When we think of Pentecost Sunday, our minds naturally focus on the event as recorded by Luke in the first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. But we ought also to recall Jesus’ promise to give the Spirit as the “other” comforter in His Upper Room Discourse in John 14 and 16. And we should certainly also turn to the statement in John 20:22, that “He breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’”
The concept of His breathing matches the Hebrew (ruach) and Greek (pneuma) words for spirit which have the root meaning of wind or breath. And it is that imagery which we find in the hymn “Breathe on Me, Breath of God” by Edwin Hatch (1835-1889), first published privately in 1878 in a pamphlet entitled “Between Doubt and Prayer,” giving it the Latin title of “Spiritus Dei” (Spirit of God). It was later published publicly in 1886 in Henry Allen’s “The Congregational Psalmist Hymnal,” and then republished posthumously by Hatch’s widow in 1890 in “Towards Fields of Light: Sacred Poems.”