Twenty Something / Christina Capecchi

Whispering pines and an opportunity to listen for the Holy Spirit

The sun was setting by the time we’d reached consensus on our Christmas tree. We’d decided on a cedar that hadn’t been anyone’s first choice—safely neutral, conflict averted.

Now we were dragging it home in the dark—tired, cold and hungry. Suddenly we heard a shimmering sound in the top of the swaying pines. It was different from the start-and-stop rustle of wind in oak leaves. The pines were singing, steady and smooth, their densely packed needles turned to reeds.

We paused our homeward trek, standing still and letting the sound wash over us.

Later, eager to confirm what we’d heard, I took to Google. Was it true? Were pines distinctly suited to make music?

Yes, I learned—and the Transcendentalists were enchanted by it. Ralph Waldo Emerson captured it well in his 1836 essay “Nature”: “The pine blows its own sweet music when the wind sweeps through it.”

Later his protégé, Henry David Thoreau described it in his journal, writing: “There is no finer music than the wind in the pine tops. It is the Earth’s own breath, sweet and powerful, sighing through the forest.”

I read on.

Anne of Green Gables—one of my favorite literary heroines—finds comfort in singing pines. In book three of L.M. Montgomery’s beloved series, Anne of the Island, Anne returns to Green Gables, homesick and weary, and soaks up the “passionate wind-songs in the pines.”

My next discovery delighted my inner etymology nerd. There’s actually a word for the sound of wind rustling through trees: psithurism. It’s an archaic word with a Greek root, psithuros, meaning whispering.

Isn’t that a lovely concept? Whispering wind.

At only a whisper, we may easily miss its lyrical song.

We embrace the spirit of Advent when we pause from our march to enjoy the view. When our instinct is to hurry up and look down, it is good to slow down and look up. We release our screens and our agendas and gaze into the heavens—available, attuned.

In an era of mindless scrolling and swiping, paying attention is a spiritual exercise. It allows us to see the sacred in our midst—the dignity of every person, the glory of God’s creation, pine needle by pine needle. When we pay attention, we process the world as we are intended to, with all our senses and grateful hearts. We remember we aren’t machines and life isn’t a hamster wheel.

Only then are we able to sense the movement of the Holy Spirit, which Scripture likens to wind. (The Greek word for spirit is pneuma, meaning wind or breath.)

We can’t see the Holy Spirit, but we can feel it and hear it. And like pines swaying in wind, we can see it moving those around us. The Gospel writer John tried to capture this mystery, writing: “The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit” (Jn 3:8).

Twice last month, I interviewed Catholic leaders who spoke to the power of the Holy Spirit. It was a striking part of their ministry, opening doors at just the right time, providing the clue, the key, the cash.

“It’s been amazingly consistent,” one woman told me. “You know it when you experience it, and I believe it.”

Amid our many December to-dos, may we listen for the Holy Spirit, whispering like wind. May we know it and believe.
 

(Christina Capecchi is a freelance writer from Grey Cloud Island, Minn.) †