Who has seen the wind?

This little poem was introduced to me by someone (I don't remember who) when I was very, very small, maybe 4 or 5. It might have been at my Episcopal Montessori school. Poor Christina Rossetti. Nobody really likes her that much. Her poetry pales in comparison to her brother's creation, and it's true that much of it is infected with some of the most cringe-worthy attributes of Victorian sentimentality.

But this little poem stays with me. I remember the slowly dawning understanding as I took in what may have been my first experience of metaphor, as well as what might have been my first intellectual "understanding" of God.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you.
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.

Today, we've got a wind advisory. My office has a huge window - so tall that if I stood on the sill and raised up my hands I still couldn't touch the top. Through the opaque blind (I'm not really supposed to open it) I mostly see a bus stop. But there are two trees with their trunks out of my eye line, one on either side of the window. Their branches meet right in the middle of the frame, and the wind is rattling them pretty briskly.

It's fairly common knowledge that the etymology of "Spirit" comes from words for "wind" "breath", etc, from several languages. So it's not new. Wind is a good, old, tested metaphor for God, the Spirit. The bible's bursting with it.

"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

At least, before meteorology. Now we sort of know where it's coming from, and we sort of know where it's going, and we kind of know why it's doing what it does. But the physics of wind are fascinating and opaque to me. Where does all that energy come from? even if I understood the physics I still lack a Prime Mover.

Wind is very good for me. As soon as it starts up I feel better. That little Rossetti poem starts to hum in my head - it's like a spiritual lullabye. I always hear it and feel a little more okay about dealing with the existence of God. If I can believe in wind, I say to myself, then I can believe in God. And it's easy to believe in wind. I am not the least bit conflicted about it. As soon as it's windy, every moment I spend in it starts morphing into a small Sacred experience. Or at least, everything that happens to me in the wind transforms without protest into a metaphor for some part of the spiritual experience, and so I understand and experience things spiritually much more naturally than usual. I like watching what it does to trees, and to water, and to street trash. I love to stand in the wind. I love especially wind that's strong enough to make me doubt for a second my ability to stand upright. I like to lean forwards and backwards into gusts, and feel myself slightly buoyed up. I like fighting it for my clothes and papers and hair and umbrella. I like it when it wins, and snatches things away from me. I've never forgotten a bit of G.K. Chesterton I once read:

For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant to have to run after one's hat. Why should it be unpleasant to the well-ordered and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, and running exhausts one. The same people run much faster in games and sports. The same people run much more eagerly after an uninteresting; little leather ball than they will after a nice silk hat. There is an idea that it is humiliating to run after one's hat; and when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic - eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing - such as making love. A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.

Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no animal could be wilder. In fact, I am inclined to believe that hat-hunting on windy days will be the sport of the upper classes in the future. There will be a meet of ladies and gentlemen on some high ground on a gusty morning. They will be told that the professional attendants have started a hat in such-and-such a thicket, or whatever be the technical term. Notice that this employment will in the fullest degree combine sport with humanitarianism. The hunters would feel that they were not inflicting pain. Nay, they would feel that they were inflicting pleasure, rich, almost riotous pleasure, upon the people who were looking on. When last I saw an old gentleman running after his hat in Hyde Park, I told him that a heart so benevolent as his ought to be filled with peace and thanks at the thought of how much unaffected pleasure his every gesture and bodily attitude were at that moment giving to the crowd.

At the risk of being crass, having never suffered horribily at the hands of a tornado or hurricane, I appreciate that the metaphor continues there, in the awesome, fearsome, old-testament ferocity and mercilessness of a Yahweh -- how the very same phenomenon that lightly ruffles a baby's hair, that's described as "caressing" is the same one that shatters lives into splinters. I appreciate that it's easy and natural to anthropomorphize the wind. I used to talk to it, and think it was "playing" with me. As I said, poems talk about the wind "caressing" something. Reporters talk of the "angry" and "punishing" winds. We name storms. I appreciate that this process helps us to deal with the phenomenon in ways we can understand, that it's the human way, irrelevant as our psychology may be to the wind itself. I don't necessarily like it, but it's true, in a solid, undoubtable way, and that's hopeful and comforting to me.

The metaphor doesn't properly account for the personal relationship with God part of the Sacred experience. One I talked about here and with which I have struggled constantly through my journey. I've seen it work too strongly through many deeply grounded people to dismiss it entirely as "naming hurricanes". It always comes down to the conflict between the tender personal relationship-having God (Jesus?) and Yahweh, the seemingly irrational, unfathomable phenom-like force of nature that blows through the Old Testament. Job shudders at his power:

"Indeed I know that this is so; but how can a mortal be just before God?
If one wished to contend with him, one could not answer him once in a thousand.
He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength-- who has resisted him, and succeeded?--
he who removes mountains, and they do not know it, when he overturns them in his anger;
who shakes the earth out of its place, and its pillars tremble;
who commands the sun, and it does not rise; who seals up the stars;
who alone stretched out the heavens and trampled the waves of the Sea;
who made the Bear and Orion, the Pleiades and the chambers of the south;
who does great things beyond understanding, and marvelous things without number.
Look, he passes by me, and I do not see him; he moves on, but I do not perceive him.
He snatches away; who can stop him? Who will say to him, 'What are you doing?"

Again and again, Yahweh thunders "Don't even TRY to understand me!" Are these warnings setting us up for the important lessons I soaked my head in here and here?

I dunno. And I've entirely lost track of my metaphor. For us to actually have a "relationship" with wind, (ie, wind power, etc) we do have to be able to understand it. I think I could pick up the thread here a bit. Something to do with practical understanding, a social gospel, etc, but by now you are thoroughly bored with it. In the meantime, it's windy. And I'm taking every opportunity I can to stand in it and mutter Victorian doggerel to myself.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you.
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.

Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor I.
But when the trees bow down their heads,
The wind is passing by.