The Spirit Connects!

Pentecost Sunday

May 15, 2016

John 14:15-16,23-25

“They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim (Acts 2:4).”

My first time to attend a Catholic Charismatic prayer meeting was around 10 years ago in Singapore. It was a gathering characterized by upbeat music and intensified prayers. As the prayer was getting intense, suddenly I witnessed some of participants began to experience kind of trance and utter unintelligible words. For a while I was dumbfounded, but soon realized that they may actually speak in tongue. This may refer to the one of the Holy Spirit’s charismatic gifts, described no less than St. Paul himself.  “For one who speaks in a tongue does not speak to human beings but to God, for no one listens; he utters mysteries in spirit (1 Cor 14:2)”

All the way, I thought that this speaking of tongue phenomenon was what took place on the Pentecost Sunday. When mother Mary and the disciples gathered fifty days after Jesus’ resurrection and the Holy Spirit started to descend upon them and filled them with His power. They began to speak in different languages. Yet, I was mistaken, they did not speak in tongue. The Holy Spirit bestowed on them a different kind of gift. That was the gift of understanding and language. The Apostles did speak different tongues but this gift empowered to communicate clearly the Gospel of Jesus Christ. People from different regions like Syria, Asia Minor (present-day Turkey), Arab peninsula, North Africa, even Europe, certainly speaking in multitude of languages, were able to comprehend the apostles who were native Palestinian. The Spirit enabled them to connect.

The gift of language speaks deeper reality about the Holy Spirit. He is the Spirit that unites us. He heals our brokenness and cures our tendency to be selfishly autonomous. In Pentecost, the Spirit undid the curse of the Tower of Babylon in Genesis 11. This is a symbolical story on human egocentric desire to usurp God, to be equal with God, by building a super-tall tower that can reach God with their own efforts and cunningness. Yet, human ambition and greed for power brought divisions and ruins to human race itself. Perhaps, one of the modern depictions of the Tower of Babel is the best-seller novel and most-anticipated TV series Game of Thrones. The novel smartly narrates how men’s unquenchable passion for the Iron Throne moves various characters in the novel to employ various cunning and dirty tricks to destroy their rivals. The seven Kingdoms, formerly united, divided, falls and they are at each others’ throats.

John Maxwell in his book, Everyone Communicates, Few Connects, argues that everything rises and falls on leadership, and yet, leadership is only possible with the leaders’ ability to connect with others. United States president Abraham Lincoln once also said, “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.”  Yet, fundamental to a genuine connecting is all about others. It means setting aside our vain ambition and untamed desire to gain all the attention to ourselves and we make others, their concerns, their struggles as ours.

The Holy Spirit comes to bring us that original connection with God and each other. It is true that often we do not get always the ‘high feeling’ of indwelling of the Spirit, just like in the charismatic prayer meetings, but it does not mean the Holy Spirit is absent. In fact, most of the time, He is working in silence and ordinary ways. He is working when we become more persevering in the sufferings of life. He is working when we are more patient in loving people who often give us problems. He gave us little joy in small realization of various blessing we receive today. I believe fruitful and meaningful reading of this reflection is His work in us.

As we celebrate the Pentecost, we pray that we may continue to open ourselves to the grace of the Holy Spirit and allow Him to make our lives ever fruitful.   

 

Br. Valentinus Bayuhadi Ruseno, OP