We have before us a series of images, a series of pictures. It is almost like we are awakening some ancient memories. We have, from last week, ascension – we have the image of Jesus leaving his disciples, being taken up, and vanishing into the clouds. Now, we have the image of Pentecost, that of a rushing wind coming from heaven, and filling the house where the disciples were sitting. We have tongues of fire appearing among them, resting upon each of them. And following that, coming from them, we have every known language being spoken, and the perplexed people looking on. If we think of all this as a series of images, as opposed to a series of concepts, it can be easier to hear what they’re trying to communicate to us. A picture carries, after all, a higher bandwidth of information. We can imagine ourselves within a picture; we can’t imagine ourselves within a concept.

A concept has the added problem that it can shut us down. We listen and listen, until we’ve understood the concept, and once we’ve understood, we need not listen or ruminate any further. But a picture within our imagination works, on the contrary, in a living way. It cannot be exhausted, it speaks to each of us afresh. It goes beyond mind and reason, and speaks to us as spirit, or as the word appears in Greek, as pneuma. Pneuma, which is translated as spirit, wind, or breath, that innermost spirit, carrying her wisdom beyond our surface level, our day to day perception of things, beyond our reason, into our unconscious, into our unknown depths, and ministering to us within. That creative wisdom of spirit, that Pneumanosophy, that divulges something that we cannot speak, but only know.

In the Christian imagination, Jesus represents light coming into the world. We can picture the lights at Christmas, our chalice lit within our dark Meeting House. The light coming down from heaven, that it might find a new home, a home within us. That would be my summary of the entire Christian epic - that light was up there, and now it’s in here, in us. In those who choose to invite her in. The trouble is, when that light is personified as Jesus, that Galilean Jew, it is restricted temporally, geographically, and culturally. Following the mystery of Golgotha, in the images of Ascension and Pentecost the restrictions are removed, and the light is made universal. This process is often typified in our own spiritual journeys. From our earliest perception there is a remote light, then the light is personified in Jesus, or expressed to us through Jesus, and then the light is released, and universalised. A movement from the particular to the universal. You could see this as the vocabulary of the cosmos, a truth echoed in the biblical text, a truth which enables our ongoing spiritual evolution, enabling our transition from a sleeping, passive state, to an awoken, creative, vibrant state, which is to say, enabling our ongoing growth, individually and collectively.