catholicPittsburgh.org

Reflections on Pentecost Sunday

By Carolyn A. Fronapel

The readings for this Sunday:

Acts 2:1-11

1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13

John 20:19-23

In the shadow of September 11, ours has increasingly become a time of clashing certainties. Everywhere the boundaries harden; everywhere the political and religious fundamentalisms I used to dismiss as marginal are branding the world with their sign and their sword. In church and state, science and medicine and art, this is more and more a time of absolutes.

Perhaps I am not alone in finding myself behind locked doors. Like the disciples in the Gospel passage appointed for this Pentecost weekend, I am huddling with friends who are as stunned as I at what has happened to the world and our shared hope. We are mourning the vision that had made all things seem possible, that had given us juice for the longer journey. We are struggling to find perspective enough to believe that the Spirit of God might still be moving over the chaos which is this moment in history.

This evening as I pray with the Scriptures of Pentecost, I am aware that what I don’t expect is to find Jesus in the midst of all this. I don’t expect to see first-hand that the creative love of God has triumphed over his wounds. I don’t expect to receive the Holy Spirit or to be sent back out there where the times are dangerous and the issues complex. I am heavily into retaining, and Jesus was right: what I am retaining is retained. My own sad certainty is not moving an inch.

The good news I am trying to make space to receive is that the disciples hadn’t been expecting any of those things either. They never expected anything to break into the locked room of their mourning and cynicism. They never expected to be moved. The most they hoped for was to be safe from the forces that had blown everything apart.

Nonetheless, Jesus came and stood among them, with that Breath and that purpose and that great trust, forgiveness. Out of his own freedom and in his own time, unbidden, he came.

Of course, the narrative continues beyond the frame of today’s Gospel passage. As part of the larger unit of John 20, it forms the background for Thomas’s struggles with faith and his meeting with the risen Jesus. Across centuries of alternating certainty and struggle, it reaches out to us in this era with hope: “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”

I have not seen, and many days, frankly, I struggle to believe. The Acts version of Pentecost Day doesn’t attract me, with its rushing wind and its dramatic tongues of flame. What I ache for are ears of flame, ears to hear with passion the hope there is in waiting on the freedom of God and being a little bit willing to unlock the door.