Every time I feel the Spirit, I think of that Shekinah night the Pentecostals brought their tents to our town.
Pentecost 1966 found me in Brussels in the Cathedral of Saint Michael. The holiday mass offered me an hour of reflection as the high worship flew at me in two languages: Latin, which I understood only intermittently, and Flemish, which I understood not at all. Thirty of us had gathered in the great cathedral, which stretched cavernous and dark behind us.
The Eucharist was most medieval and colorful, read by a red-robed cardinal attended by two brightly garbed guards. With all the plumage of the worship leader and the officious pageantry, the great church seemed to embarrass the little crowd, huddled at the altar end of the cathedral. The echoes of the holy words flew through the dank air.
I made out the unintelligible service to be about the Holy Spirit, so I thumbed my English Bible to Acts 2 and tried to keep faith with the cardinal, who was totally unaware that a Baptist from America was there, spying on his liturgy but very much in need of a word from the Lord.
No matter! It was Pentecost: a day for celebrating the time when power once fell upon the church; the wind blew then, the flame danced, too. Indeed, the miter of the bishop was in the shape of flame to recall the descent of the warm, indwelling God of Whitsunday.
The bishop swung the censer, and the odor of incense drifted from the altar, heady as new wine. I suddenly understood why the early churches were accused of a giddy inebriation. Drunk on God were those Spirit-washed disciples.
They were elated, out of touch with their business-dominated, commerce-controlled world. They must have danced the streets mad with joy, speaking in languages they had never learned, to foreigners from countries they had never visited.
My reverie on Acts 2 brought my mind back to a rustic Oklahoma tent revival, where I first met the Holy Spirit two decades earlier. I was nine years old in that important year when World War II ended. Hiroshima and Nagasaki each sounded a little like American Indian tribes, and each had the same number of syllables and sounds as Oklahoma. I couldn’t imagine exactly where they were, but the whole world had come to focus on their desperation. The adults in my world talked of little else. The pictures, under headline letters thick as my young fingers, covered the newspapers with black, smudgy ink. My four older brothers-in-law would come home, they said. We thanked God that the possibility of their dying had passed.
In that year of joy and cataclysm, the Pentecostals erected a tent. There was very little use in asking where Pentecostals got tents. It was like asking where Ringling Brothers got tents. Pentecostals had tents—that’s all! And they came to our town. Their big-top tabernacle rose above a swampy, snake-filled lake and was wind-billowed like the happy accordions that played under it. The tent swayed but never fell, for it was held upward by staked ropes, taut as the guitar strings that played along with the reedy accordions. The tent looked like a huge, orange jack-o’-lantern, lit by dangling light bulbs, around which swarmed the candleflies of August. Revivals always came with August, as medicine shows came with June. Both peddled their wares in these canvas cathedrals, floored with wood chips, domed with tarpaulins, and pewed with 2-by-12s resting on concrete blocks.
Here I, too, found myself, seated on the boards, shirtless—you could get by with that in 1945 if you were a child—and shoeless (“no shoes, no shirt, no service” was sloganized by restaurants, not Pentecostals). Worst of all, I was not “saved.” Oklahoma Pentecostals had divided all the world into two broad categories: saved and unsaved. By the age of nine or so, almost everyone secretly knew which category was theirs. Indeed, that’s why we had tent revivals—so people could change categories.
The person who helped with changing categories was the Holy Spirit. That was what the Spirit did. He helped the lost get saved, and the saved act more like it. Most of the characters in this rural drama now escape me. I do remember two huge men who played monstrous accordions. There was also an unforgettable reformed drunkard who, through streaming tears, told how he had once been set free of the Devil’s power. One of the athletic evangelists wore a leather buckskin coat, whose swishing, dangling cowhide fringe lured the eye hypnotically as he made the earth tremble with his glossolalia.
I listened, sincerely and with fear. Who wouldn’t? As Nagasaki yet smoldered, this red-eyed prophet told us of the great whore in Rome who would fornicate with the Antichrist till blood flowed up to the horses’ bridles. I trembled as he warned us to make ready for apocalyptic hordes of frogs and locusts. The Euphrates would be dry as Oklahama’s sun-baked Salt Fork riverbed, he said, then Gog and Magog would rise up and the Tribulation would begin to tribulate. I quailed wide-eyed as the buckskin jacket rippled on the chest of this doomsdayer who spoke with authority, and not as the liberal Methodists and Presbyterians did.
This matter was serious. The hymns made me as nervous as the preaching, for they were rapturous and exultant about death and all the great things that would come once we all had the good fortune to die. “Some glad morning when this life is o’er, I’ll fly away,” went one hymn. Another rhapsodized, “ ‘Almost’ cannot avail; ‘almost’ is but to fail! / Sad, sad, that bitter wail—‘Almost—but lost.’ ” But the song that choked my voice to silence went, “I was sinking deep in sin, far from the peaceful shore, / very deeply stained within, sinking to rise no more.” Oh, the pain I felt as the accordions lamented my childhood fate. I saw only “the dark wave.” Oh, how I needed “the lifeline to be saved.”
“In nomine Patri, et Filii, et Spiritui Sancti”; the cardinal chanted the thread that tied the mass in Brussels to the recollections of my childhood years. While his Latin office rolled by, I wondered if the cardinal knew “Farther Along” and “I’ll Fly Away.” His red robe fascinated me. It swished as he pivoted and Latinized. Suddenly I realized how different his dress was from the buckskins of the evangelist who preached in the Pentecostal tent. “We all have our own denominational costumes,” I thought. Suddenly, he lifted the cup, genuflected, and spoke again of the Spiritus Sanctus. Somehow I knew we were brothers. He convinced me he was “saved.”
I’m not sure he would have convinced the evangelist or Sister Rose, our Pentecostal pastor. She, too, was at the revival that Shekinah night when Nagasaki burned in my heart. She, too, knew the Spirit, I could tell. Sister Rose did not play around at being religious. She clamped her eyes shut and lifted her head as though she could see through both her clenched eyelids and the canvas that domed our primitive glory. “Shandala,” she shouted. Tears streamed down her face. Sister Rose was truly “filled” (with the Holy Ghost). Even Sister Rodgers said so, and Sister Rodgers had the gift of discernment, which meant she, more than others, could tell who was truly filled and who wasn’t.
I wasn’t. Sister Rodgers would know that, too, of course. So when they began to sing “Oh, Why Not Tonight?” it seemed an honest question unblemished by the adenoidal alto harmony that always marked our singing of the invitation. “Step forward to the altar, so you’ll never have to step into hell,” shouted the buckskinned evangelist above the plaintive singing. Sister Rose was weeping. Sister Rodgers was discerning. The burden was immense. I broke into tears. Emotion burned like fire spreading through the sawdust chips.
Hell, dark as a gospel tent in a power outage, suddenly gaped lke a black hole before me. I stood weeping, naked, foolish, and undone. What would I do if God should bring Gog to Garfield County? I knew not when Christ would come! Lucky for me, they sang an invitation: “Oh, do not let the Word depart, and close thine eyes against the light, / poor sinner harden not your heart, be saved, oh, tonight.”
I had no choice. I must fly now to the arms of Jesus. I did. Wonder of wonders, he did all the hymn said. He snatched my feet from the fire and set me on the rock. I changed categories. I was saved.
The wood-chip aisle was a kind of yellow-brick road that ended in Oz. I was saved, said Sister Rose. Sister Rodgers said I was truly filled. They were both right, of course, said Brother Buckskin, and I felt a marvelous elation. I then knew what the Bible would later say to me in the Brussels cathedral. “And when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting …” (Acts 2:1–2).
The cardinal did not seem nearly as moving as Sister Rose once did. Still, I felt the years condense: 1945 and 1966 were in some sense one. That is what the Spirit does. He integrates and unifies. As a matter of fact, Joel’s prophecy of the Spirit’s outpouring, quoted in Acts 2, binds the ages before Christ with Peter’s ecstatic sermon of A.D. 33, with Chrysostom, Augustine, Aquinas, and, yes, Sister Rose. To be sure, ages, cultures, and churches go about it all differently, but we are yet made one by the Spiritus Sanctus.
Pentecost is not merely a day on the church calendar; it is fire and wind able to blow and burn at any time. The elation is inebriating. It comes suddenly like the wind of which Jesus said, “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit” (John 3:8). And like the Jerusalem disciples, our elation will make us appear as though we have gotten “drunk” on God (Acts 2:13).
Jesus, in this passage on the Spirit in John, speaks of being born again (John 3:3). The Acts passage on the Spirit ends with a mass conversion of pilgrims. Conversion is always the first, best work of the Spirit of God.
In my life it was true. I wondered about the priest. How did he come to know the Spirit? How diverse must be the ways of God to make an educated cardinal and a bashful child of nine one in Christ. Still, this may be his most glorious work—unifying us across our wide church differences.
I have a distant friend who helped liberate Belsen in 1945. He said that as he leaned against a wall of execution, he looked out at the now-silent concentration camp and saw the grim reminder of humanity’s inhumanity. The greatness of the moment overcame him, and the Spirit soared into his life. C. S. Lewis, on the other hand, came more gradually to know the Spirit’s reality. He wrestled atop an omnibus and in a motorcycle sidecar with the very existence of God. But, no matter, the Spirit’s coming is authentic however it occurs.
But what of the cardinal? What of me? The coming of the Spirit in my life certainly lacks the historical grandeur of the liberation of Belsen. As a child, I merely knelt between big Pentecostal women in the sawdust, and there he came. But the experience is as indelible as sons having visions, daughters prophesying, and old men dreaming dreams (Acts 2:17).
As I was lost in my devotion, the cardinal all too abruptly swished away. The mass was over. In a way, I felt cheated. The wafer and wine were not for me, a Protestant. Church doctrine can sometimes mar a beautiful experience, but while it might bar me from the table, the faith had been opened. I walked out of the dark church. The sun drenched the world with light. The costumes were gone, and neon blinked its glitzy enticement from bistro to bistro.
Never mind! There was a fire loose in the world that made Jerusalem, Oklahoma, and Belgium somehow one. It was not as obvious as I might have liked outside the cathedral. But the Spirit was there. Who knows where the wind may yet blow? Where the flame may yet surprise us? Such a fire is ever in us even when it hides, waiting to break out where the coldness of reason freezes.
Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
