A Reflection for Monday of the Second Week of Easter
Find today’s readings here.
The wind blows where it wills,
and you can hear the sound it makes,
but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes;
so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit. (Jn 3:8)
Not to correct Jesus, but we do know where the wind comes from and where it goes. I can check any radar and see where the wind gusts near me are headed next; it is no longer a mystery.
Boom, done; end of reflection. We’re smarter than God.
But no, there is something more—there’s always something more, especially in the Gospel of John.
English has a lot of words. I am reminded of this when I discover that there are very often at least two English words for a lot of German words I have to look up for school. Or we have multiple very specific words to mean the same thing, like “awareness” and “consciousness” which can only be described in German with “Bewusstsein.” English ends up with a lot of words because our terms derive from Germanic—like “awareness”—as well as from Latin (and others)—like “consciousness.”
Similar to German, Greek, in which John wrote his Gospel, has fewer words to describe the same phenomena, so two senses of a word can often be translated multiple ways into English. That is true for the word “wind” in today’s Gospel. Pneuma, the root where we get words like “pneumatic” or “apnea,” means wind, breath or spirit. All those things are rather air-oriented, sure, but in my English mind, I want to have it be clear which is being referenced. Latin has the same thing: spiritus. Remember how the “spirit of God” or alternatively “a wind from God” moved upon the waters in Genesis? In the Vulgate, that word is “spiritus.”
But that is the beauty of a language with fewer words: we must find double meanings within phrases. The wind moves where it will and sure, during Jesus’ time, people did not know where it went. But the Spirit also moves where it will—and we still do not understand how it goes. Here, Jesus’ logical jump from “You do not know where the wind goes” to “That’s how it is with people born of the Spirit” is not a jump at all, but rather the same referent, only that one is on a physical plane and the other on a spiritual one.
The Spirit moves in ways unknown to us, helping us to see the world in a merciful and loving light, and moving people to conversion daily.
“So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.” And now, in this time between Easter and Pentecost, we are reminded again and again of our belonging to God and especially to the Spirit. New members of the Church are so full of the graces bestowed upon them at confirmation, but each of us, even if our baptisms and confirmations were decades ago, is still born of the Spirit and has that wind, breath, spirit within us.
We may not know where the Spirit leads us or especially anyone else, but we can follow it by keeping our baptismal promises, which we conveniently repeat each Sunday, and asking God to show us the way. It will not be clear all the time—God’s favorite languages must be Latin and Greek, after all—but through consistent prayer and seeking the truth we might be able to glean the Spirit’s movements in our lives.
