Pentecost

They were all together in one place (Acts 2).  When the doors were locked, where the disciples were (John 20).  This sounds like a reasonable start for getting things organized, for arranging things on time and at a good location. Basic managerial skills.  But good luck.  You can get everybody together but have the event bomb.

Everyone in one place is also a formula for discomfort and suspicion: meetings when participants conceal their real thoughts and reactions; elevator conversations where words are boundary-setting and focus on the trivial.  The doors are locked to safeguard a threatened identity. 

We assume the wisdom of constructing defensive walls and boundaries which reassure us of our identity and belonging.  The Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor remarks on the buffered nature of our society:  it is really an enclosed system, regulated by strict norms (often unspoken) which deny the reality of any external intervention.  Like the people of Babel, we commit our beliefs to the tower we construct to eliminate any recourse to a higher or transcendent reality.  And we end up confused, unable to understand each other, and incapable of communication.  Power and wealth assure an uncertain hold on the “good life.”  Perhaps it is the fullness of life and experience that we keep at a distance.  I can’t help recalling the comments of Cardinal Blase Kupich after the recent conclave.  He said they went through all the motions, prayed to the Holy Spirit, sang the Veni Creator Spiritus, and then were surprised by the experience of surmounting all the language and cultural barriers in rushing to unity. Surprise!  The Spirit is free in intervening with institutions and organizations.

When Jesus enters the locked room, he breaks through the barriers meant to protect and preserve the community gathered there.  He breaks down the security they pretend to offer and reveals the vitality that come from the Spirit of peace and forgiveness.  These sound like a weak glue to hold a community together.  In showing the disciples his wounds, he reveals how costly and transforming these works of the Spirit will be.  Recognizing Jesus’ wounds means recognizing and acknowledging one’s own wounds.  To live in an open vulnerability to the experience which penetrates the heart. To recognize Jesus will mean having been converted in the depths of one’s heart, to have experienced his forgiveness and peace: not the results of a better organization and membership screening, but being washed in the Spirit.  It is to breathe the new breath of a new creation.  It is God’s own breath that we inhale.  Veni, Creator Spiritus.  

The feast of Pentecost and the readings which give us entry into its mystery become real when they evoke in us the response of awe, attention, and responsibility.  We are not reading a history book, but are drawn into the event it realizes: the birth of the Church, the breakthrough of God into our world.  The council document on the church reminds us that sacred tradition and sacred scripture are like a mirror in which the Church, during its pilgrim journey on earth, contemplates God from whom it receives everything.

The Church is the breakthrough of God into our world.  The world is no longer the same, it is the New Creation where we can walk and speak in the freedom of the spirit of love, peace, and forgiveness.  It is our new gift, vocation and responsibility to proclaim the works of God, to live as children of God, born of him through our baptism and sharing in the body of Christ himself.

In Vatican II’s document on the Church, we are reminded that Christ pours out his Spirit upon all so that he might move them inwardly to love God with their whole heart and whole soul, with all their mind and all their strength, and that they might love each other as Christ loves them (Constitution on the Church, “Universal Call to Holiness”). As in our opening prayer, we pray that God may pour out the gifts of the Holy Spirit across the face of the earth with the divine grace that was at work when the Gospel was first proclaimed, fill now once more the heart of believers.  It is our hearts that will recognize the Lord and rejoice in his presence.