By Greg Austin.

In Celtic hearts, the goose is the visible representation of the Spirit of God. Much of the Church has reimagined the Holy Spirit as the dove; gentle and pristine, issuing forth a soft and peaceful cooing so unlike the raucous squawk of the goose.

It is as though we want to tame God’s Spirit; we want to make Him manageable, we want Him to be gentle and quiet and acceptable to our more sophisticated sensibilities.

But the Spirit of God will have none of that. Like the wild goose He may enter our silent reverie unannounced, even uninvited. He may shake us, violently uproot us, He may shock us with His suddenness and His untamed, unfettered behaviors.

More than two thousand years ago, on a certain Day of Pentecost, like the loud and insistent geese of today’s experience, He arrived, unannounced and certainly without observation of mans’ sensitivities. He came as fire and as a violent, crashing wind. He disturbed the environment of His visitation. They had prayed together, meeting in a room with walls and floor and roof. They sought Him, but they forecasted the manageable, they expected the controllable. Their anticipations were for sweet reflection, peaceful manifestation. What they received was dynamic power; earth-shattering explosiveness, inordinate shaking. Flames of fire appeared, seated upon carefully coiffured heads. Disruption, disorganization, divine disturbance is what they received. Surely, to the thinking mind, this could not have been God in their midst! But it was, and when we distant relatives of those first brothers and sisters become hungry enough, sufficiently devoid of our own resource and empty of the results of our own religious attempts, perhaps, like the train of sqwuaking, interrupting geese this morning, He will come once again, and fill us with Himself. The season is changing. Are you listening?

“Be not drunk with wine wherein is excess, but be filled with the Holy Spirit.”