In the Northern Hemisphere Summer season is just around the corner and here in California we are also entering‘ Fire Season’. Since the rash of especially deadly and destructive wind driven fires over the past years many now believe ‘fire season’ is year round. As a native Californian I have come to adapt to this awesome and dangerous aspect of our environment by taking reasonable precautions to respect this powerful force of nature. Some years back over five thousand homes were destroyed by fire in my home town of Santa Rosa – stopping only a few blocks from where I live. So, I often think about fire.
While preparing our emergency ‘Go Bag’ to be grabbed when making a hasty evacuation ahead of flames that in previous fires traveled at over sixty miles an hour I pondered how the native Lodge Pole Pine tree of the Sierras requires episodic fires in order for its cones to release its seeds. Perhaps there is a purgatorial aspect to these incendiary events along with the transformation of everything in its path to ash, a kind of cleansing fire that prepares a space for renewed life by burning away the old dead clutter – the ‘refiner’s fire’ of Scripture that may purify the soul though not without suffering.
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s story Earth’s Holocaust conveys an ironic puritanical progressive take on our effort to purge the evil wrought by our ancestors in the construction of cultures whose failings we now so clearly see. A bonfire is made of all that is useless and outdated including the Bible in an effort to purge evil from the world. Yet without a purging of the evil impulses of the human heart humanity is doomed to repeat the sad tale of history sans Savior.
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A Poem by the late Jane Greer, Micha–el, offers another rather troubling take on purgatorial fire, this time as an aspect of the fire of God’s merciful love…an excerpt from the end of the poem:
… Love like a conflagration shall be yours now;
love like an April river, like a temblor;
love like an avalanche, a midnight bomb-blast,
finding you hidden,
shrieking the air with shards of stained-glass windows;
love like a sunstorm, sweeping before it nations,
continents, galaxies, and all your hubris.
Yes, say your prayers now.
This is your Precious Moment, I its angel,
angry and dark and terrible. God With Us,
Emmanu-el, comes bearing yet more mercy,
but you won’t like it.
(I recommend following this link to an episode of the Catholic Culture podcast where you may hear Jane Greer read her poem and discuss it along with the host.)
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On the day of Pentecost both the sound of wind and tongues of fire appear in the dwelling of the disciples who are filled with Holy Spirit and begin speaking miraculously in various languages of the mighty acts of God. Thus began a conflagration that has in the ensuing centuries swept over the face of the earth (I have come to ignite a fire on the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled! Lk 12:49). But, for the disciples this first Pentecost must have come like some convulsion. Just days before as they stood around their resurrected Lord before His ascension they continued to expect Jesus the Messiah to somehow restore the Davidic kingdom to Israel. After the experience of Pentecost however, their sole vocation is to spread the kingdom of God through faith in the crucified and resurrected Lord who mysteriously remains present with them in the sacraments of His Eucharistic Flesh and Blood, in the gift of the Spirit, and in the shared ecclesial love of believers (Mt 18:20).
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