In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures....
These all look to you
to give them their food in due season;
when you give to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are filled with good things.
When you hide your face, they are dismayed;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to their dust.
When you send forth your spirit, they are created;
and you renew the face of the ground." [Psalm 104:24, 27-30]
Do me a favor, would you? Think for a moment about how your lungs work. Picture how the air moves.
Before you draw a breath at all, your body is already surrounded by an ocean of air that blankets the entire planet. It's in the breeze the tickles the branches on the trees in the distance. It's in the warm humidity that hangs around everywhere on a summer day before a thunderstorm. It's the reason the sky looks blue on a sunny day. And as you inhale, some of that wind--those molecules of nitrogen and oxygen and carbon dioxide and whatnot--enters your lungs and is absorbed into your bloodstream. With me so far? From there, that oxygen--which just a moment before had been bouncing around the atmosphere--is incorporated into your cells, stored in sugars in your body for fuel, and coursing through every blood cell of your body. In other words, the air that used to be very clearly outside of you comes to be inside you--and in a sense, becomes a part of you. And all of this is going on all the time, every time you breathe in... or <sigh>... breathe out.
The thing that boggles my mind about that exchange is that chemically, the oxygen is all the same, whether it's out in the breeze of the open air and blue sky, filling my lungs like a balloon, or being transported through my blood vessels within red blood cells. And yet, once the air is inside my body, I think of it no longer as just "air" but "breath." And once it is in my blood cells, I don't think of it as "breath" any more so much as I just think of it as "me." And yet, the oxygen from outside myself is necessary to make my body (also "me") come to life and stay alive... and I don't think of the oxygen in my lungs or blood cells as a hostile invader or external force that is possessing me. It enables me to be me, distinct from the world around and the atmosphere's ocean of air around me, and yet it is also inseparable from my life and even my own body. In a very real sense, you could say that I (and all life forms that breathe) were made to be both surrounded and filled by this thing we call "breath" or "air" or "wind," depending on where we picture it.
Well, the reason I've asked us to take this brief detour into the respiratory system is that the biblical writers so often use the same language for the Spirit and the Spirit's indwelling. The biblical words for "spirit" (and also "Spirit" as in "The Spirit of God" or "the Holy Spirit") are also words for wind, breath, and air. And just as the same air can be called "atmosphere" when it is blowing in the wind and also "breath" when it is inside my lungs, the Spirit of God is also described in the Scripture as both the breath from God and the breath that brings us to life. We are brought to life because God dwells within us--and yet that doesn't make us stop being ourselves, not any more than I stop being myself when I take a breath. Just the opposite, in fact: I become more fully myself--and alive, rather than a corpse!--when I am filled with this outside stuff called "air" that becomes "breath."
All of this is to say that human beings--and maybe all of creation itself, in a broader sense--is made for being indwelt by God's Spirit--and yet, that indwelling doesn't exhaust or contain God (as though God were limited to only being a life-force inside human beings), nor does it stop us from being individual beings ourselves, rather than puppets or hosts for a parasite. We are indwelt by God, and that neither limits God to existing only with us, nor does it reduce us to programmed automatons. We are made for relationship with God, and even to be dwelling places for God by the Spirit, and yet God remains beyond us as expansively as the atmosphere is bigger than the capacity of my lungs.
Grappling with this reality both exalts and humbles us. It means that we human beings are indwelt, not merely by a complex system of chemical reactions we call "life" but with nothing less than the very presence of God who enlivens us like breath. And at the same time, the psalmist here reminds us that all creatures are brought to life by this "breath of God" who is also the "Spirit of God." And we find our place in the universe, not by pretending we are "better" or "more important" than the other creatures in God's world, but by seeing that we share a common dependency on God's Spirit to fill us like breath in our lungs and oxygen in our blood cells. In that sense, it is humbling to recognize that God is not ashamed to dwell within me, but neither is God ashamed to dwell within a skunk, a sea cow, or a slime mold. God's presence permeates all of it, and all of us are able to exist and live because we are filled with God's own indwelling Spirit like our breath.
That means I never have permission to dismiss other creatures as of secondary importance to God or of lesser beauty or goodness. I never have the right to view the world merely as raw materials to be harvested and hoarded or resources to be commodified, but rather as parts of the same web of life in which I am woven, enlivened by the same breath of God as I am. Taking the Spirit of God seriously means seeing my connection to all of life and all of creation, and to own it rather than to hide it.
Think about that the next time you breathe in. Think about that the next time you see a bee pollinating a flower. Think about it the next time you cross paths with the neighbor who always irritates you and gets under your skin. We are all enlivened with the same Spirit of God, who not only made us but sustains us all, moment by moment, as an ongoing gift of grace.
O God, open our eyes to see the connections we share with all creatures and with all people, and draw us more closely to you in that recognition.
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