May The Dove Descend
Bernini, The Dove Of The Holy Spirit, St. Peter’s Basilica, 1666
At dinner the other evening, one of our dear friends, after a sigh, mused: “We just don’t know where all of this is going. We are living with so much uncertainty.” We were talking about Ukraine, of course, and the brutal use of lethal power, the likes of which we have not seen in the lifetimes of most of us. What can we do? What should our leaders do? What in the world will the leaders of this horrifying assault do in the next days and weeks and years? Where is our world headed? Yes, indeed, we live with profound uncertainty.
We are living in a world with few answers. We face it everywhere. We faced it through the pandemic, when often those who proposed the answers, sometimes with arrogance, turned out to be wrong. We face it in our schools and universities where we have tended to politicize the questions, so that the answers wear thin. We face it with the division that erupts in our streets, board rooms, our halls of political power, school boards. We face it with the seeming intractable scourge of homelessness, the inability to protect the sanctity of human life, the marginalizing of older people. We face it with the decline of our churches, the destruction of our culture, the unleashing of hatred in our midst. We would love to have confidence in answers.
Right now we face it most immediately with the people of Ukraine, those desperate people huddled in subway passages and basements, the lights turned off, those mothers, with fear streaked across their faces, holding their babies close, terrified. Strong, courageous, articulate, usually young women, their eyes clouded with profound uncertainty.
Psalms 124, my reading for this morning, I begin to see some glimmer of clarity. I offer this Psalm in honor of the mothers, holding their babies, in the subways of Ukraine. I offer this Psalm as a reflection for our own plight as we wander through the fog of uncertainty.
IF the LORD had not been on our side–
let Israel now say–
if the LORD had not been on our side
when our foes attacked,
then they would have swallowed us alive
in the heat of their anger against us.
Then the waters would have carried us away
and the torrent swept over us;
then over us would have swept
the raging waters.
Blessed be the LORD, who did not leave us
a prey for their teeth.
We have escaped like a bird
from the fowler’s trap;
the trap is broken, and we have escaped.
Our help is in the name of the LORD,
maker of heaven and earth.
There was an amazing Tweet circulating this morning of a Ukrainian priest splashing holy water at the opening of a service for Lent. Perhaps staged, though seemingly natural, a white dove circled around the priest, then flew to a perch above an ancient painting of Pentecost. It signaled for him, I suppose, and for me as well, that the Holy Spirit will circle like a dove and descend with peace. As these people live with the threat of being swallowed alive or drowned under the raging torrent of inflicted war, may the dove of Pentecost descend with peace. May these people escape “like a bird / from the fowler’s trap”; may “the trap be broken.” May the Lord be on their side.
The Lord on our side? I know this can be distorted and misused as a kind of presumptuous claim for divine sanction of whatever we are doing. It can be naïve, shamefully self-focused, unrealistic. But this is what I believe: If we seek to follow the path where the Lord is our answer to all our questions, ultimately, eventually, we will not be swallowed up with the plight of uncertainty.
That’s my prayer this morning, for the mothers in the subway bunkers of Kiev, may they see the sun rising through the fog of immense suffering and uncertainty. May the Holy Spirit sweep through the land like a fierce wind. My prayer is that we may seek answers, not in the usual places, but in the “name of the Lord, / maker of heaven and earth.”