My Story of Pentecost. A simple woman’s testimony

Dedicated to those who have done the greatest damage

I am a simple woman on whom the gift of language might be said to be largely wasted, really, since I cannot speak of worldly affairs, nor influence men to cease doing harm.

However, I am well able to articulate personal experience, and I have the ability to see, and make, connections between corporeal and spiritual, between mysterious and rational dimensions. This can be useful to readers.

So, I want in this story to testify, describe an event that happened in my body, for you to make of what you will.

It happened the Sunday before last, on the 8^th of June, at the Pentecost Service. I was in Hogsback and attended with a dear friend.

Boughs of pyrocanthus and red hot poker lilies leaned into the dressed stone walls on either side of the altar, and another cherished friend had created an arrangement of coaly roses which glowed over the food table in the vestibule.

Pastor Barry named all the instances of fire as they occur in the Bible, and his arms and words fanned the yellow, orange and red flames of that famous day when the Holy Spirit came to the disciples and all of us mortals on earth.

As I listened to him holding forth, both impassioned and humour-filled, I became aware of a fine, fierce, contrapuntal gust pushing itself up inside me, sitting at the end of a pew beside the scarlet carpet that runs down the middle of the little chapel’s nave. From the waters of my sacrum I could feel a slender, burning blueness ascending.

As he ended his sermon, the pastor encouraged us not immediately to chat outside with one another after the communion, but to be quiet for a bit and pay attention if God’s voice was wanting to come through to us. He emphasised that God has a unique way of reaching each one of us, tailored to each individual’s capacity and predilection.

Photo by Venti Views on Unsplash  (photo cropped by the author)

When the three friends who were sitting beside me rose for communion, I was obliged to get up too, to let them through, and, despite the confusion inside my body, I was pressed from behind by the parishioners moving all together to the pulpit. It was not my first time attending an Anglican service in this non-denominational chapel, and I cupped my hands deferentially to receive Christ’s body, a weightless white disc, and stepped towards another friend in the community, Helen, who was holding the tray of tiny glasses brimming with vermilion liquid, the sacred symbol of the gory story.

At that moment, the blue fire blew abruptly through my heart, it was a torch in my conscience, and a whisper that found its way past my lips.
“I can’t! I can’t!” I breathed, staring at Helen.
“It’s grape juice,” she replied reassuringly, but I stared and repeated, “I can’t!”
I dropped the pale white disc into a tray of ice that just happened to be there, and stepped outside, feeling clean and light. I was aware of how icy the air had suddenly turned and how cleanly it entered my lungs.

I went around to the front of the chapel, where some people were huddling in spots of watery sun while others took shelter in the vestibule. Serenely I joined in the eating and talking. The pastor approached me, my sudden refusal of the holy communion had not escaped him. He asked whether I was a Roman Catholic and when I replied in the negative he invited me to come and see him sometime, adding that he would pray for me. I must have looked nonplussed, for he added benignly,
“But it’s okay.”
That made sense to me and I echoed, “Yes. I know it’s okay.”

We ate, talked, and then carried, washed, dried and packed away the cups and plates and tiny glasses. It was close to twelve when we said good-bye and I drove back home soon thereafter.

The next day (Whit Monday, which in some countries is a public holiday) I caught up with an unfinished, online creative group process I was part of, which involved drawing rainbow labyrinths while connecting specific colours with specific sounds. The colour the group had reached that Sunday happened to have been red, and the associated sound was ‘ê’ (as in red). I selected my red oil pastel and drew the outer paths of my labyrinths while chanting ‘ê’. Then, without any forewarning from my Self, I took a paintbrush, loaded it with acrylic paint labelled ‘Vermillion’ and pulled paths up and down and across between my labyrinths, going in all four directions, and, again, a wind animated my body and I knew: this is my blood.

I became excited, inspired, and squeezed thick red paint from the tube onto my finger and drew my blood thickly over the paths the brush had made. As I did so, I was inhabited increasingly by lightness and joy, as if I were purifying my own soul, my blood and my bloodline. My memories clarified as I sang and I felt the weightless Christ, my own liberated Self, and a joy my body could not have before this. Because I had never been able to stop thinking of Mary, feeling sick at heart all my life about what she had had to endure. Because, you know, Jesus too was covered in vernix at birth, and Mary had to brush her nipple on his cheek beside his mouth so it would open for him to suck her milk. He was born to live with friends and food and go on nice long walks and plant almond trees and trellis vines and give her and Joseph grandchildren, not be crucified by envious men and lies!

I felt that Ruach had broken through historic deeps in my body, she had breathed me, leaped me over a bridge higher than that gruesome consecrated murder on the red and speechless earth. Oh Mary, Mary, is it you or I who’s quite contrary?

Rainbow labyrinths, process art by the author

 

So there you are. This is my Pentecostal record, personal, simple, a single simple woman’s tiny crystal of truth, dictating nothing, prescribing nothing. I will say this, though: we women don’t give birth so you can kill bodies, hopes, trust, dreams, aspirations, natural complexities, and simple, ordinary joys. If you want blood, serve wombs and birth, become a midwife. If you want redemption, then grow the balls to serve the Mysteries of Life.

I thank my friends; Pastor Barry Wittstock and the St Patrick’s Chapel community in Hogsback; and Chantell Dysel, each for your part in this story.

– Silke Heiss, June 2025

  

Four-footed Fire

I want to re-ignite momentum on my blog! 

Through a series of blessed synchronicities, I find myself here again, at last, after almost seven months.

Today eleven years ago I formally wedded that beautiful soul, the poet Norman Morrissey and, in the wake of that event, I created a hand-made book of poems for him - most of which have never seen the light of day.

I'm moved to share two of them with you. 

They are quite distinct in their energies. 

Four-footed by Silke Heiss

Four-footed

My ring has four loops
round the green eye

of the centre stone.

Wisdom is an animal:

four paws on the earth

keep the heart humble

and the mind

uninterested

in suffering.

        *

The above poem was written in Grahamstown, where I was staying with my fifteen-year-old son, who was not at all happy, at the time, about my marriage to Norman. Norman, for his part, had his youngest son staying with him in Hogsback, so we were both, during and very shortly after our wedding, more or less absorbed in parenting, more than we could be in one another. This was painful to me, but the ring (which I had designed myself) gave me strength, it gave me the sense not to indulge myself. At least, my poem led me there, to a better self, you could say.

The second poem is entitled Fire. I like it because, as far as I'm concerned, it reveals me to myself more articulately and more wittily than I could do. If that makes sense. Here it is.

Fire by Silke Heiss

Fire

Hestia and Aphrodite

- the virgin goddess of the hearth

and the brazen goddess of love -

in me

somehow combine -

Hestia's fire keeps

my loins loyal,

while the love goddess' spark

illuminates my kitchen

and all I conjure

in the heat there.

Ag, it probably sounds very grand and unlikely.

But it's true

my eggs are in two baskets -

both very 

near fire. 

    

       *

Hmm. I shall be curious as to whether this little bit of breath on that little bit of tinder does, indeed, re-ignite my blog.

Strelitzia - my chosen wedding flower,
blooming in Sunrise-on-Sea, where I now live.

Protein

Just a fun clip recording a thought that came to me at the first outdoor fire I've made since Norman died.

A forgotten letter to the Steppenwolverine

I actually don't know how it happened, but today I discovered a forgotten email to me from Norman, dated 7th June 2012. Here it is. (His pet name for me was 'Wolverine' - short for 'Steppenwolverine', a feminisation of Steppenwolf, which Norman called himself after Herman Hesse's figure of that name to express his isolatedness.)

My Dearest Wolverine,

    As someone who's been called

    a Master of Fire,*

    your log-blooms awe me,

    their architecure

    so sure,

    so

    alert to the meaning of air-paths

    traced amidst the symmetries

    and crankinesses of wood;

    and these past days

    you have set me to sleep and meditate

    before such heart-warm blazes

    that today some ache in my chest that's been there as long as I can recall

    gave way,

    let me settle towards a peace of mind and body

    I've not known for years

    - took me into the arms of comfort

    that are your flesh and spirit

    laving over me,

    healing me

    of a life-long illness,

    letting me come safely into your company

    more closely than anyone's

    ever done before,

    thawing my self-denying fear of risking living

    into trickling

    like the first seeps of Spring

    towards

    really leafing

    into Tomorrow.

    Love,

            Norman.

* My poem Master of Creation, which describes Norman as a master of fire, was published in New Contrast 152, Vol.38, No.4, Summer 2010.