Book of Days

It’s Pentecost Sunday, also known as Whitsunday. I’ve a quote for you for the day, but it’s in Middle English, which is the same form of English that Geoffrey Chaucer spoke and wrote when he put The Canterbury Tales down on paper in the late 14th century, and if you’ve ever read those tales, perhaps in high school English classes or in British Lit in college, you’ll remember well that Middle English takes a bit of getting accustomed to –– much like it took a bit of getting accustomed to my Aunt Lil’s accent and speech patterns when we’d go visit her in Augusta, Georgia. The quote is from John Mirk, an Augustinian canon who lived and preached in Shropshire, England, between 1382 and 1414, so… a contemporary of our Geoffrey Chaucer.

I’ll admit that’s a lot of set up for a short sentence, but here it is: Goode men and woymen, as ye known wele all, thys day ys called Whitsonday, for bycause that thee Holy Gost as thys day broth wyt and wysdome ynto all Cristes dyscyples. Or, in our contemporary tongue: “Good men and women, as you all well know, this day is called Whitsunday, because the Holy Ghost on this day brought wit and wisdom to all Christ’s disciples.”

Wit and wisdom. Two things that are in short supply these days, along with kindness and empathy and respect. (How did we get here? I have my own theories (they begin, innocently enough, with the sitcom Seinfeld and reach their apex––let’s hope so, anyway––with the people currently in charge in Washington), but we’re not here today, on this beautiful day in May, to discuss this.) Wit and wisdom in the form of inspiration and the Holy Spirit: this is what’s behind Whitsunday: Pentecost Sunday celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit to Christ’s disciples on the fiftieth and last day of the Easter season, which is where Pentecost takes its name, from a Greek word meaning “fiftieth.” And in the teachings of the Church, the Holy Spirit is the third person in the Holy Trinity, as in, “In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,” as everyone in my family says when we cross ourselves, which, for some of us, can be several times each day.

John Mirk, as you may have noticed in the quote above––not to mention Geoffrey Chaucer, and everyone when I was a boy, and probably every English speaker in between (the Catholics, at least)––did not call this third person the Holy Spirit. We called it the Holy Ghost. The Latin languages use spirit (my Italian grandparents used to say, “Nel nome di Padre, del Figlio, e dello Spirito Santo”) and in recent decades there’s been a shift in that direction. But I rather miss the word ghost. Especially on Pentecost, when I always think of my most memorable Pentecost celebration, at the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community in Maine. I won’t tell you about it here, because I feel like I tell you about it every Pentecost, every Whitsunday, and so I will pass today… but if you care to read about it, here is one of many chapters about this day where I describe it. It is very much a story of ghosts and spirits, of spiration: of gusts and ghosts and spirit and breath and respiration and inspiration. It is, I think, a beautiful story.

And with that, I will wish you a most inspiring day, and a most inspiring life, and a wish, for us all, for more wit and wisdom, more kindness and empathy, and more respect for each other.

SHOP HAPPENINGS
The shop is open today, Sunday, May 24. The first of our summer workshops, Botanical Monotypes, which is sold out, is happening this morning, but we’re open for eclectic shopping toward the end of the workshop and once it’s done, from 11 AM to 4 PM. Two weeks later, I’ll be teaching a Case Bound Journal bookbinding workshop on Sunday, June 7 (3 seats left) and our next Convivio Cookery workshop is my favorite pasta, Mambricoli, on Saturday, June 13 (5 seats left). And we’re making plans for our Midsummer Solstice Market… it’s planned for Friday June 19 through Sunday June 21. We’ll have some good Midsummer Magic in store for you!

Image: “Retabla of Holy Ghost” by E. Boyd. Woodcut with watercolor and colored pencil on paper, c. 1936 [Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons].

Happy Whitsuntide. Easter is past, Ascension Day, too, and now it is Pentecost: Holy Spirit descended upon earth. It is the day when the apostles gathered in Jerusalem and spoke to the people and everyone, it is said, understood them, no matter whether they were Jew or Greek or Roman: there was, that day, no barrier of language. A day of clarity. Like no day before and no day since, and if the world has shown us anything in recent days, it is that we are as far from understanding each other as we’ve ever been.

They say that in France on Pentecost it is traditional to hear trumpets playing during Mass, the trumpet music symbolizing wind, breath, Holy Spirit manifested. But each Pentecost, my thoughts return to a simpler place with the very first Pentecost I spent at Chosen Land, the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community in Maine, in 1996. It’s a story I tell you each year, but it’s a story I love, and just like my father told stories over and over again, usually as if it was the first time he had ever told you, I’ll tell you this one again, too, because this is what we do: We tell the stories again and again, to keep them alive, always on the breath, exhaled into the world. Exhalation, inspiration.

And so I was there for that Shaker Sunday Meeting, and Seth was there, and all the Shakers I had just met were there, too (and it was a larger Community then), the men on one side of the 1794 Meetinghouse, the women on the other. Father Bob Limpert, an Episcopal minister from New York, was there, too, and still to this day occasionally I’ll hear from Father Bob. And the Shakers that Pentecost in 1996 let Father Bob give a more formal sermon to all who were gathered: all the Shakers, and all the people “from the world,” as the Shakers say, who were there that Sunday, too. It was a very windy day. Father Bob was inspired that blustery day to talk about the relationships between words like gust and ghost and it was Pentecost, of course, the day the Church celebrates the coming of the Holy Spirit… which, when I was a kid, was better known as the Holy Ghost. And here was this day of gusting wind ushering in holy ghosts of all kinds in this old building full of history: gust to ghost to spirit. And spirit brings us to inspiration.

And this always reminds me of one of my favorite professors from college, Myriam Swennen Ruthenberg, who also remains in touch with me to this day, and who, in an Italian Literature class, perhaps over Dante or Bocaccio or Giuseppe di Lampedusa, spoke one day of the connexions between words, too. Her words that day were the Italian versions of respiration and inspiration and their common Latin root: spirare, breath. We breathe in and out in the act of respiration, but we also breathe in and out inspiration: we are inspired by what we take in, and what we exude or breathe out hopefully inspires others.

If you’ll follow along on my winding trail, these things all connect: the gust and ghost of Father Bob, the breathing in and out of Professoressa Ruthenberg. All are not so much of the earth as they are of the air and so they lack heaviness and instead are light and ethereal. Inspiration comes to us sometimes as fleeting as breath, a ghost seen just briefly from the corner of the eye.

gust–> ghost–> spirit–> breath–> respiration–> inspiration

Pentecost never meant much to me but it did after that Pentecost Sunday at Chosen Land in 1996. I think of it now as a day of exquisite connexions. (And yes, the X is purposeful, for that, to me, seems more closely related to the idea of connecting ideas––like a mathematical expression of language.)

Image: Illustration of a weathervane from Die Gartenlaube (The Gazebo), a hugely popular weekly illustrated magazine published in Germany in the 19th century by bookseller Ernst Keil. [Public domain] via Wikimedia Commons. An angel blowing a trumpet as weathervane activated by wind? I think it’s the perfect illustration for today’s Book of Days chapter.