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

  

Vitally important

Characters

My longest-standing friend
Her husband
My beloved

Bird

Me

Story

It crashed hard into the window pane, soft down feathers flew. We rose, alarmed, to see it on the tiles, breathing heavily. Its head, slightly up, laid itself down after a while.

"Not looking good," my friend said.

"But look at that heart," I pointed out.

She agreed: we both saw it pumping relentlessly, lifting the small, green torso up and down, up and down.

None of us dared go near the concussed creature, for fear of shocking him or her the more.

Time went by. Neither did the head lift nor did the heart stop beating.

Under my breath - what a vitally important place that is! - under my breath I asked whether there be guardian angels for birds as small as this, but I did not wait for an answer as I summonsed a guardian angel for this miniscule bloblet of warmth in the universe.

I pulled myself on my knees a little towards him and spoke softly and he blinked.

That gave me hope. "Hope is the thing with feathers / that perches in the soul."

No, I did not think of Emily Dickinson's poem while I was oaring myself towards the tiny being, willing it to know I meant no harm. Dickinson's poem is in my marrow and needs no conscious articulation.

I stroked it once, expecting it to take fright.

It seemed to relax. My friend's husband encouraged me to take it in my hands.

"Just don't let it fly into the house," warned my friend: the bird faced the open door into the house.

The two men stationed themselves in the door to discourage any thought of flight into the house.

I edged in from behind and lifted the bird. Its claws immediately gripped my fingers. A good sign. I stroked and spoke. It blinked, looked, turned its head. Perkily, actually.

My friend stepped outside and the bird pooped.

"That's a positive sign!" we chorused.

"He looks like he'll stay there forever," my friend's husband said.

Yes, the little soul was comfortable, albeit his eyes remained surprised at the shape his heaven seemed to be taking: full of great, featherless entities making strange sounds.

At length, I got up, rested my hands on the balcony railing near a tree and suddenly he fluttered away. Landed on a steep branch, hung on admirably.

I shook the poop off my fingers, it splashed on the tiles.

We went inside.

I was aware how we had left him to himself and to the guardian angel of his life's flame.

When we went out again, he wasn't there.

He'd asked for nothing.

In extremity, he'd given us all his trust.

"Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul, / And sings the tune without the words, / And never stops at all."

Under your breath, in your marrow, in your hands - vitally important places!

Sacred vessels

It's a while now that I've not been attending to this blog as regularly as would fulfil me.

When the blogsite was kindly set up for me, it was announced on my website as

a space where Silke dreams her dreams, speaks her mind, shares her journey and sometimes disappears from - a sign that she's enjoying her solitude.

A lovely disclaimer, "enjoying her solitude".

But my infrequent blogs these months have not been due either to enjoyment or solitude; they have been due to a heavy heart that will not speak.

Way back (nearly forty years ago), a fellow at my old school gave me a note, on which was written:

To understand people, you have to be able to hear what they are not saying. What, perhaps, they will never be able to say.

I did not understand why he gave me the note and I don't remember him telling me why he did. At the time I assumed he was sharing something of his own, painful silence, but now I wonder whether he sensed something about me instead?

There is much focus, in this time, on truth, exposure of lies, on revelations, clearing blockages and festering obstacles on all kinds of levels - economic, political, social, racial, spiritual and psychological.

All through this time now, my heart feels strained, broken, aching, sometimes panicky.

A heart is a place of very few, choice words.

Perhaps the only words that can be at home in a heart are 'I love you', and variations thereon.

Those words and their variations fulfil the purpose of words as cups of mystery, cups filled with the elixir of a kind of pure existence: I am, you are, we be, and how strange and lovely is that.

It may be age, it may be the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune - whatever it is, there is great, urgent, profound and uncompromising need, in the heart writing this, to retreat. To be a leaf, melting gradually into its own ungreening.

Writing these words give ease. The metaphor conveys me into the foliage my soul needs.

I am no longer strong enough for any other kind of habitat, other kinds of words.

Living in peace is possible (for me) only when words are respected for the sacred vessels they are.

Painted papyrus by Eva van Belle

 

2 years today

A quilt no one has seen

Perfectly Present - title poem from Section 5 of Greater Matter

The tortoise of me is making slow, but steady progress. Here's the title poem from the fifth section of Greater Matter.

Perfectly Present

I spent time with fellow-widow Gwyneth

– our regular weekly keeping tabs

on our days, work,

thoughts, experiences –

she too’d been mugged

by the mugginess dragging down the sky;

that it wasn’t only me who was dof  was reassuring.

Over tea and cake and talk

there was a cooling,

we discussed the blessing of thoughts that appear as beings,

intentions that catch you in motion

before you’ve thought –

our obedience to intuition

makes us a port

for

Spirit.

I came home to the sunflung polka dots of white roses dancing

in the hedge beside the garage door;

and writing this now

– not in the obligatory present tense

(which many modern writers use for no better reason than to hog an effect)

but in the elegiac mood

of reverence that holds in faith

that which we can’t

grasp –

I am certain

that what is past

is perfectly present.

- Silke Heiss