Sitting with the Sacred

This week’s readings:

• Acts 2:1–11
• Psalm 104:1, 24, 29–30, 31, 34
• 1 Corinthians 12:3b–7, 12–13
• Pentecost Sequence
• John 20:19–23

For this post, I’m going back to listing all the readings at the beginning in case you want to revisit them and pray with them. I’m not going to dive deeply into any one of them. My memory, limited though it is, says I’ve already sat with the first, third, and fifth readings and written about them here You can read posts related to these readings by going back to “Earth,Wind, and Fire,” and “Locked Doors.”

Nothing jumped out at me about those passages when I returned to them this time around. This experience seems ironic, given that today is Pentecost this year, and Pentecost celebrates the opposite of the spiritual blahs, a.k.a “spiritual dryness.” Pentecost celebrates the Holy Spirit giving the apostles what they need to witness to what they’ve experienced and learned so they can care for those who follow Jesus and help their spiritual family grow in numbers.

The psalm is a wonderful prayer of invocation and praise for this celebration. I need to pray with it, and I will, but when I read it this week, I just felt prompted to pray with its words, not to explore it more deeply.

I think what’s going on with me ties to what I posted about last week. Thanks to the first, third, and fifth readings, I can read about how the Holy Spirit moved within the early church. These passages are great reminders and great stories, but receiving the same reminder, reading the same story over and over, isn’t the same as experiencing for myself what the early church experiences in this week’s readings.

So I’m going to invite the Holy Spirit to enlighten my senses — my eyes, ears, mind, heart, and lips. I’m going to extend this invitation using the Pentecost Sequence. I consider it a beautiful example of sacred poetry, and more specifically, liturgical poetry. (These are the names I’m giving it. I don’t know if these are some names the professionals apply to it.) As far as I’m concerned, it cries out with all the longings of the human soul in ways that paint pictures on the canvas of the mind. The comprehensive quality and the vividness of the sequence as well as its musicality are the reasons it resonates with me this week. For me, these qualities are enhanced by John Michael Talbot’s musical version,, “Come Holy Spirit.” You may want to have headphones on when you click the previous link, as it leads to the original version posted on the song on the musician and composer’s YouTube channel.

When you have headphones, and you’re able to set time aside to enjoy beautiful prayers, music, and poetry, I hope you’ll join me in following the links in this post. These links lead to expanded forms of the prayer I’ll close this week’s post with: Come, Holy Spirit. Amen.