Whitsunday

The Dove Descending…(Source)

Inspired by and borrowing from Artur Rosman’s similar post, I offer you some Pentecostal poetry.

“Little Gidding” IV, by T.S. Eliot

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

“God’s Grandeur,” by Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

“Epigrammata Sacra XIII” – The descent of the Holy Spirit – Richard Crashaw

Bear, o bosoms, bear ye what Heaven’s vintage showers,
Sacred clusters pouring from ethereal bowers.
Too happy, surely, ye who drink of wine so good;
It comes into your bosoms a sparkling, cooling flood.
Behold, with nectar’d star, each head is shining, shining;
Around your purpl’d locks a crown of life entwining.
O Spirit of all flesh, to drink who’d be denied,
Since Thou, lest they should falter, mak’st wine a torch to guide?

Veni Sancte Spiritus! (Source)

descent-of-holy-spirit-on-the-apostles-1885MikhailVrubel

“The Descent of the Holy Spirit,” Mikhail Vrubel. 1885. (Source).

Dom Mark Daniel Kirby of Silverstream Priory has a phenomenal piece out today about the cosmic and intimate indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit. Imagine Teilhard de Chardin, but without all the heretical bits. Just a great, poetic doxology of praise for the Third Person of the Trinity.

The Holy Ghost impels apostles and missionaries in every age;
He is the invincible faith of the martyrs;
the shining light of doctors;
the incandescent purity of virgins;
the joy of monks;
the abiding friend of solitaries;
the consoler of the bereaved.
The Holy Ghost is a father to the destitute;
a storehouse of infinite resources for the penniless;the uncreated Light all ablaze where no created light shines.

Read the whole thing here.

The Amish Catholic

Ora et Labora

Three Poems for Whitsunday

Elsewhere: Dom Mark Daniel Kirby on the Holy Ghost