Fire and Light
“When you send forth your Spirit, they are made, and so you renew the face of the earth.”
CSJ sister Mary Southard’s Praising does not depict the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost per se — although it certainly evokes the themes and the colors of the feast. Nine women are depicted, distinct in the ethnic markers of their hair style and skin tone; yet they equally and commonly illuminated by a dancing flame: a flame both outside and within them; a flame with whose contours they are fully absorbed, and in which they are fully taken up.
Praising serves to help us correct a blindspot we sometimes have to Pentecost. Mary the mother of Jesus and other of the women who followed him continued among the disciples after his Ascension and consequently were likely there, their experience of the descent of the Spirit and role thereafter is effectively omitted from both the narrative and the iconography. The classic Pentecost icon is concerned instead with the harmonious positioning of the Apostles, and their orientation towards old man Cosmas as representative of fallen humanity, and their commission to bring the Gospel to all ends of the earth. A more recent iconographical tradition depicts the Mother of God in the center of the action, as representative of the Church and of the Christian soul — however, this is only slightly better, as it imagines the female presence and participation as more symbolic than substantial. Yet the pouring out of the Spirit was upon “all flesh:” “sons and daughters,” “menservants and maidservants” both were taken up into the new energy of “prophecy” enabled by it (Joel 2:28f/Acts 2:17f).
If the ambiguity and omissions of the Scriptural texts mean that debates about how these gifts should be expressed in and received by the Church are likely intractable, their reality can be universally affirmed and attended to. The Spirit of God remains alive and active in all the people of God: the Spirit that unites us to one another and to God through Christ, and leads us ever more deeply into that unity and abundance that is the heart of the Triune life, as well as into the mysterious economy that is a self-pouring out for the sake of the life of the world.
To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good.
— The Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 12:7)
Pentecost Sunday
Texts for This Week
Prayer
Almighty God, on this day, through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, you revealed the way of eternal life to every race and nation: Pour out this gift anew, that by the preaching of the Gospel your salvation may reach to the ends of the earth; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Veni Creator Spiritus …
The great hymn to the Holy Spirit of Rabanus Maurus (d. 856) may have been the first international mega-hit in Christian music. The hymn echoed, not only as the core votive for the Holy Spirit in the Latin Church, but also as the sequence hymn for conformations, ordinations, and coronations: at every occasion, indeed, that the unction of the Spirit was formally entreated. Indeed, the tradition was so deep and embedded that it was retained in the English Church after the Reformation.
In the above rendition by the Estonian folk ensemble Heinavanker, the Latin lyrics of the ancient hymn are interposed antiphonally with an evocative Estonian paraphrase, sung with the alluring harmonic depths characteristic traditional Estonian choral music.
For those preferring an interpretation of the ancient hymn that is more (rather than less) accessible, the 2005 interpretation of Bruce Benedict and Raymond Mills certainly deserves the accolade of being truly “ancient-future,” adding in the chorus most appropriate for this unsettled season, “Be not afraid: where you go, there I am with you.”
