Pentecost will not be tamed by our balloons

Pentecost will not be tamed by our balloons

Readings for Pentecost Sunday, Mass during the day, Year B


I would like to suggest that today’s popular image of Pentecost as the “birthday of the church” is not helpful. The problem comes when we start to associate the symbols of birthday celebrations with the mighty acts of God we hear on this day. Our limited symbolic language for the social event surrounding birthdays simply cannot adequately bear the weight of the mystery of the Holy Spirit.

Our limited symbolic language for the social event surrounding birthdays simply cannot adequately bear the weight of the mystery of the Holy Spirit. Click To Tweet

Balloons and birthday candles are too small and tame to capture the spine-chilling implications of the moment when God’s wholly uncontrollable Spirit burned into the hearts of those disciples. The connotations associated with birthday songs and neatly-wrapped gifts are too peaceful and clean for this messy and uncontainable Spirit that turns worlds upside down. This Spirit will send those first disciples (and us) out into the streets to proclaim a gospel that will get many of them (and us) killed, persecuted, laughed at, fired, or shunned. Most disorienting is that the Spirit will lead disciples to love their enemies, forgive their persecutors, and get up again and again to keep professing their faith no matter what.

The connotations associated with birthday songs and neatly-wrapped gifts are too peaceful and clean for this messy and uncontainable Spirit that turns worlds upside down. Click To Tweet

Instead of trying to use an inadequate analogy, let us simply focus our gaze upon the neophytes, those newly baptized and anointed with this untamable Spirit. For they are the church’s profoundest symbols of the Holy Spirit’s incomprehensible power to upend the world.

 
This post was first published on the planner page for Pentecost Sunday, Year B, in “GIA Quarterly: A Liturgical Music Journal,” Vol 29, No 1.

Image credit: Gaelle Marcel, unsplash, CC0.

3 Responses

  1. Andy Varga
    | Reply

    Indeed… think not of the pro-forma anniversaries of birth but the birthing day itself: straining, laboring, messy and exploding into the world with the lung-searing ear-shattering cry that announces LIFE… I LIVE!!

    • Diana Macalintal
      | Reply

      That’s a great “birthing” image I can support, Andy! Thanks for adding it to the conversation.

  2. Bruno Richard Martínez Villavicencios Olazábal
    | Reply

    I agree with you Lady Diana, but not for 100% of the Baptism. Middle Schoolers, for example, even High School Teens, need a primer. Though on Pentecost, the melting is seldom only a Birthday Celebration. I ask these teens and pre-teens to bring in the earliest pictures of their life, and if they have siblings theirs as well. I send them home with a family task. The Scripture to be read aloud with, at minimum, their parents or guardians, ideally with their siblings as well. A brief discussion about the Scripture. Sitting in the middle of where ever they were gathered, a single cupcake, a knife, plates and forks. Then ask the parents or guardians to try to find their earliest baby pictures. Share those with their kids, and share some stories that were told about them. Finally with teen(s) in the ministry, each parent look at their child’s baby pictures and share what it was like to be Co-Creators with God the Father. Then have them tell each of their children how they changed their life at birth and as they grew up. Now in the context of the miracle of the birth of their children, their children’s impact on their own life, guided by what I sent with them, usually a guided mediation, question, or a reflection on all the events in that upper room. From Jesus calling Peter His Rock and His Asension, etc., and how the Apostles and disciples gathered were more afraid than ever, until the Most Holy Spirit appears with a brisk wind, fire as of tongues above them. Then, as the Church of Christ emerged from the room, emboldened, speaking in tongue, so anyone could understand them, supernatural abilities. How this was the Birth of the Church, it wasn’t silent, it wasn’t tame, it wasn’t restrained. It burst out of the upper room, with great faith, brazen preaching, supernatural abilities, and how similar this is to how their parents Co-Creating with God the Father. Finally the cupcake, using the knife to cut it into how ever many pieces there are people gather, tie that to the Eucharist, sharing in the explosion into life of the Church, outside the upper room. And yes, to end the gathering they can opt to light the candle (they wouldn’t cut the cupcake until they did this) giving them several options on what to do with tiny cupcake with a candle, from the happy birthday song, a song that speaks to them in that moment, saying something about why the Church means to them, or wing it. But remind them that their doing this in the Community of their family, the Domestic Church. Then the cupcake thing, as already described.

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