maybe it's begun (on Trinity Sunday)

For a long time, I facilitated group workshops called “Paying Attention.” In the afternoon session, I’d instruct the group to make a collaborative piece of art that we called The Collage of Distraction, and while they were cutting out words and images from magazines that represented all the things that keep us distracted from the present moment, I’d go outside and hang up a dozen or so big yellow signs with instructions for paying attention to one aspect of the world at a time.

Then I’d send the group outside to spend 45 minutes attempting to pay attention. One part of the world at a time. I’d watch people blow bubbles, color with sidewalk chalk, inspect a tree’s bark patterns, trace the branching veins on a fallen leaf and, sometimes, when my friend Callie was there with her own personal Paying Attention Station Addition, hug each other fiercely.

My favorite part of those workshops were the moments when the whole group would return to the meeting room after those 45 minutes spent outside, paying close attention to the world around us, one feature at a time. The sense of the room, the energy, vibe, atmosphere was always - every single time - palpably different than it had been before folks left. People had calmed their spirits wandering around the lawn or fields, and every single time, I could FEEL that shift in our gathering. Probably not every single person had an attitude adjustment during that hour, but the collective, combined energy of the GROUP had changed. I led these workshops several times each year, and the energy shift was so predictable and consistent that I changed the way we debriefed the experience entirely, attempting to shift my facilitation energy to match this more grounded, present, openness.

Those workshop moments weren’t the only times I managed to witness and name that kind of collective energy shift; it happens sometimes in worship, sometimes when we’re singing together, in big meetings when someone finally names the thing we’ve all been thinking or introduces a new possibility that opens up our discussion. I’ve felt it in hospital rooms, at campfires, even, believe it or not, on a few particularly powerful Zoom meetings.

In my theological worldview, I ascribe these collective energy shifts to the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is wily and unpredictable, which means that religious leaders who prefer to be In Charge Hoarders of Power don’t like to talk about Her very much. But this Sunday is, in the calendar of the Christian year, Trinity Sunday, and the texts are all about this wily third person, the Spirit.

Proverbs talks about Wisdom, who tells us that

Before the mountains had been shaped, before the hills, I was brought forth,

when he had not yet made earth and fields or the world's first bits of soil.

When he established the heavens, I was there; when he drew a circle on the face of the deep,

when he made firm the skies above, when he established the fountains of the deep,

when he assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters might not transgress his command, when he marked out the foundations of the earth,

then I was beside him, like a master worker, and I was daily his delight, playing before him always,

playing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.

And then we get Jesus, in John, telling his friends about this Spirit who will “guide you into all truth.”

The doctrine of the Trinity isn’t mentioned in scripture; it’s something people came up with as they read ancient texts about Wisdom and Jesus’ later instructions about the Spirit that would arrive to accompany his friends after he ascended into heaven. I don’t so much care about the particulars of how the trinity works or what it is, but I have always been curious about this thing: wisdom/logos/spirit that existed before the mountains, that works both within and around us, that leads us into truth, in whom we live and move and have our being.

I’m curious about the Spirit because of all those moments of collective energy shifts I’ve witnessed and participated in. I’m curious about how we pay better attention to those moments, how we invite them into our processes and discernment, how we honor them for the powerful things they are.

This weekend, peaceful protests agains ICE’s work of terror in LA were met with violent, unnecessary and unrequested military intervention. In her newsletter this morning, Rebecca Solnit said “I think maybe it's begun, the bigger fiercer backlash against the Trump Administration which is itself a violent backlash against every good thing that's happened over the past several decades…” Solnit has been writing for months about how current waves of resistance might coalesce; she’s been writing for years about the ways that change happens. She is experienced in the practice of paying attention to movements, social change, collective effervescence. I doubt Solnit would say it this way, but it seems to me that she’s wise in the ways of watching out for movements of the Spirit.

Those paying attention workshops I used to lead were pretty simple. I asked people to practice kindergarten activities: blow bubbles. Use sidewalk chalk. Make a leaf rubbing. But I realized over the years that those simple kindergarten practices might also be the beginning of habits that can be transformative: not just for our own internal well-being, but for our larger, collective salvation.

How often are you looking out for movements of the Spirit, these days? What are you paying attention to? Where are you looking? Who are you listening to? There are ways to read this weekend’s headlines about the President activating the National Guard unprompted and see only more terror, more horror, more violence. But if you back the story up just a few hours, you might be able to see, like Solnit does, that those actions were prompted by an enormous coalition of neighbors simply standing up and refusing to tolerate being terrorized. We might be able to say, along with her, “I think maybe it’s begun.” If we’re practiced in paying attention to collective shifts, gathered energy, those moments when the Spirit shows up, swirls around a bit, connects us and redirects us, we might get a very different picture of what’s actually going on, here and now.

The Holy Spirit is hard to talk about. I suspect She’s better experienced than explained. I know I’m botching it all up with my words here, so here’s a favorite poem from Denise Levertov, since the poets are much, much better at all of this:

In Whom We Live and Move and Have Our Being

Birds afloat in air’s current,
sacred breath? No, not breath of God,
it seems, but God
the air enveloping the whole
globe of being.
It’s we who breathe, in, out, in, the sacred,
leaves astir, our wings
rising, ruffled—but only saints
take flight. We cower
in cliff-crevice or edge out gingerly
on branches close to the nest. The wind
marks the passage of holy ones riding
that ocean of air. Slowly their wake
reaches us, rocks us.
But storm or still,
numb or poised in attention,
we inhale, exhale, inhale,
encompassed, encompassed.