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PENTECOST

About five or six years ago, I was in this period of the liturgical year when the Easter narratives are so delightful:

-Mary meeting Our Lord in the garden,
-the Emmaus story of the breaking of the bread and recognizing him,
-Jesus cooking breakfast for his fisher disciples.

And then Pentecost would come and I would participate in the liturgical year as a matter or routine, but then, I would go back to my sense of Jesus being those forty days between the Resurrection and Ascension.

This, for me I thought that was good enough, I felt that Jesus was very present, he was very alive and well in my life and I loved those Gospel stories. But it occurred to me that I never did go beyond the Ascension, I never entered into Pentecost.

So I think it was an invitation by the Holy Spirit that I heard to do sustained Lectio Divina on Pentecost and so I took this passage from the Acts of the Apostles, the coming of the Holy Spirit:

“When the day of Pentecost had come they were all gathered together in one place and suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind and it filled the entire house where they were sitting. There appeared to them as if there were tongues of fire distributed and resting on each one of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance.” (Acts 2: 1-4)RSV

This passage is only four verses in the whole bible that names the Feast of Pentecost. So I took up the sustained method the four dimensions of Lectio Divina, first of all I asked Bishop Michael Fitzgerald, who was in Rome under Cardinal Arinze.

I was the Executive Director of Monastic Interreligious Dialogue and so I reported with the Chairman of the Board about what we were doing in North America.

Bishop Michael is of Irish descent, an English bishop but was our man to report to for the Pontifical Council for Monastic Interreligious Dialogue. He was a White Father or Holy Ghost father and we had met several times at these meetings and he was interested in my method of Sustained Lectio Divina. Currently Bishop Fitzgerald is Papal Nuncio for the Arab States and resides in Cairo, EGYPT.

I suggested to him to do lectio on Pentecost and he said, “Let’s do it!” So we did it by e-mail.

First was a thorough exegesis of that passage, those four verses from Acts Second Chapter. I followed up on every footnote, every allusion which drove me back into the Old Testament to the whole prophetic tradition. What was Pentecost?

Pentecost was a confluence of three feast days:

One was when Moses received the Law and after fifty days handed the Law of salvation to the people. The law was read to them and they said, “All that you have said, we will do.” So it’s that remembrance of consenting of the Law of Moses that was the Feast of Pentecost.

Another Pentecost was 50 days after the Passover to celebrate being saved from slavery and entering into the Promised Land. The Hebrew people became the People of Israel.

The third tradition was an agricultural feast day, opening the harvest celebration, sacrifice of first fruits and festival time for a people faithful to the Law of Moses.

It was interesting that I did not know the roots of Pentecost. The early church borrowed from the Hebrew calendar and they merged it with the 50 days after Jesus rose from the dead.

Then I went back to the Old Testament and re-read and studied all the prophetic texts, that would be Exodus 13, Isaiah 66 and Joel all the prophets.

Jesus was the fulfillment of the promise, he was the Messiah that was named in the Old Testament as the fulfillment of Israel in all its connectivity and also for us individually Jesus is the presence of God in each one of our hearts.

So the Old Testament study was interesting but then I went forward to the New Testament and chased out all the “What was the reign of God”? and the krygma, the Good News.

I reread the four Gospels that shares the narrative stories of Jesus Himself. (The new Moses giving us the Pentateuch. Then I, read the Acts and Letters. that the apostles continued being a historical witness of Christ’s teachings.

I continued my study and meditation into the Life St. Anthony that is written by Athanasius, he had all the prophet indicators. I saw how the new genre of hagiography read back into the prophetic literature and brought it forward on Anthony to make the point that he was the prophet that now extended Christ into the New Covenant.

Athanatius himself writes his destiny into the script using language of Elijah giving the spirit of double proportion to Elisha and leaving the cloak or mantle. So, William Harmless, sj notes that the Life of Anthony is the new Elijah. ( p. 94 Desert Christians, An Introduction to the Literature of Early Monasticism).

Then, I found the same motif in Gregory’s Book II of the Dialogues. St. Benedict’s story is told in hagiographical form also. Twenty of the almost 40 chapters were allusions to either Elijah or Elisha both from the books of Kings.

So as we study the prophetic in the entrance of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament and we see that each one of us has been baptized in the Spirit. Jesus said, “ask anything in my name and it will be given to you”.

So the study of the scriptures is essential to understanding, but I also read ten books about the Holy Spirit and about the prophetic tradition and about the reign of God. In that study I asked the questions:

Was the Holy Spirit a cosmic Christ?

Was the Holy Spirit the spirit of Jesus that is in us, like the Jesus who has left the earthen life?

Was the Holy Spirit just undifferentiated mystery and all matter?

Or as John Breck asks the question, which is really my question too,
does the Holy Spirit have a face of her own?


Is she a distinct person to pray to? Toward whom my heart is devoted ?

Are we to feel the presence of the Holy as distinct from the Father and the Son?

So in that study this whole Lectio lasted from the Ascension in May to the following Ash Wednesday in February of the following calendar year.

This sustained process takes time, many weeks. Lectio was delightful; I could not wait to get back to the books in my room and write up e-mails to Michael. I must admit, this wonderful emersion in Lectio Divina took hours and hours and I was at it when ever I was not doing something else.

Obviously in a little presentation like this I am only describing the first two dimensions of lectio divina: The literal voice received by my logical mind was the first phase. Then, I listened to the symbolic voice with my intuitive senses.

But for our sake today I would just like to tell you three things that I learned from all this lectio:

The first one is that the Holy Spirit is real and is an entity, is a person. She is someone we can count on, we can pray to, we can invoke.

When we go to Mass in a couple of hours time and the priest lays his hands over the elements on the altar, it is called epiclesis, calling down, invoking the name of the Holy Spirit, that these elements, this wine, this bread, will become the body of Christ, he invokes the Holy Spirit to effect that and to sanctify those elements.

And then later in the Mass he says that prayer and just as now we have received the elements of the body and blood of Christ. Then the priest prays another epiclesis: that you and I who have partaken of this food we become the body and blood of Christ as a group and as an individual s, so there are two invocations to the Holy Spirit: epiclesis.

So really the very first thing I did learn was an actual experience of the Holy Spirit being real. Somebody like each other. It’s more interior life called mystery: whether we call Sophia, Advocate, Sanctifier, Holy Spirit, and Dove. There are all kinds of words for this – coming of the Third Person, but it is a very feminine coming, it is a coming that comes from within. It is an inner experience.

In the exegesis I discovered that there is probably no historicity to Pentecost. (on this point Bishop Michael said that it definitely has an actual historical event. No reason that the Holy Spirit could not quicken them as a group to start the Church).

It is a formative event, when thy say that they all gathered in one place, in the Old Testament one place a place of God means that we experience God it does not mean outwardly in a fact of time. It does not mean an actual event.

So not like Jesus birth, Jesus death, Mary’s consent and Jesus miracle stories and walking and talking in Palestine in those precious years were just the same experience of you and me, but probably there was not an event that was historical about Pentecost.

It was not in any of the other gospels. They just put it at the Ascension, go forth and preach to all nations. So is it real? Yes it is. It is more real, it is more particular. So I learned it is very personal and the literary way to describe this amazing interior sanctification for individuals and the community was to say it was just like all the prophetic actions for the last 1500 years.

The second thing I learned was that the Holy Spirit can if we invoke the Holy Spirit, the Holy Spirit does come and enlightens our judgment, gives us answers, gives us insights, gives us the way to go.

I know yhe Holy Spirit, when called upon, does enkindle our hearts and fill our minds with the right thoughts, wisdom and understanding and compassion and fear of the Lord.

So we can count on those gifts in our daily life. That is really in that first thing I understood that the Holy Spirit is real, we call on the Holy Spirit and then I can call on that Holy Spirit and feel the courage to act and feel that the insight is true and real.

I can feel that I am coming out of another domain, not my ego, not my preferences even; I am coming out of another place where it is confirmed to be of God. So that second level of courage and servitude and piety is very real. I learned not only can first I pray to the Holy Spirit for the wisdom I feel the confidence in acting.

The third thing is there are fruits of the Holy Spirit that come from our actions but we have nothing to do with them. I mean in all humility this great universal compassion and inclusiveness of God’s reign in our life time through us does have fruits.

So this third thing means that we can count on seeing good, seeing goodness, seeing great miracles, seeing great deeds that we wonder at, that we marvel at, how could that happen?

And these things come better than we ever expected. So the fruits of the Holy Spirit are manifested to us and might come through us if we have this great sense of reverence that we have nothing to do with it.

It is through the gift of the Holy Spirit the grace of the Holy Spirit we are immersed in this consciousness and this realization the Holy Spirit is alive and well and reigning in our times. So let me conclude with just reading these four little verses again. You and I are just going to be experiencing Pentecost in just two Sundays from now.

“When the day of Pentecost had come they were all gathered together in one place and suddenly a sound came from heaven and the rush of a mighty wind and it filled all the house where they were sitting. There appeared to them as if there were tongues of fire distributed and resting on each one of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave them utterance. “(Acts 2: 1-4)