God’s eternal Word leaped down from heaven in the silent watches of the night, and now we are filled with wonder at the nearness of our God.

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With the after-Pentecost season, the power of the Holy Spirit comes to the forefront, after the celebration of Jesus’ presence and mighty deeds. At Pentecost the image of the wind for the Spirit seems less clear-cut than the flesh-and-blood reality, the sheer humanity, of the Son. The wind, Scripture tells us, blows where it will. We see that most strikingly in hurricanes, snowstorms, and other disasters. Or, more hospitably, in places where the wind is a cooling force against the heat.

All earth’s creatures, without exception, feel the wind. With its forcefulness, it can even blow into contemporary cities, towns, and villages. I think of the wind as a metaphor for grace, and that certainly blows where and when the Spirit chooses. How do we imagine this? What images of our experience carry such a meaning?

The Spirit of the Lord, we are told, fills the whole earth and its peoples. That’s why I think of the image of the wind as grace, the power that the Spirit infuses for renewing the earth and its peoples—through our human presence and our deeds. The power of grace brings about change, transformation, either slowly over time or with a single, direct stroke, as happened to Saul. No human spirit is denied grace, the empowering wind of the Holy Spirit. In our time and strongly visual culture, in addition to words, images carry meaning, especially to those of us who view them with a lens distinctly incarnational, sacramental.

Inevitably, that leads to recognizing images of change and transformation. In the modern genre of films, I have found the recurring expression of that pattern of change. It is a pattern ever ancient, ever new: men and women graced to transcend themselves in either humble and unsung or splendid and celebrated deeds.

When I began to recognize that pattern in some films, I discovered why I found them deeply satisfying. (Truth in advertising: the friends who also saw them don’t necessarily see them with the same lens as I do.) As I explained to them, it was clear to me that certain films were all about transformation. But not in a classic literary sense. These films tell stories of profound changes in the course of ordinary events or at least within the range of ordinary experience: a party, a visit, a duty performed. A kind of democratization of the heroic.

A few of my favorites go back in years: “La Strada,” “8 ½,” and, not too long ago, “Babette’s Feast.” I loved them all when they came out. They have a mystical quality in their endings, where chaos and differences are transmuted into profound sadness, or joy, or oneness with others. More recently, “Other People’s Lives” showed the gradual humanization of a robot-like state functionary. While doing his duty to spy on a suspect, he encounters the possibility of a humanity beyond his experience—and the power to act. Possibility and power. No great reward or honor follows; in fact, demotion. With his loss of position after the political fall of the government, his circumstances are transmuted from Stasi bureaucrat to mailman, into the ordinariness of life; yet he is infused with new capacities. His inner life transcends the limits he had lived: he feels, he can imagine how others feel, he is empowered. The wind blows where it will, whether one lives within one’s limits—or is graced to exceed them.

At the opening of “The Visitor,” one man’s life-limits are dreary, indeed. He suffers the understandable aftereffect of the death of a beloved spouse. Duty takes him to their second home in the city. There, the wind sweeps into the space within his borders, as he confronts up close other men and women of different ethnicity and class. The protagonist is stretched, very gradually, beyond his self-imposed boundaries to the point of heartbreak. Grace is not always comfortable. At one point in the unfolding human drama, he is wordless, baffled, and can only express himself by an uncharacteristic embrace of the one other who shares his distress. It is an image of compassion that is comforting to the viewer as well as the character. No glorious resolution as in “Babette’s Feast.” Only life in our time and place; a life with a more capacious spirit.

Less dramatically, but no less life-changing, “The Savages” brings reconciliation to adult siblings as they fulfill their duty to their aged father.

More films could be cited. Recognizing the images requires only a bifocal view—if that’s the lens that fits one’s vision. Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose sacramental perspective fills his poetry, writes “God lies under the world’s splendor and wonder.” The grace of the Spirit blows where it wills.

Bridget Puzon, O.S.U.

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With the season of Advent and the changes in nature at this season, a look at the meaning in what surrounds us as we prepare for the coming of the Lord.

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