When ancient man confronted the mystery of death, which is also the mystery of life—when he looked at the body of a dead man and compared it with himself as a living man and wondered at what terrible change had come over it—one of the first things that struck him apparently was that whereas he himself, the living man, breathed, the dead man did not breathe. There was no movement of the chest. A feather held to his lips remained unstirred. So to be dead meant to have no breath, and to be alive—to have the power to rise up and run and shout in the world—meant to have breath. And the conclusion, of course, was that breath is not just the little wisps of air that men breathe in and out, but that it is the very animating power of life itself.
Breath is the livingness of those who are alive.
This is why in so many languages the word for breath comes to mean not only the air that fills the lungs but the mystery and power of life itself that fills a living man. Such is the Latin word spiritus, from which our word "spirit" comes.
Each one of us has a spirit, this power of life in us, and like breath it is not just something that is in us but something that also issues from us. Every man has the capacity, more at some times than at others, to project some of this power of his own life, his vitality, into others. It is the power literally to in-spire, breathe into, and although it is invisible and intangible and cannot be put into a test tube or under a micro-scope, it is perhaps the greatest and most dangerous power that we have.
Team spirit, group spirit, esprit de corps in French—all these point to the power that can be generated by a group of people and can be generated with such force that to be in the group or even just near it is to risk being caught up by it and for a time at least transformed by it, made drunk on it. The least likely person can be so galvanized by the spirit generated by the crowd at a horse race or a football game that their madness becomes his own and he finds himself one of them.
Or the least likely person can be so possessed by the spirit of a mob bent on destruction that he joins in deeds of violence and hate that otherwise he would never be capable of and that leave him, once the spirit has passed, gutted and empty like a house that has been swept by flame.
Individuals no less than groups have this power of the spirit. We can all remember certain people who were not necessarily any more intelligent or more eloquent than other people but who had this power to communicate something of their aliveness in such a way that it is part of our aliveness still. This does not come through what they say or through what they do necessarily but through what at their best they manage to be. The word "inspiring" has been so loosely used for so long that it no longer conveys very much, but again, in the literal sense, that is what such people are—life-breathing, not through deeds or words so much as through some invisible force that leaps from their lives to our lives like electricity.
There are times when this force of a person is so intense that we can feel it when he just walks into a room. There is the intensity of spirit that comes with great gladness or great grief, for instance, which can gladden or grieve an entire house although the person himself may say and do nothing. It is a force that can be either creative or destructive. There are good spirits and evil spirits, and that is what makes it potentially so dangerous. In some measure everyone has the power to transform for good or ill the whole life of the community, invisibly, intangibly, but nonetheless really. And one of the strangest aspects of spirit is that it does not appear to be bound by either time or space. The spirit of a community is the product not only of all who are part of it now but of all who were part of it years ago and whose very names may no longer be remembered. By the power of your spirit, your life can reach out and become part of my life, you can empower me to do things and be things that I could never manage on my own, and this can remain true whether we are six feet apart or six thousand miles, six years or sixty. The spirit of men who died centuries ago can intoxicate us, electrify us, transform us, as really now as when they were alive.
Frederick Buechner
The Magnificent Defeat