This is the air I breathe

by John Watson

Pop into an old church or dusty room and the smell hits you. A mixed emotive response might come to haunt you as you breathe in the air. Contrasting words like ‘stale’ or ‘ancient’, ‘well used’ or ‘forgotten’ might come to mind. What’s the air like with you?

Pop into an attic and you can smell the mustiness and heaviness. The air is thick with dust and history – not much movement in the atmosphere, seldom receiving fresh air.

Climb a high mountain and you find the air purer an thinner – deeper gulps are needed to survive here. It makes us dizzy, tired more easily, can restrict our movement. It may cause sickness or even death if the ascent is made too quickly.

Go into a sewer – the air is repugnant and foul. You want to get out as soon as possible – here the air brings nausea, disgust, suspicion – where do I stand? What is clean?

I can give many other examples of the kind of air we breath. You can give some more. But what is fresh, breathable adequate and sufficient air like?

The Attic

Here is the past. Here the past remains – untouched. Provoking, reminding, pointing. It can be a place of oldness, and stagnation, museum pieces and broken memories. Yet it can also be a place of rootedness and treasures. We discover who we were and who we are – what made us, us.

The Mountain

The thin air here is adventurous and brave. A search for something new, a quest to push limits – a single mindedness to reach the top. On and on we must go. Yet this can be dangerous too. We can get damaged, lose our way. This air is only for the few, it seems.

The Sewer

We want to disengage from reality here. We wish for the sweet smelling air so we need not face the brutal honesty of life. We seek to ignore the grotty and protect ourselves from contamination. We wish to preserve our purity at the expense of our real humanity.

This is the air I breathe – Ruach – breathing God come to me and fill me.

Transform the air we breathe of breath of God. Wherever I stand whatever breath I breathe with, meet me and breathe. Bring new discoveries out of the old, bring energy and direction to things that are new; bring freshness to a world that is stale, and though is bountiful and beautiful, in places still stinks of poverty, greed and injustice.