Come Holy Spirit

As one of my VLI leadership projects I'll be helping to lead the Alpha Holy Spirit weekend next Friday and Saturday.

In preparation, I've been praying and studying and teaching on the Holy Spirit. That's one of the advantages of being a leader -- you get to choose the topics! So this week, at both kinship and the nursing home, we studied the Holy Spirit.

The scary part is the ministry time. The reason it's scary is that our church is in a phase where the manifestation of the Spirit is pretty subtle, and many of the people in the church have never experienced a wave of the Spirit, or spoken in tongues. So standing up in that context and praying 'Come, Holy Spirit' is scary because sometimes nothing (apparently) happens. And even if the Spirit does manifest, people are suspicious of anything that they have not seen happen on Sunday morning. So I'm ironically scared both that something won't happen and that something will happen. Because half the kinship will be disturbed with either result. I am committed to waiting on the Spirit regardless, but it is not without its stress.

And then there's the nursing home. They're pretty sure that the Holy Spirit isn't actually part of Christianity. When I try to teach from the Bible, they are pretty sure that I'm wrong, although they are usually very patient with me because I'm 'young' and don't know any better.

Because we visit the nursing home on the 1st and 3rd Sundays of each month, and because this month actually has 5 Sundays, we won't be there on Pentecost, so I decided to teach about Pentecost today. Along with that, we sang songs about the Holy Spirit. Usually I try to choose hymns, so there is a memory the people can connect with, but today I really wanted to stress the Holy Spirit theme, so we sang Be Thou My Vision, and then some contemporary songs. As we sang 'Sweet Sweet Spirit' I was cringing at how 'modern' it was -- copyright in 1962. After all, if you are in your 90's that is pretty cutting-edge. And then I prayed 'Come, Holy Spirit'. There were 33 residents there this morning, as well as 3 staff coming in and out. About half were still awake at the end of the teaching time, which is about par for the course. But that's ok -- if they don't get bored and fall asleep they are not sure it 'counts' as having been to church. (Parenthetically, that reminds me of one time someone in my kinship complained to me that someone else was asleep, and that it was rude. I laughed and said that it didn't bother me until more than half the people were asleep).

Anyway, I was surprised to find that when we went around to the people in the nursing home individually at the end of the service, that more of them than usual seemed to be desiring specific prayer. So while we didn't have any miraculous healings (that I know of), we did seem to have more people connecting with God than usual.

One gentleman was getting a bit agitated, because he had a speech impairment, and I couldn't understand what he was saying. It sounded like he had had a stroke, and also perhaps a stutter, and was speaking a foreign language. Finally I asked him if he was French speaking and he said yes. I know a little French, but the last time I studied it was in 1977, and we certainly were not learning any Christian vocabulary words. So I resorted to reciting the words from a musical composition by Poulenc that we sang in college, in around 1979.
Dieu le pere, createur, ayez pitie de nous, dieu le fis redenteur, ayez pitie de nous, dieu le sante esprit, santificateru, ayez pitie, ayez pitie de nous. [or something like that]

And the agitation in the man immediately left, and he became peaceful, and seemed to be listening and comprehending when I switched back to English.

Who would have thought, when I was in the college choir, that God had a plan for Litanies a la Vierge Noir?