Spirit-Enabled
Pentecost Sunday Mass during the Day
noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were. Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim. (Acts 2:1-4)
There are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit; there are different forms of service but the same Lord; there are different workings but the same God who produces all of them in everyone. To each individual, the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit. (1 Corinthians 12:4-7)
On the evening of that first day of
the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the
Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with
you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The
disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be
with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” (John 20:19-21)
Piety
Jesus, you are the head of this Mystical Body. As you send us onward from the locked room of Pentecost, send forth your Spirit to be with us always and to guide us. Holy Spirit, we look to you to take us through this journey from start to finish fulfilling Christ’s promise: “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt 28:20)
Study
On this Pentecost Sunday, Richard Rohr reminds us that “unity” is not “uniformity.”[i] Pentecost united the disciples with the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Such a “confirmation” is a group blessing and an individual sacrament. The Lord filled “ALL” with the Spirit. The Spirit rested “on each one of them.”
In Paul’s letter, he reinforces this message of unity in diversity. There are different gifts, services, works, languages, and races, yet the diversity is held together by the common threads that unite us.
As far back as grammar school, I remember hearing the analogy that our country was a melting pot where people came from different places and became Americans. But, that implies that this country is some fondue pot where we lose our identity as we melt in the “new” mass. Instead (if we want to keep the food analogy), we are more like a house salad. We get mixed up together and anointed with tour dressing of choice – yet the tomatoes, lettuce, carrots, mushrooms, and cucumbers among us retain their individual property.
The Holy Spirit serves as a kind of honey mustard dressing – a sweet and savory addition to our lives individually and collectively.
Julian of Norwich describes the more profound, Pentecostal unity we seek through our “ora at labora.” She writes, “The love of God creates in us such a “oneing” that when it is truly seen, no person can separate themselves from another person.” How is that for a mission as we stretch back into “ordinary” time?
For Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the Jesuit scientist, Christ revealed today through the Spirit does not remain Jesus of Nazareth risen from the dead. Instead, in the Spirit of Pentecost, the “Cosmic Christ” is a “huge, continually evolving Being as big as the universe. In this colossal, almost unimaginable Being, each of our lives and develops in consciousness, like living cells in a huge organism.”[ii]
Perhaps the lessons of Pentecost, Julian, and Teilhard are that Christ’s divine task and ours are to heal this fragmented world. We can unite it through love in all of its visible and invisible dimensions. What may emerge is that Teilhard’s vision of that immense shining Being, the Body of Christ, glowing with divine energy.
Christ the Lord, the head of this Body, has promised to be with us and guide us, from start to finish. He said, “And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matt 28:20)
Action
Many of the vegetables in the salad of Christ are still unaware of their divine calling of unity among diversity.
We can do that through both our interior piety and our external action in the world. Let the flame of our confirmation shine forth in the world and for the world to see.
The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism, died more than 260 years ago. Even then, he taught a mysticism of everyday life. The entire world was a prayer house, he said. “A man needs no fixed place to say his prayers, no synagogues; among the trees of the forest, everywhere one can pray.”
As we emerge from the pandemic’s locked upper room, help us not forget that we are all in this together. The cross and the resurrection are for all: Jew and Roman, Gentile and Greek. What actions can you take to live out this radical union that brings together the traditional and contemporary, the European and American, the African and the Asian?
Ending our separate existence behind the locked doors and masks of social distancing to save all from COVID-19 gives us a chance to discover once again – and rediscover – that when we are separated, we are lost.
Sunday mornings of a Cursillo weekend, we hear the talk about Christian Community in Action. It has a very Pentecostal message: “An isolated Christian is a paralyzed Christian.” As we emerged Spirit-enabled from pandemic lock down, let us study the environment and find new ways of living in God’s friendship in the oneness of Julian, Teilhard, and the Holy Spirit.
No comments:
Post a Comment