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Pentecost Reflection
The Bible describes Pentecost like the opening scene of a movie. The camera pans in on ancient Jerusalem. The narrow streets are crowded with people who have come to celebrate the feast of Shavuot.
They have pilgrimaged here from all over the known world. Though we are told that they are all devout Jews, they speak different languages, come from different social classes and, influenced by living in the diaspora, espouse different religious philosophies.
Now the camera pans in closer, down a winding street to a single house. Inside, we find the Jewish leaders of the Jesus movement. They too are celebrating Shavout when, suddenly, like a shock wave, they experience a staggering religious vision – an encounter with the Living Spirit of God. They are transfixed and transformed.
What happened that day to the followers of Jesus inside that room, and later to the teeming crowds outside in the streets, may have happened to everyone at the same time, but it was by no means one collective experience. Each person encountered the Living Spirit of God in a profoundly personal way, or as Luke puts it in the Acts of the Apostles, each person heard it in their own language.
To paraphrase writer Anais Nin, we don’t experience things as they are, we experience things as we are. As Christians, we know that the Living Spirit of God continues to act upon us to this day. And as on that first Pentecost, we experience the Spirit as we are, in our own unique way.
Today we see people, particularly young people, disaffiliating from institutional religion at a high rate. Many are put off by the one-size-fits-all approach we have traditionally taken towards our beliefs and traditions. Many resent the restrictions placed on who is permitted to participate in the Church and who is not.
I believe that the Spirit is urging the Church to dig deeper. We are being called to go back to the basics and think more holistically about some of the ways we have organized ourselves in the past.
We can begin by asking ourselves what it means to be a human person loved into existence by God. How does that impact the way we see one another? Who then is worthy of full communion with the Church? Who then is worthy of pastoral leadership in the Church?
On this day, as we celebrate the birthday of the Church, we remember that Jesus taught the Reign of God – a new way of being in the world, and that the Spirit continues to draw us – not to what has been, but toward what can be.
To quote Fr. Richard Rohr –
It is time for the Church to:
take its Christian head off,
shake it wildly,
and put it back on.
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