…says a wizened monkish man looking up from a large open book. (From a New Yorker cartoon.)
Today over Christendom is the celebration of Pentecost, that is, the Church’s birthday. Now, hold in your mind, for a moment, your 2018 image of the Christian church.
Now, consider its birth: the story goes that the Holy Spirit blew in like a freight train of hot sparks and started fires of introspection, blazing through old divisions, igniting forgiveness, and generating great leaps of unimagined cultural amalgams, social connections.
It was, some said, the reversal of the Tower of Babel. It was, said others, the signal that God was no longer writing laws on stone but was writing the Law of Love on human hearts.
Categories were smashed, borders were overrun by raids of love. People understood each another, biases burned away, joy everywhere percolated and kindness rained down anointing foreheads. It was communion beyond denominations; it was community beyond religions. The Empire lowered its heel but something irresistible slipped out and spread.
Well, you could say it wore off. But then, every once in a while over these two millennia, despite monumental co-options in the service of politics and power and celebrity, something erupts and memories are refreshed, and the resolve to mimic the Spirit of Love takes over.
Small pockets of people head out to care for the poor, the strange, the foreign, the unappealing as well as the ailing earth. Essentially, that which the corporate church and steel-jaw state deny.
A favourite story, related to all this, is W.H. Auden’s brush with this “spirit.” (Later inspiring his brilliant poem, “A Summer Night.”)
“One fine summer night in June 1933 I was sitting on a lawn after dinner with three colleagues, two women and one man. We were talking casually about every day matters when, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, something happened. I felt myself invaded by a power which, though I consented to it, was irresistible and certainly not mine. For the first time in my life I knew exactly what it means to love one’s neighbor as oneself. . . . I felt their existence as themselves to be of infinite value and rejoiced in it.
I recalled with shame the many occasions on which I had been spiteful, snobbish, selfish, but the immediate joy was greater than the shame, for I knew that, so long as I was possessed by this spirit, it would be literally impossible for me deliberately to injure another human being. I also knew that the power would, of course, be withdrawn sooner or later and that, when it did, my greeds ands self-regard would return. . . . . The memory of the experience has not prevented me from making use of others, grossly and often, but it has made it much more difficult for me to deceive myself about what I am up to when I do.”
May the Church, on this day of Pentecost, remember its beginnings.
