The Call of the Wild Goose
Many years
ago my husband Robin won a goose as a raffle prize, he brought it home, it was
a wild goose so it had been shot, to pluck and draw, pheasants are one thing
but this goose was both messy and smelly, and it wasn’t much of a prize because
the thing was so scrawny when didn’t know what to do with it, let alone eat it,
but we didn’t want to throw it away so we put it in the freezer and forgot
about it, until several years later when we finally got rid of it as an
unwanted inconvenience.
So when at
the CMD conference on zoom last Friday
for Lay readers and Clergy our Bishop said that he preferred the Wild Goose as a
symbol of the Holy Spirit as opposed to a dove, because Geese are messy, noisy
and inconvenient. I remembered that encounter with a very inconvenient goose
and thought hoe appropriate for the feast of Pentecost, because for most of us
Christians how Robin and I treated that goose really is a parable for how we
seem to treat the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
As I said in
my June reflection ‘The Holy Spirit came not to a building but to people’ it
came to the disciples huddled together ‘in one place’ and it came as a ‘rush of
violent wind’ and as ‘tongues of fire’,
it completely overwhelmed them made them appear drunk, it was noisy, dangerous
and inconvenient and it changed them utterly, it moved them, it called them
insistently onwards. earth. And like the wild goose it was dangerous.
In ancient
Celtic spiritual tradition, ”Chasing the Wild Goose” was a symbol for seeking
to go in the way the Spirit of God calls us to go, and if you “chase a wild goose” you don’t really know
where you are going to end up and neither did the disciples.
Moving with
the Spirit of God can sometimes be like that, Jesus, in fact, used the image of
the wind to make this same point. “The wind blows where it will: you do not
know where it comes from, or where it is going.” There is a sense in which,
when we are captivated by God, there is that dangerous element to it. There is
that risk; there is that excitement; and the image of the wild goose as a
symbol of the Holy Spirit leaves us in no doubt that we cannot domesticate the
Spirit of God in our prevailing Western
culture, the will of the individual is supreme. So God is becoming confined to
smaller and smaller boxes, domesticated, crammed into a shape and size that
seeks to place God at our disposal but the mere fact that the Spirit comes at
Pentecost and comes not
gently but like the wild geese, uncontrollable, uncontained and untamed, ,strange, unexpected, and unpredictable to rest on the disciples means that God’s
Spirit rests within people, comes to us if we will only accept it, and it calls
to us as raucous, loud, passionate and
as insistently as the wild geese, and it call us all (not just you and me) but
Christians everywhere to remember, remember that day, Pentecost in Jerusalem,
where the wild untamed Spirit of God scattered the disciples and sent them to
the ends of the earth.
And what
about us, can we follow the call of the spirit, the call of the wild goose into
the unknown land we inhabit in these days of change and challenge
Can we allow the wild spirit to break free and
to take us to places we know not where,
for the sake of God and for the sake of the world, and ultimately for our own
sake. As we will sing later:
God’s
lamplighting Spirit
Is dancing
the way,
From dark
into dawning,
From night
into day.
Can we
follow, can we dance along with the Spirit, can we be led by the spirit, by the
call of the wild geese as they fly to
experience the grace and purpose of Pentecost? Amen
With thanks to Rt Revd Ian Paton, Bishop of St Andrews, Dunkeld and Dunblane, & Rt Revd Karen Gorham, Bishop of Sherborne, whose reflections set me off on this training of thought.
