April 27, 2025

On the Breath of Life and Grasping the Wind

Today I am offering some thoughts on the passage you heard from the Gospel of John in which Jesus breathes on the disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” By now, it will not surprise any of you to learn that I understand this as metaphor. But it is not a simple one. This remarkable episode is packed with layers of meaning; it touches on themes that go back to the beginning of time, but are so fresh and alive that they can fill your life with grace and power.

At this time of year especially most of us are not very comfortable with being breathed on. You never know what sort of ugly little viruses are floating around in someone’s breath. But I learned recently that native Hawaiians have a very old and cherished tradition called honi of greeting another person by touching nose-to-nose and inhaling or essentially sharing each other’s breath. When White people first came to the Islands they were revulsed by this practice of breathing into each other’s faces and mouths. But to people all throughout the Polynesian Islands the practice meant sharing that most valued part of oneself, the life Spirit from within. So, the Hawaiian term haole, which is used to refer to foreigners, is thought by many to derive from hā-ole which translates “no breath.” The same folk etymology, by the way, explains the word aloha as deriving from alo-hā. Which means to face or share breath. It is that Polynesian root, hā, that can mean breath, or spirit, or essence of life.
I think it’s no coincidence that peoples all over the world tend to link these concepts. When Jesus breathed on his disciples, what he shared with them was pneuma, a Greek word that also can mean either breath or spirit – not to mention wind. So this “Holy Spirit” that was conveyed to the disciples in this passage from John is also a holy breath, or a holy wind. All of which puts one in mind of the story of Pentecost, when a great wind filled the place where a bunch of people were gathered and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit.

The connection of spirit with wind and breath goes all the way back to Genesis. When the Lord Almighty created the world, the writer of this tale says, the Ruah Elohim, the Spirit of the Lord, hovered over the face of the waters. This ruah is also wind, breath, and spirit. And then in the second chapter we are told that the same Lord Almighty breathed into the man he created the breath of life, and he became a living being; in Hebrew, he became a nephesh chaya. So the Divine breath caused the man to become a nephesh – another remarkable ancient word. It can mean spirit, breath, throat, soul, life force, personality, state of mind.

So why should any of us care about all these Polynesian, Hawaiian, Greek, and Hebrew words? It’s because there is a wealth of meaning buried in them. First of all, I find it no coincidence that when Jesus breathed on his disciples so that they received the wind/breath/Spirit of pneuma, the image is immediately called to mind of the Creator breathing into Adam the divine breath, giving him the spirit/breath/life force of nephesh. I think John was intentionally trying to relate the two images. And that this same mystical, divine breath of life described in the tale of creating the first human is now shared with these common people Jesus collected from fishing boats and byways is no small development. It represents a movement of this soul force from the one to the many, from the first to the eternal, from the ethereally divine to the physically human. In other words, we’re not talking about some mysterious hocus-pocus from a dusty old book; this is a power, an animating force, that can be part of your physiological being.

C. S. Lewis referred to the Creator’s “. . . grand enterprise. To make an organism which is also a spirit; to make that terrible oxymoron, a ‘spiritual animal.’ To take a poor primate, a beast with nerve endings all over it, a creature with a stomach that wants to be filled, a breeding animal that wants its mate, and say, ‘Now get on with it. Become a god.’”1

Lewis makes it clear what a difficult thing is being asked of us. It’s contrary to our nature, or so it seems. Indeed, rather, it’s primary to our nature, a nature we spend most of our days, and most of our energies, trying to deny and overcome. This inner force that makes us more than a “beast with nerve endings” or a “breeding animal” has everything to do with some kind of connection to the divine – a connection that has been there from the beginning, but which we lose track of over the course of our lives. Seeking and rediscovering that connection, however you do it, is fundamental to being fully human. For some people this connection is found in prayer or meditation, and, interestingly, a key to such practice is focusing on one’s breathing. Perhaps there is, indeed, something about breath that has to do with Spirit.

Secondly, it’s important to note that when Jesus breathed on his disciples the Spirit of Holiness he did so in the context of a summons for them to follow him. And he immediately said, “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.” This business of forgiving and retaining sins is a little tricky. I think what he means is that there are circumstances in which we are called to be healers, and circumstances in which we are called to make trouble – the kind of trouble that naturally comes from “retaining” another’s sins. That doesn’t mean throwing their shortcomings in the their faces; I think it means developing the inner strength to reflect evil back on itself, so that it becomes undeniable. Gandhi referred to satyagraha, “soul force” or “love force” – the force of “truth”, that was at the core of his nonviolent resistance movement. It was, in fact just this sort of spirit, this inner power, that allowed him and many others, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and a host of followers, to breathe new and transforming life into death-dealing practices of religious and racial animosity.

This confrontational quality of Spirit is buried in a minor but now famous passage from Proverbs. It was the inspiration for the play (and subsequent movie) “Inherit the Wind”. That title is taken from Proverbs 11:29, which in the King James Bible reads: “He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind and the fool shall be servant to the wise of heart.” The presumed meaning of this passage is that, if you cause trouble within your family, you will wind up with no inheritance – just wind. But the word used for wind in this passage is ruah, the same word used to mean the Spirit/wind of the Creator that hovered over the waters in Genesis. So if we read the proverb in another way, one might conclude that making the kind of “trouble in one’s house” that Gandhi or King (or Jesus for that matter) did will lead to an inheritance of Spirit that is a great creative power. In fact, that reading might be even more appropriate for the ultimate outcome of the Scopes trial dramatized in the play. If one is filled with the divine Spirit, one can nurture the inner strength to gently forgive wrongs as well as to gently resist evil.

And finally, it’s both humbling and a little awe-inspiring that these words that mean wind, breath, soul force, Spirit, and life, show up in so many diverse cultures, in different eras, and distant lands. There seems to be something universal about this connection between ourselves and the divine that’s instinctively connected to our breathing, and the breathing of our planet. It’s hard to argue with common principles that emerge from such varied human experiences. Perhaps we need to pay more attention to the wind and what’s blowing in it – to the ways that we foul it and the air we breathe. Can it be that the Divine Spirit is indeed wrapped up in creation itself, and that the ancients were not so far from wrong in sensing that divine Spirit in the wind? That’s a tough concept to grasp. But maybe “grasping” the wind is exactly what’s required of us in this age.

The year 2025 is still something of a toddler, but winter seems to have breathed its last. Each year, spring and summer, it seems, are anticipated with hopefulness, sometimes seasoned with a little dread. But, who knows, maybe in this coming season of warm winds we might all discover new strength and new power for our lives. Maybe we will use the days ahead to find and nurture a spiritual force within that is a profound connection with the divine, and maybe that force of Spirit will embolden us to gently forgive and to gently cause trouble, and maybe we will see ourselves and all of our fellow human beings as one with each other and one with our earth.

Given the prevalence of viruses and bacteria floating around we may not choose to practice the Hawaiian honi, greeting one another by touching nose-to-nose and sharing each other’s breath, but nevertheless in the days and months to come let’s find ways to grasp the wind and share the breath of life.

Let’s sing it together.