.
I go to nature to find God because that is where God the Spirit first found me.