The breath-wind-spirit of God is an invitation to deep communion. (Listen here.)
One thing I learned from my middle child is this: horses greet one another by exchanging breath. Some time later I met Poppy. She gently leaned her muzzle against my forehead. We breathed once, twice, three times, and my whole being filled with an awareness of the goodness of fresh grass and clean hay and the exuberant muscular joy of galloping over a hillside. It was one of the more powerful experiences I have had of communion.
The Maori greet one another similarly. Culture holder Carmen TePuke describes it like this. ‘The Hongi (pressing noses) is something we do when we greet someone … The sharing of the breath connects our Mauri (life force). We are no longer separate. We are one!’ More, the experience of hongi transforms a visitor into tangata whenua, a person of the land. The act not only brings humans together, but changes their relationship with the soil.
In these sad Covid days, I’m not willing to suggest that we all turn to one another now and share breath quite so directly. But as the late great Ursula le Guin wrote: ‘Whenever a text is spoken … and listened to, we become a community of present contemporaries, people breathing together.’ We have just heard a biblical text or three. We have become a community of present contemporaries. So let’s take a deep breath, together.
The thing is this: The atmosphere which blankets our beloved wounded blue-green planet is a closed system. Nothing goes in; nothing goes out. For millions of years, the exhalations of swamp gas and the inhalations of dinosaurs and the exhalations of leafy plants and the inhalations of Neanderthals and the exhalations of soft mosses and the inhalations of swallowtails have been going around and around and around.
Take another breath. The breath which you have just drawn in, which fills your blood with oxygen and gives your body life, is the same air which — who knows? — a pterodactyl breathed and a pobblebonk in the rushes and a kangaroo on a nearby plain. It’s the sigh of a cyclamen on a Florentine hillside and the blow of a blue whale arcing from the sea and the song of every ancestor who has gone before. It’s every hongi ever performed, and the echo of a hymn sung with gusto by your grandma; it’s the original reuse, recycle.
But you are in a series focused on the spirit, so why am I talking about breath? Because in both Greek and Hebrew, the word we translate as ‘spirit’ refers to the movement of air. In Hebrew, it’s the feminine ‘ruah’, meaning breath or wind. In Greek, it’s the gender neutral ‘pneuma’, meaning air-in-motion. The Greek is where we get the words ‘pneumatic’, inflated with air, and ‘pneumonic’, related to the lungs. It’s also the root of the longest word in the English dictionary, pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanokoniosis, which is a respiratory disease. The word ‘spirit’ itself has this same concept at its root: spirit, respire, to breathe. Breath, wind, spirit: they’re the same word, and any time you encounter one of those words in the Bible, a translator has made a decision to choose that word over the others.
We meet this air-in-motion at big moments in scripture. At the earth’s beginning, God’s breath moved over the waters and brought life out of chaos (Genesis 1:2). At the human beginning, God forms us out of clay and gives life by breathing into our nostrils (Genesis 2:7). It’s the original hongi, the sharing of spirit and breath of life which anchors us to the land, and it happens when we meet God face to face. But despite this extraordinary intimacy with God, which each and every one of us is given, brokenness and suffering abound. And so the prophet Ezekiel calls upon the four winds to breathe into the dead and reanimate them, and God promises to fill them with God’s spirit so that they can live once again in the land.
This interconnection of spirit, life and breath continues in the Bible. I envision Jesus as the great sharer of hongi, filling people with his spirit and reconciling them both to God and to God’s own kingdom. For John writes that Jesus came to bring abundant life and perfect communion through his holy spirit-breath. At his death, Jesus bowed his head and gave up his breath (John 19:30). And when he commissioned his first disciples to continue his work, the Risen Christ breathed on them, saying, ‘Receive holy breath.’ (John 20:22).
Then in Acts chapter 2, a growing band of men and women were gathered together when ‘suddenly from heaven a sound like the rush of a violent wind’ came to them and set their heads on fire. It’s the same air-in-motion which hovered over the waters of chaos and gave life to the brontosaurus and the thylacine, and which Jesus exhaled from the cross. It’s the wind which the Risen Christ breathed into his disciples as he commissioned them, and it filled the larger crowd at Pentecost with holy spirit. And it changed them. For in that moment of deep intimacy, every person breathed in new gifts, new words, new possibilities.
People beyond the group heard the sound and came running. They were astonished, because the disciples were speaking to them plainly. There was no hyper-holy jargon, just ordinary words in different languages that everyone could understand. Thousands were added to the disciples’ number on that day and we later learn the result: ‘they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers,’ and to the sharing of resource so that all could be fed (2:42-47). And then the great missionary journeys were inspired and led by the same holy spirit-breath as over and over again people shared the intimacy and life of the spirit.
That was two thousand years ago. And maybe, given the ravages of Christendom and the colonial genocides in the so-called name of Christ and the cultural violence of much of the missionary movement and the ongoing revelations of clergy abuse and the hatred spewing from the mouths of many self-described Christians and the burned out sorrowful tentative place so many of us inhabit, it might feel like our god is old and tired, and the spirit is petering out.
But the thing is this: The atmosphere which blankets our beloved wounded blue-green planet is a closed system. Nothing goes in; nothing goes out. Take a deep breath. The holy spirit-breath which Jesus exhaled on the cross and which gathered pace and noise and thunder and roared into the house in Acts and set the disciples’ heads on fire; the breath which gave them life and confidence and language to speak to all people, and which beckoned them into the breaking of bread and the sharing of resource and passionate, urgent prayer; the same breath which propelled Paul and Timothy and Silas and Lydia and others into the sharing of spirit all around the Mediterranean Basin: this breath is still ricocheting around the earth: and you have just inhaled.
It’s the breath which gathers us here together today. It’s the deep breath you take before you call someone and say, I’m sorry; it’s the sigh of relief and sweetness when relationship is restored. It’s the new green shoot emerging when everything seemed stale and dead; it’s the whisper of courage which helps you name a terrifying, life-giving truth. It’s the right idea which comes from nowhere when people are prayerfully listening. It’s the spark which makes God’s holy word erupt from the page. It’s the impulse which leads God’s foolish people to gather in all circumstances and to sing and break bread and pray; and it’s the confidence which leads those same foolish people to give their lives away. It’s the free-flowing help when we don’t know how to speak with God; it’s the groans too deep for words. It’s the freshness which pours through a room full of people and stirs them to newness and change. It’s the compassion and connection which binds us to others, and the tenderness with which we treat them. It’s the anchoring of people to creation and land and the intimacy of communion through hongi. In all things, it’s about freedom and movement and life and joy, for the spirit is the opposite of suffocation.
Holy Spirit: she’s the gift of God and the song of the planet, and there’s plenty of oomph in her yet. So take another breath. Give thanks. Exhale. In this simple act, renew your union with God, and all people, and the whole of creation. And know that you can do this with each and every breath, 22,000 times a day. Ω
BENEDICTION: As people filled with holy breath, may the Creator’s life flow through you, Jesus’ peace spill from you, and the Spirit’s power always lead you into deeper intimacy with God, and other people, and the whole of creation. For the life of the Spirit never ends: it must be lived. We go in peace to love and share God’s Spirit: in the name of Christ: Amen.
Reflection shared with Rosanna Baptist, on 13 July 2025 (multiple texts, off lectionary) © Alison Sampson, 2025. This reflection is heavily indebted to ‘The Gospel of the Holy Spirit,’ a sermon by Barbara Brown Taylor found in Home by Another Way. Cowley Publications: Cambridge / Boston, MA, 1999. Thinking about horses led me to think about hongi, which led me to this: https://provensustainable.org/blog/carmen-tepuke and also this: https://youtu.be/uwN3TcsLXsU. If you are offended by me comparing Maori greetings with horse greetings, perhaps you underestimate my respect for the culture and intelligence of horses, trees and all beyond-human creation, and how deeply we are all related – and go watch the YouTube video above! If this is your photo of hongi, let me know so I can credit it or take it down if needed; I could not find the original source.
Alison and the whale 