The ‘Wild Goose’ Of Pentecost

“Jesus said to his disciples, ‘When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf.’”

—The Gospel of John

Celtic Christians accurately described the Holy Spirit as the “Wild Goose” because it cannot be predicted and will not be tamed. It comes and goes as it pleases, plotting its own course in our lives. Just when we think we’ll never feel it so close again, the Holy Spirit knocks on our soul’s front door.
The Holy Spirit often comes to us in brief inspirational flashes, instantaneous realizations. Not unlike an Instagram or FaceBook post. The Holy Spirit can zip us a “tweet” or a “text” out of the blue.
The difference, however, is that, where so much of social media is inherently too abbreviated to be truly meaningful, the Holy Spirit’s “tweets” and “posts” are deeper than the sky.
And they invite us to go further still with the insights and understandings they provide.
The Holy Spirit’s messages are trail blazes on our spiritual journey, showing us which way to turn when we arrive at a crossroads and pray for direction.
And even when we don’t pray for guidance. Because the Holy Spirit is fully capable of picking the lock of our closed door if we refuse to answer its knocking.
This “Wild Goose” is not constrained or restricted by any flight pattern. The “Wild Goose” doesn’t join flocks of geese in the sky. Instead, it cares for each sheep and every single lamb in the Good Shepherd’s flock.
Loving and caring for you and I.
The Holy Spirit’s “voice” can resemble a feeling, a thought, an intuition, a hunch. Seemingly trivial and mundane things take on great meaning: a passing car with a message license plate that speaks like the direct answer to prayer that it is: God-incidence, not coincidence. If we are watching, if we listen. The Holy Spirit is able to use anything and everything to communicate with us. It might be an otherwise completely inexplicable occurrence or experience.
On a terrifically gusty day in February of 2017, I had just completed the manuscript for a book I believe God told me to write. (Two years earlier, the Holy Spirit had given me a sudden “vision” of this book, a book I’d never intended to write and hadn’t been thinking about at all.) I had just emailed it to my agent, who was pitching it that afternoon to a publisher he thought would be the perfect fit. I was out with my dog, letting him do his business, when I saw a leaf dancing mid-air in the windy distance. I had a flash of intuition that I was going to somehow catch this leaf.
The wind suddenly quieted, parting like the Red Sea, and the leaf floated straight toward me, closer and closer and then directly into my left hand. At that moment I “understood” that a path had been cleared for my book and that this particular publisher was, indeed, THE publisher. “I just ‘know’ the Holy Spirit was saying so with that leaf,” I told my wife that night. I signed a contract with that publisher a few months later.
The clearest sign that we have received and understood a message from the Holy Spirit will be a deep sense of peace, as if every blustering gust of wind has been calmed inside us. That’s just the way I felt on that wind-swept day after I caught that leaf even though I had been leashed to a particular spot with my dog. Or, I should say, after the leaf caught me.
None of us can fly on our own but, if we follow its “nudge,” the “Wild Goose” will give us its wings when we need it most, and in the way we most need it: a flight to our soul’s next understanding of how much God loves us.
Just as Jesus promised.