Psalm 104:30 “When you send your Spirit, they [all creatures] are created, and you renew the face of the earth.”
A few years ago, I had the opportunity to visit the Oklahoma City National Memorial. It commemorates the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. The memorial includes an outdoor field, pictured in part below. On each end of the field are the Gates of Time: 9:01, the minute before the bomb exploded; and 9:03, the minute after, and when healing began. In between are chairs, illuminated in these nighttime pictures, one chair for each person who was killed. The designers intentionally framed the memorial as before, during, and after the terror attack. It is very moving to walk through it and experience each part as it unfolded, before, during, and after.
This before, during, and after pattern has varied names and words to describe it. It’s the Action Reflection model of learning, where you act, you reflect on your action, and then there’s a new action based on your reflection. Franciscan friar Richard Rohr calls it the Wisdom Pattern of order, disorder, and re-order. It’s also the same template for many epic journeys, from Disney’s “Moana” to J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings.” When Frodo, Bilbo, or Moana return home again, home looks like how they left it, but they are different. It’s the reason for the sayings “You can never go home again” and “You can’t step in the same river twice.” There has been a change. Whether you chose to go on a life-changing journey, like these fictional characters, or change is forced upon you, like the attack on Oklahoma City, you are no longer the same. And in between was a lot of chaos.
This Sunday, many Christians will celebrate Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is a major change agent. Like Loki, the Norse god of mischief and chaos, but firmly on the side of good. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is creation. There is new life, which only comes after the chaos of the disorder and disruption of the old life. It's a liminal time, this period of disruption and disorder. On the day of Pentecost, the apostles were processing the chaotic events of Holy Week and living into a new way of life after Jesus’s ascension. But then came more chaos and disorder, everyone hearing their own native language at the same time, so many voices. And then came re-order, as Peter reminded the crowd that they weren’t drunk and they weren’t imagining things. The Spirit was moving in their midst. The Spirit was disrupting old patterns and ways of thinking and creating new patterns and new ways of thinking. The new patterns don’t happen instantaneously, however. To get to the new, you must first pass through the messy middle.
In Oklahoma City, the messy middle entails a lot of grief over the lives lost. Nineteen of the chairs are smaller than the rest, to symbolize the children who died that day. In the middle is a reflecting pool to contribute soothing sounds to a peaceful setting. There is hope, symbolized in the Survivor Tree, the only tree on the block to survive the blast and which continues to grow and thrive. Before, during, and after. When life has changed, take care to not cling to life as it was before and that no longer exists. In the middle, try not to rush to the after, as uncomfortable and painful as the middle is. As I’ve said before, healing takes time. And when you do make it to the after, share your story of hope and new life. The rest of us need to hear it.