GRAPEVINE
A weekly spiritual insight, sharing a Bible verse paired with a thoughtful reflection to deepen your connection with God and illuminate His path for your life.
Thought for the week - 4th June 2025
This Sunday, 8th June, is Pentecost Sunday, when we celebrate the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on Jesus’s first disciples. With God the Father and God the Son, God the Holy Spirit is the third ‘person’ of the Trinity. The Holy Spirit sustains us in our daily walk with Jesus.
Pentecost (also called Whitsun) is celebrated on the Sunday fifty days after Easter (the name comes from the Greek ‘pentekoste’, "fiftieth"). It is regarded as the birthday of the Christian church, and the start of the Church's mission to the world. Pentecost is the Greek word for a Jewish harvest festival called Shavuot – the festival of Weeks. The disciples were celebrating this festival when the Holy Spirit descended on them, with a sound like a very powerful wind, and the appearance of tongues of fire. The disciples were enabled to speak in foreign languages by the Holy Spirit, so that they could tell the Jewish pilgrims about the good news of Jesus, so that they in turn could take this good news home to their various nations.
A popular hymn sung at Pentecost is ‘Come Down O Love Divine’. When we sing or speak these words prayerfully from our heart, we are giving God permission to fill our hearts with the fire of his divine love. The Holy Spirit acts to form us into the likeness of Christ, encouraging us, revealing God to us and helping us to pray. He (never ‘it’) corrects us, refines us and purifies us, that we might let go of our selfishness and put the needs of others above our own. In this way the Holy Spirit transforms us, deepening our love for God, our neighbours and all Creation.
Read it slowly … read it prayerfully … and then read it again.
COME DOWN,O LOVE DIVINE
Come down, O love divine, seek thou this soul of mine,
and visit it with thine own ardour glowing;
O Comforter, draw near, within my heart appear,
and kindle it, Thy holy flame bestowing.
O let it freely burn, til earthly passions turn
to dust and ashes in its heat consuming;
And let thy glorious light shine ever on my sight,
and clothe me round, the while my path illuming.
Let holy charity mine outward vesture be,
and lowliness become mine inner clothing;
True lowliness of heart, which takes the humbler part,
and o’er its own shortcomings weeps with loathing.
And so the yearning strong, with which the soul will long,
shall far outpass the power of human telling;
For none can guess its grace, till they become the place
wherein the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling.
"Come down, O Love divine" originated as a poem by the Italian poet Bianco da Siena (1350-1399). In 1861, the Anglo-Irish clergyman and writer Richard Littledale translated it into English and it was published in the 1867 hymn book, The People's Hymnal. For the hymn's publication in The English Hymnal of 1906, the hymnal's editor Ralph Vaughan Williams composed a tune which he named after the Gloucestershire village of his birth, Down Ampney. This established the hymn's widespread popularity. When Vaughan Williams died in 1958, "Come Down, O Love Divine" was sung at his funeral in Westminster Abbey as the composer's ashes were interred in the Musicians' Corner.
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