There’s a common refrain from religious ‘nones’ that goes something like “I encounter God more in the forest than I ever do in a church.” While such an attitude may miss the mark about what church is for, it captures the undeniable truth that we experience the Transcendent often and easily in nature. It’s a place of beauty and terror, of vast vistas and microscopic life, of wondrous fractal patterns and apparent chaos. It’s no wonder why so many of us feel God’s presence in nature. While Christianity rejects the pantheistic idea that the God is nature, it has always (canonically at least) held that God is in nature: As the Father whose imprint is all over creation, as the Son who is the very Wisdom and Word of God that is the ‘grammar’ of creation and “through whom all things were made,” and as the Spirit whose presence brings life to all things. Moreover, Christianity insists, this same life-giving Spirit is available to us in a special and more conscious way through the gift of Pentecost.
All this lies in the background of the prayer upon which I’ll be reflecting today, the Eastern prayer known as “O Heavenly King,” which is part of ‘the normal beginning’. In its most common English translation, it goes like this:
O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth,
Everywhere present and filling all things,
Treasury of blessings and Giver of life:
Come and abide in us and cleanse us from every impurity,
And save our souls, O Good One!
Here we have in this tradition, at the start of almost every prayer service, whether formal or informal, public or private, an invocation of the Holy Spirit. And what an invocation it is! It tell us so much about not only the centrality of the Spirit in Eastern Christianity, but also about traditional Christian beliefs about who the Spirit is and what the Spirit does. First it addresses the Spirit through various names and titles:
- Heavenly King: That is, fully and equally God, partaking in the same divinity as the Father and Son
- the Comforter: The Gospel of John’s favoured term for the Spirit, this has an edgier meaning than the common translation suggests, less grandma doting on a sick child, more coach encouraging a struggling athlete on to success. Comforter yes, but equally Advocate, Exhorter, and Goad
- the Spirit of Truth: Another term from John, this testifies to the Spirit’s role in leading the faithful into ever greater Truth
- [Who is] everywhere present and filling all things: Again, nature is not divine, but the divine is present in and through nature. As transcendent as God is, God is also radically immanent, which means anything and everything has the potential to be a sacrament for us, a tangible thing through which we can encounter and participate in God.
- Treasury of blessings: All good things (though, remembering how Jesus reframes what blessing looks like!) come through the Spirit
- Giver of life: The biblical creation stories are unanimous in asserting that the Spirit of God is the very breath of life; without the Spirit, there is no life.
The prayer ends with another epithet for the Spirit:
- Good One: Beyond anything else, Christians believe that God is good: gracious, loving, compassionate, and kind (even if perhaps not always ‘nice’!).
With all this robust theology of the Spirit in mind, what does the prayer request of it?
- Come and abide in us: Again, the belief is that the Spirit is both ‘everywhere present and filling all things’ and available to dwell in the faithful in a special way to provide guidance and strength to do what is right.
- Cleanse us from every impurity: We ask the Spirit to remove from us any spot or stain that may mar our likeness to Christ. (While Jesus rejected the whole idea of purity culture, it’s a metaphor that proved too striking to erase, to mixed effect historically and theologically!)
- Save our souls: It is ancient Christian belief that salvation is something we grow into. Just as we’re entirely ourselves when we’re born yet still need to grow up into the fulness of ourselves, so too are we ‘saved’ in the moment of faith but need to grow up into the fulness of what that looks like, which is nothing other than being like and as Christ to the world. Here we ask the Spirit, as ‘the Spirit of Truth’, to lead and guide us into that salvation, so that our lives may be like that ‘city set on a hill’ that cannot be hidden, and which causes others to glorify God.
To put all my cards on the table, this is absolutely one of my all-time favourite prayers. It’s beautiful, poetic, often set to beautiful music, and is simultaneously a fulsome theology lesson and powerful invocation of the Spirit to be fully present in our lives. While it may be true that people may experience God more in a forest than in church, this prayer reminds us that our goal is for people to experience God just as much in us as in the forest.
O Heavenly King, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth,
Everywhere present and filling all things,
Treasury of blessings and Giver of life:
Come and abide in us and cleanse us from every impurity,
And save our souls, O Good One! Amen.
Matthew Root 