Tongues of Fire

Pentecost celebrates the countless expressions of God’s love and wisdom. Like a skilled dancer, God’s Holy Spirit moves through all creation, bringing forth life and love and inspiration. Fire and wind are everywhere. Inspiration and revelation are just a moment away and can come either by surprise or as a result of the interplay between God’s wisdom and our intentional spiritual practices. The spirit blows where it wills, in all directions, embracing all life, human and nonhuman. In other words, Pentecost is about God’s omnipresence, which Ingram interprets through the categories of Whiteheadian process theology, as God’s ever-present “initial aim” that all things and events at every moment of space-time achieve the maximum self-fulfillment of which they are capable. Intentionally conforming our “subjective” aims for our own fulfillment with God’s initial aim for us, as the historical Jesus did, is the call of Pentecost. Omnipresence is an all-or-nothing deal. God can’t be a little omnipresent. Either God is present in, with, and under every thing and event since the beginning of creation—what theologians and philosophers call panentheism—or omnipresence makes no sense.