06/01/2026
Born of Wind and Fire
Most assuredly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but cannot tell where it comes from and where it goes. So is everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Nicodemus replies with sarcasm you can cut with a knife: “How can a man be born when he is old. Can he enter again into his mother's womb?”
Indeed. It is impossible.
And it is impossible to enter the Kingdom of God unless we are born of water and spirit. The flesh can only give birth to the things that come from its nature. The flesh cannot give birth to anything beyond itself. Try as we will, we will never get beyond ourselves. Our own limitations, mental and physical efforts, or our own limited rationalizations. A blind man can play the piano, but he can't build a house. He can’t paint a masterpiece.
No man-made religion will ever open the Kingdom of God for us. No political system will ever deliver us. There is no utopia just beyond the next technological breakthrough. Transhumanism will not bring the Kingdom of God to earth; quite the opposite. All our efforts seem to unleash some new hell.
What Jesus tells Nicodemus; he is telling us. There is no ascent into heaven without Him. The poison we have drunk is only cured by looking to the Son who was hung on a tree. Only faith in Him transmutes the death we hold within ourselves and distills it into the elixir of life. There is no way in, no canal to follow, no path save through him.
We cannot see the Kingdom of God, Jesus says. It is beyond our perception. It escapes our reasoning.
To see it requires a gift of illumination we do not possess. It is a sense that has been long dead in us. The fall has darkened the eye of the soul, the Nous, the spiritual organ by which we understand ourselves and the world aright, and through which we see God. Our capacity to see, to know and understand, and to perceive the Kingdom is fallen.
What is the Kingdom we cannot see? The Church? Is the church the kingdom? No. Not really. The Church can reside, more or less, in the Kingdom of God if it abides in charity and virtue and is occupied by the Spirit of God, but it is not the Kingdom of God itself. It is the place, and we are the people, where the Kingdom of God is supposed to manifest itself. Where “thy Kingdom come” is supposed to be lived out, bringing heaven to earth. It is not, in itself the kingdom, but we can see the Kingdom through it when it is Holy.
As Nicodemus put it, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher come from God; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.”
The Kingdom comes into view when we can see the signs of it. When gifts of charity and virtue, and the miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit, bring it into view.
However, do we perceive the Kingdom of God around us even when no miracle is present? Can we see the Kingdom when we suffer? When all things appear to be lost? When circumstances and people are against us? No one can unless he has been given new eyes.
The Kingdom is a spiritual Kingdom, spiritually perceived. When the ways and will of heaven become plain to us, through prayer, through training in charity and virtue, we see it.
It is invisible to the worldly heart and mind. What do you see when you look at the world? Reality? Is it reality as it is? Are you sure? Do you see reality as it is, or is it a world pulled over your eyes, stilted and obscured by your biases, your desires, your emotions? Your past? Your anxious ruminations about the future? Do your many loves crowd out the Kingdom? Are you distracted by the entertainments of the world or the duties it demands?
What is the organ we perceive the Kingdom with? The eye? The ear?
We have been born again into a spiritual world. Those who have faith in Christ and have been baptized and have gone through the waters of baptism are born again. Who have received the Spirit. Who have been born of water and spirit. These have been born again into a spiritual world.
There is membership in the church and new birth into the Kingdom of heaven, and these are not synonymous. Not always. Perhaps not even mostly. Membership in the church rolls certainly do not do it. Neither does a new members' class. We are not born again into this heavenly Kingdom through such things.
How can you be born into a Kingdom that is not of this world?
How can you be a member or citizen of a realm that is not of this order? What does man have in common with seraphim and cherubim? Can we enter the heavens, the highest heavens, through earthly things? Will we find a place among the angels by our fondness for fall walks in the woods or ocean wonder or the warmth we feel at a striking sunset?
No. We must be born again if we will enter this new and eternal landscape, whose light is God Himself and whose horizon is eternity. Here, where God is enthroned upon a sea of glass. Whose enthroned glory is like red Jasper and brilliant Sardis stones, polished and bright. Where, in rainbow brilliance of emerald green, with thunders and lightings proceeding, He sits with a rainbow encircling above. Where elders preside around Him twenty-four strong, clothed in brilliant white and crowned in gold.
Before them seven golden lampstands burning bright, the seven-fold Spirit of God ignited. Here the pavement stretches out before the Throne and heavenly host into infinity like a sea of crystal glass. Where, hovering above, the four living creatures—six-winged spiritual beings covered with eyes front and back, having the face of a Lion, a calf, a man and an eagle, see all that man does on the earth and all that God does and proclaim Holy, holy, holy!
What mortal can presume to be born into this place? Who dares think they deserve it or can even attain it?
Not you or I.
We must be born again to reach these shores. Born of water and spirit—of something not of this world. Born of Heaven by the seven-fold Spirit before the throne, only then can we ever breach the doorway to this house of God.
How do we qualify for this new birth? Through the waters of baptism and by repentance.
What is repentance, and can it truly deliver us from the afterbirth of sin into this unseen kingdom?
Repentance is not guilt or remorse for wrongs. All humans know this. It is more.
Repentance is not merely sorrow our sins. It is to cast oneself into the hands of heaven as the only remedy for our desolation. And only when we see the desolation of all our efforts can we ever truly repent. As long as we are blind to our own desolations, we will remain blind to the Kingdom of Heaven.
It is a flight from this world and from this life. Abandoning our life as it has been. Forsaking our vain efforts to attain a kingdom of our own while hoping for an eternity we know we do not deserve. Rejecting our fruitless wanderings from one religious path to another and from one desolating devotion to another.
The waters of Baptism are the waters of repentance.
The waters of baptism are those that trace the path through the Red Sea in flight from Egypt’s terrors and slavery into the freedom of a new life on the other side of death. Baptism is the sacrament of repentance and new life. Of burial and resurrection. Of self-abandonment and reinstatement as a child of God. Whether as children or adults, the waters of baptism signify the same thing, and mark us inwardly as citizens promised to the heavenly horizons where death is no more.
We are raised from the waters to our relocated humanity.
To be born again is to be there while we are here.
To sit with the heavenly council having lost ourselves in prayer.
To sip a coffee and listen to the birds sing praises to the Lord.
It is to feel the summer breeze and the wind from heaven that blows where it will, filling us with divine illumination and peace.
Once we are born again, we are dwellers of heaven while our bodies occupy our mortal tasks and toils.
What makes those heavenly winds blow that stir the soul so and translate it to heavenly abodes?
We are born again by a wind that blows where it will, and we do not see it or hear the sound of it, yet we are changed by it.
Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear its sound, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
The wind and the Spirit. Pneuma and Pneumatikos. A play on words. The same word. The heavenly wind fills our lungs and our souls and our spirits are quickened by the blowing of the world above and beyond our own.
If the spirit is from above the power is from above. If there is no heavenly power, can there be a heavenly birth? If there is no heavenly illumination, can we say there is a heavenly birth? If there is no joy, no peace, nothing from above that marks us, what then is our home?
The Spirit blows where it will, but how does it know who to choose, who to caress? Who to embolden and possess? Those who are born of wind and fire from above! Only those whose repentance is deep and sure. Whose hope and heart are in heaven. Upon those who have abandoned this world and the vain pomp and glory thereof. Whose hearts are perpetually rent before heaven, like the veil to the Holy of Holies.
Wind and fire! The Holy Ghost brings wind and fire. Burning our attachments to this world and translating us into heaven. Into the Kingdom we cannot see. Wind and fire—the signs of Pentecost, to translate us into a heavenly life.
The spirit and the bride say come.
