Come, Holy Spirit

Friday, May. 29, 2015

I have always wondered why the Catholic Church doesn’t make a big deal out of Pentecost Sunday. It seems to me that if the story of Jesus ended with “and he ascended into heaven,” then Christianity would have died with the first martyrs, because I doubt Christ’s other followers would have been able to face the persecution they did without the Holy Spirit. 

Other cultures have stories of gods dying and being reborn, but Jesus is unique in that he not only lived on Earth from his birth to his death (at least in human terms), but he actually tried to improve the lot of humankind with his preaching and teaching. Then, after he ascended into heaven, he sent the Holy Spirit, a gift through which “we are restored to paradise, led back to the Kingdom of heaven, and adopted as children, given confidence to call God ‘Father’ and to share in Christ’s grace, called children of light and given a share in eternal glory,” according to Saint Basil.

That’s an amazing gift, so why don’t we celebrate Pentecost like we do Christmas and Easter? Where are all the parties and presents, the nice dresses and fancy dinners?

I wonder if it’s because we have a hard time wrapping our minds around the Holy Spirit. We don’t seem to be able to conceptualize him in either music or art. Compared to the other two high holy days, there are only a handful of hymns about Pentecost, and only a few famous paintings of the event. We can picture the other two persons of the Holy Trinity as an omnipotent father figure and either a baby in a manger or a teaching, preaching suffering man. The Holy Spirit, however, is represented as a flame or a dove, and it’s hard to feel intimate with someone whom we can only imagine as a symbol. 

I think Christmas is a favorite time for many because we humans love newborn babies, whom we can cuddle and care for. Easter is a big sigh of relief when we rejoice that the man who died rose from the dead. In all of that we look to Christ as our teacher and savior – he is the one doing all the work; we just have to love him.

Pentecost, though – Pentecost forces us to realize that now Christ has left his work to us. Being Christian would be much easier if all we had to do was adore the babe in the manger and admire the man who gave us the Sermon on the Mount. Truly following Christ, however, means going through the cross with him, and that entails suffering ridicule and rejection and pain and death. None of us wants to do that; it’s against our nature. 

It is precisely to overcome our human nature that Christ gave us the Holy Spirit. At Pentecost, Jesus breathed on the disciples and sent them out to testify to him; he does the same to us, and asks us to go forth as well. 

The Catechism of the Catholic Church reminds us that “to be in touch with Christ, we must first have been touched by the Holy Spirit.” With that touch, we not only accept the fruits of the Holy Spirit but acknowledge that we must put them to use, bearing one another’s burdens and not tiring of doing good. 

Pentecost isn’t one day of festivity to commemorate a baby’s birth or a man’s resurrection, it’s a lifetime of dying to self to live in Christ. 

Perhaps that’s why we don’t celebrate Pentecost here and now; the party awaits us in heaven, and the theme will be “Well done, good and faithful servant.”