Our theme for the month of June is “spirits.”
A movie I never tire of is Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmaron. Phillip already wrote about this masterpiece earlier this month, but it’s a special movie because it grows with its viewer, from innocent and enraptured horse-obsessed child to cynically jaded but still hopeful adult. It was a beautiful, jubilant story about mustangs and good guys versus bad guys when I first watched it nearly two decades (yikes!!!) ago. Now, it’s still a beautiful, jubilant story about mustangs and good guys versus bad guys, but with significant and intricate layers of nuance and commentary on Western expansion, Manifest Destiny, and all the rest that also make it difficult and a movie you can sink your teeth into.
Even though I took a whole course in the Holy Spirit in college, it still remains such a baffling thing to me. My Episcopal church tends to refer to the Spirit as a “she,” and I find this oddly comforting and interesting as I haphazardly catalogue all the various feminine personifications throughout the Bible. It’s perhaps the part of the Divine Mystery with which I’m most comfortable, oddly enough—ignornace is bliss, as they say.
Being horse-obsessed from an early age, I always hated the conceptualisation of “breaking” wild horses and crushing their spirits to be pliable. I’ve lamented how humans seem to revel so in abusing Creation, but perhaps I focus so much on that just to avoid lamenting how humans abuse themselves as well. It’s so much more difficult to parse out our frailty and why we do what we do (or don’t do), and it’s such a desolation.
People often talk knowingly about turning to God in difficult times, or that Jesus will comfort us, etc., etc. Not that I disagree theologically, but I wonder if the emphasis is wrong and the idea of coming alongside with God isn’t more in the purview of the Holy Spirit. The bamboozling aspects of the triune God aside, I guess I’ve always sort of had this picture of the Spirit being the one who does the legwork as it were, post-Jesus’ ascension and all, as the moving force in daily humanity.
The idea of the gray is easy; the idea of a wilderness like the vistas in Spirit is easy. Sermons and exhortations about endurance and resilience and faithfulness all make logical sense to me. But when you’re plunged into that gray wilderness, everything is shakier than me trying to stand on a balance ball. I’ve always loved answers and definitions, the shape and limits of a physical or metaphorical space. But I feel just like the little bug lost on the torus, trying to grapple with what the hell is going on and where the answers are and if there’s ever going to be any clarity in all of the murkiness.
So far, this year has shaped up to be one of the most difficult and tumultuous and painful passages of my life. There is no spirit of tackling a new frontier with vim and vigour. I’m mostly just cranky, tired, and hungry these days. And most of all, I’m afraid. Perhaps much like when I first began seeing a regular therapist, there’s a lot of blind and half-hearted flailing around in the darkness, hoping I’m doing the right moves and going through the right motions so that I can make it eventually, even after faking it. Instead of a milkman in the post-Blitz rubble, though, I’m a wrung-out upper-twenty-something plodding putting out fires everywhere in the rubble of the life she thought she wanted and desperately hoping the Spirit is around here somewhere.
