Two Fires

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

       -T.S. Eliot, “Little Gidding”

The Spirit comes as a fire.

In the Gospel of John, Jesus imparts the Holy Spirit to his followers with a breath, perhaps as the breath you would feel when a lover or friend whispers a gentle, intimate secret into your ear.  In the book of Acts, the spirit descends upon the apostles at Pentecost as a fire, wild and loud, bright and brilliant.  The dove of peace comes with wings aflame, terrible and awesome.

Fire is light.  As the chosen people traveled to the Promised Land, the fire moved in front of them by night to illuminate the way forward from slavery to the new life of holy community.  A campfire may call us back to friends when we have wandered off into darkness.  The flame of a candle casts out the shadows in the corners of our rooms.

Fire is heat.  It may call the desperate fisherman from his boat to be warmed on the shore.  It may relieve us from the cold in our bones when we walk through the doorway of a welcoming home.  It may dry our drenched clothes after an unforeseen walk in the rain.

Fire transforms.  It takes a meager offering and turns it into a pleasing aroma to the Lord.  In the kitchen, fire applied to the fruit of the earth awakens new flavors to be savored by the hungry tongue.  When the breath of life has left us, fire may change us into ash, ushering us back to the earth from which we came.

Fire burns.  While the breath of life is in us, it scorches and scars the skin, bringing pain and demanding a balm.  Fire strikes at our vulnerability and tenderness, producing the agony of passion and the grief of injury. 

Fire is many things.  Fire destroys a moment and ushers us into the next one.  Fire is the Spirit of the Lord Jesus.

***

Several weeks ago, in the heart of Lent, I sent myself on pilgrimage by embarking on a silent retreat to the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky.  I had scheduled the retreat in December, and I had no way of knowing where my life would be when the time for the journey came.  When it arrived, I was grappling with an ending and facing the darkness of where the road would take me in the days ahead.  The silence of my small room and of the monastery grounds, broken only by joining the monks in the offices of prayer, was a quiet and motionless ocean with no visible shore.  There was no future but the moment, and the moment was a persistent flame on my skin.

I decided to fill the hours of the first full day of this silence by hiking the trails in the woods of the monastery grounds.  I had a particular destination.  In the time since my previous visit to Gethsemani in 2015, I had heard of something that I didn’t have the opportunity to see those few years ago—the statues.  Hidden in the surrounding woods, I had learned, were statues depicting Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane and the sleeping disciples whose weak flesh could not match their willing spirits to stay awake with their master.  After the morning offices of prayer I set out on the hiking trails, knowing what I sought but having no idea how to find it.  Maps I had consulted were not much help, and so I found myself wandering the wooded trails, looking for some markers that would tell me how to get where I was going.  When I found no such markers I opted simply to continue, to walk and to take the turns that whimsey dictated when the path forked or branched off.  The only plan now was to keep moving.

And I found them.  It was at just the point when I was thinking of turning around, rationalizing that I had two more days of unfilled time and profound silence and so should work on getting better bearings and try again.  At about this moment, though, I saw that the path was preparing to leave the woods for an open expanse between the trees.  “I’ll just walk up to the clearing,” I thought, “and see what I can see.”  The most notable thing that I saw when I entered the clearing was a sign that simply read “Statues,” with an arrow pointing me in the right direction.  The path took me in and out of woods and clearings, but from there on always offered signs to point the way until it came to the edge of a larger area of forest where I found the Gethsemane statues.

They were amazing.  But I was even more transfixed by something off to the side of the path, just before the entrance to this section of woods.  It was a statue of Jesus, standing upright, with the robes over his chest pulled back to reveal his flaming Sacred Heart.  It was the typical Valentine’s Day-style heart symbol with tongues of fire shooting out from the top.  Behind the figure of Jesus was a clear and perfect view of the meadows and rolling hills of the landscape beyond.  And, as I stood and gazed at the Savior’s face and his burning heart, I prayed the most dangerous prayer I have ever prayed in my life.

Oh, Lord, break open my heart.  Split it like tinder so that it may be ignited with the flame of your love.  May I catch fire, so that all around me might catch fire.

Had I known what I was asking for in this moment, I would not have prayed this prayer. 

***

He stands before you exposing his heart, but it is your own face on which his gaze if fixed.  In his eyes are two equally brilliant fires.  They are compassion and challenge.  Compassion for where you are, for the fire that eats at your own heart and disfigures your own face.  Challenge that you not shrink back from this fire, that you not know it for the fire of hell, but to know it in all its refining power, calling you beyond this moment and into the eternal moment of his Kingdom.  Neither fire diminishes the other, and neither is present without the other.  There is no compassion without this challenge, but there is no challenge without this compassion. 

His hands fold back his robe so that you can see his burning heart.  These hands bear the scars of nails, the scars of his own agony still visible though the radiance and peace of his love lack for nothing.  The fire of his heart burns brightly, but does not destroy.  It calls the heart to life and warms it eternally.  This heart cannot grow cold.  And this fire reaches out to your own heart, to find any tender place where it might catch.

This fire is my fire, he says.  From this fire was born all that is, and without this fire there can be nothing.  It is the fire of innumerable stars, of the suns and the moons.  It is the primordial fire of creation.  It gave birth to your world and to your life.  It is the fire of your agony and the fire of your joy, and to know either of these things you must know the other.  You must hold them both.  You must love them both.  This is not the fire of perdition.  The only perdition is to flee from this fire, to avoid catching it and to avoid spreading it.  Without this fire, there is only cold and there is only dark.  This fire is my fire.  This fire is my love.  And you must know its heat if you will know its light.

Behind him are unfamiliar hills, rolling on into the distance.  There is no path to mark the way through them, but they are brightened by rain and the brilliance of the sun.