An address for Whit Sunday
That Which We Seek Is Seeking Us
On the front of your Order of Service it says, open your hands if you want to be held. It reminds me of a child holding their open trusting hands up knowing that their grown up is there, it reminds me that all that I long for, is also all that I can give, that opening my hands to others puts me in relationship, allows me too to be held.
I know that worshippers in Pentecostal churches, who of course make much of this sacred day, often open their hands in prayer and song, and I know meditation can also invite to open our hands… I know too that we find that a little less comfortable, but I do think the image belongs to us as Unitarians as much as any other way of believing.
For a long time in my life, I would have identified with the idea of being a seeker, and a solitary one at that, quite sensible, rational even and certainly not a churchy person or an open hand person. If I was feeling a little poetic I might have said a pilgrim. That’s a fine image I know.
But something has shifted in me quite recently in fact – where despite my atheist upbringing and the secular culture in which I am very comfortable – I have begun to feel less like a seeker and more like someone who was sort of already here, someone in relationship with the transcendent, the sacred. I wonder if you can feel the difference between always looking ahead for something on a singular path and finding instead within yourself and between you in breath and outbreath, finding it instead in others, between yourself and them.
Whitsunday asks us to imagine something more mysterious: that what we are seeking may also be seeking us, that we are not alone, we are made to be in relationship – with each other, with ourselves – the constellation of the self and with the cosmic, the divine if you will, God of many names. Life is no one way street, it is in the doubling back of all we give, it is in the winding roads and the crossing paths and the endless movement from the self to the other to the self. We breathe out the spirit on each other.
Rilke puts similarly. “we are grasped by what we cannot grasp.” I love the double meaning of that word: grasped. We grasp with the mind. We try to understand, to comprehend, to make sense of our lives and our place in the universe. We reach out toward mystery, toward meaning, toward the marvellous picture of the universe that science has revealed to us.
And yet, as we reach toward what we cannot fully comprehend, something also grasps us. Not like a trap, but like an embrace. We are held by what we cannot understand. I wonder if you have ever had a moment of darkness in your life, where you have felt, just for a moment, held. Maybe through the kindness of others, or the beauty of the night sky, or maybe just ineffably, mysteriously, held.
***
We look out into the vastness above us, and something looks back. We breathe the world in, and the world breathes through us. We are not isolated minds peering out at a dead universe. We are living beings in relationship with a living world.
I do not imagine God as a distant clockmaker, standing outside the universe and setting it going. But I do feel the sacredness of imagining — or perhaps playing seriously with the idea — that love, meaning, courage, and healing are not only things we search for. They may also be in some profound and mysterious way, searching for us.
Nikita Gill reminds us that when we look at the sky, the moon, the sea, the sunset, we may remember that the same universe that made them also made us. That is not a small thought. It is a courageous thought. It tells us that we belong here. We are not accidental strangers in a hostile wilderness. We are made of the same astonishing stuff as stars and tides and wind and light.
And perhaps that reciprocity – this sense that we are not merely observers of the universe, but participants in it – is foundational to religious experience. It unites us with one another, and with everything else. We are part of a living web of relation: breathing, seeking, responding, being changed.
There is something transcendent there in the relationship and the awesome, extraordinary reciprocity of life.
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And this brings us back to Whitsunday.
In John’s Gospel, Jesus promises the Paraclete: translated as Advocate, Counsellor, the one called alongside. In mainstream Christian tradition, the Paraclete is often understood as the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity. That is a rich and serious tradition, and we can honour it.
As Unitarians, many of us may hear it differently. We may hear the Paraclete as an attribute, movement, or presence of the Divine: God’s truth, comfort, courage, and love dwelling with us and within us.
And this does not make Spirit cold or abstract. The Spirit may not be a person in the way we are persons. Yet it is deeply personal.
Breath is not a person, and breath is intimate. Wind is not a person, and we feel it on our face. Love is not a person, but love can claim us, change us, and call us by name.
So perhaps the Paraclete is one way of speaking about divine nearness: the presence called alongside us. The truth that seeks us when we are confused. The peace that steadies us when we are afraid. The breath that returns when we are exhausted. The love that refuses to abandon the frightened heart.
In John, this presence comes quietly. Jesus breathes on the disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” In Acts, the same Spirit arrives as wind, flame, speech, and astonishment. The breath becomes public. The inward courage becomes outward voice. People hear one another across difference.
And this is where the story touches us.
We live in a world that often teaches us to harden ourselves: to speak quickly, defend our positions, mistrust difference, and turn away from pain. The Spirit of Life moves differently. It opens a room within us. It steadies us. It makes us brave enough to listen, and humble enough to be changed.
Open your hands if you want to be held.
That which we seek is seeking us.
May this make our world feel less lonely, less like a wilderness, less abandoned to pain.
May we feel held and loved as the rare miracles we are.
May we be found by what we seek.
May we be grasped by what we cannot grasp.
And may breath become courage, courage become speech, speech become community, and community become compassion in action.
