Pentecost

 

Yesterday we began our preparation for the most mystical of feasts, Pentecost, also called Whitsunday. It is a kaleidoscopic holy day, and in the modern world often given short shrift. My Confirmation and later my Reception into the Episcopal Church occured on that day as well. It is the time of graduation and the lush beginning of summer. When I was growing up it was referred to in Catholic School as “The birthday of the church”. This is a cute name, and its principal texts come from the the gospel of Luke where that Evangelist tells the story of the Holy Spirit descending on the one hundred twenty disciples and the Virgin Mary and them going out to testify, gaining three thousand converts in one days. I’ve already talked about, the problems with this story, but my main problem is this is only a glimmer of what Pentecost means, and even after this article is done we will still have touched by a glimmer.

Pentecost is also called the end of Easter, but this too is a disservice. The Anglicans have continued what Roman Catholics have forgotten which is that Pentecost is not the leap into “Ordinary Time” but the beginning of the short and blessed season called Trinity.  Christmas, Good Friday and even Easter celebrate Christ on one level and in the dimension of earth. On those feasts, we are speaking of sacred and eternal matters, but speaking of them on this earth. Beginning with Ascension, really, we must shift gears and speak of God and our relationship to him in a more heavenly dimension. I want to say right here that one of the things I am sorry about is that while we have four Gospels, we only get one book of Acts. What if John had written his own account of the descending of the Holy Spirit and the story of the church? The readings for the extended vigil of Pentecost make it quite clear that Pentecost is about the event of the Spirit of God coming into the earth and the Spirit’s [ower to revivify, filling that which we thought had no power with great power, giving life to that which we believed to be dead and fulfilling the promises we thought long forgotten. In that sense Pentecost is not about one day, but a new era and an era which is far from over, and ever unfolding.

Pentecost is about the Holy Spirit, but what in the world are we talking about here? Having been given tantalizing glimpses of this being, the churches have done a poor job explaining or dealing with him, and maybe this is because the churches have not been terribly spiritual, let’s admit it.

As we saw in the recent US election, Christians, overall, showed little prophetic or compassionate presence. Most Christians have not been taught how to plug into the mind of Christ. Thus they often reflect the common mind of power, greed and war instead. The dualistic mind reads reality in simple binaries: good and bad, right and wrong, and thinks itself smart because it chooses one side. This is getting us nowhere. We need the mind of mystics now, to offer any kind of alternative, contemplative or non dual consciousness. We need practiced based religion that teaches us how to connect with the Infinite in ways that actually change us from our finite perspectives. We need to rediscover what Saint Francis called the marrow of the Gospel. It is time to rebuild from the bottom up.

Fr. Richard Rohr

This rediscovery of the mind of Christ, this reconnection to the Infinite must he a true product of our earnest human desire, however in the end it is the graceful work of the Holy Spirit, and this Divine and fiery reconnection of our fragile souls to God’s burning self is Pentecost. The moment of the one hundred twenty disciples in the Upper Room is not simply historical, but mythical and therefore, always present and always available.

In the Book of Acts, once and only once, Saint Paul refers to the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Jesus. This is most gratifying. Trinitarians have had a difficulty with what heretics do not, the idea of modality. I don’t want to talk about the issues of the Trinity here, but Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit plainly as Jesus in another form, another dimension of Christ. I would add right now that when Jesus says, I and the Father are one in John, this seems to point to the same thing.

Perhaps one of the reasons the Holy Spirit is such a sticky person to deal with, ever made anonymous, symbolized by a bird, is because he is a door to heresy, and here I say that, though I have been using, as the modern translations of the Bible and as the catechisms use, the term “he”, I am the umpteeth millionth person to point out that the Holy Spirit was identified with Ruach, Breath, and with Sapientia, Sophia, of Chockmah, the ancient Latin, Greek and Hebrew names for Holy Wisdom. All of these folks, whether in Hebrew, Greek and Latin are counted as true and not metaphorical and all of these folk, to the consternation of orthodox Christianity, are ladies.  This means on some level, the Spirit of Jesus is transsexual, something that would send the Church of Rome and many other Christians into a rage, but which many saints and mystics, including Julian of Norwich knew well.

"It is a characteristic of God to overcome evil with good.

Jesus Christ therefore, who himself overcame evil with good, is our true Mother. We received our ‘Being’ from Him ­ and this is where His Maternity starts ­ And with it comes the gentle Protection and Guard of Love which will never ceases to surround us. 

Just as God is our Father, so God is also our Mother. 

- Saint Julian of Norwich

This points in someway to the promise of the Holy Spirit and the acknowledgement of the Holy Spirit being the return of the Shekinah to her people and to her temple, the return to acknowledging the long denied Mother of All. 

Because I have been speaking of Mother God, I must speak about the Mother OF God, Mary.  Mary is often the way Catholicism has made prayer to the feminine acceptable, by making it prayer to someone who flatly IS NOT GOD. Mary is not the Goddess. She is not God the Mother. She was never meant to be. She is the deified humanity that has become entwined with God by being, as Jesus said, his brother, his sister, his mother. There is no salvation without entering into this, becoming the Mother of God and bearing him in our lives, and Mary is first in this. If her symbols become entangled with those of God the Mother, if God the Mother is seen through her, it is because, she is experiencing the union with Great Mother we all are called to experience, but let us not be deceived, it is the Holy Spirit who is the Eternal Mother. That Mary is confused with the Eternal Mother is not blasphemous. It is apotheosis. It is the fate of the Beloved of God, not to be a follower of Jesus, but to become Jesus, not be godly, but one with God. This is the work of Pentecost.