HEARING THE APPEAL OF THE OTHER
May 24, 2010
For
in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews
or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to
drink of one Spirit.
~ I Cor. 12: 13
The first reading for the liturgy of Pentecost Sunday from the
Acts of the Apostles (Acts 2: 1-11) relates in vivid and highly
allusive scriptural imagery the gift of the Spirit. It is, as
in the creation account of the first chapter of Genesis, in the
power of a mighty wind that the Spirit of God is manifest. As
in Genesis the creative Spirit of God brings light out of
darkness and order out of chaos, so in Acts the arrival of
Spirit brings inner light and clarity to the darkness and
confusion in those who find themselves living the experience of
Jesus’ absence. The second allusion is to the story of the
Tower of Babel in Genesis 11:1-9. In the Scriptural account of
the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise, the action of Spirit involves
the reversal of God’s punishment at Babylon. The story of the
Tower of Babel is, at its core, a reiteration of the story of
the Fall. In this mythic account, the dispersion of peoples,
our inability to understand each other, is due to our refusal to
accept the reality of our shared humanity and the limits of our
being human. As Adam and Eve fell prey to the temptation to “be
as gods,” the people of Babylon similarly succumb to what Adrian
van Kaam calls “inverted awe,” that is, they become awe-filled
at their own capacities, specifically, their “technological”
capacities. They attempt to reach the heavens by building a
tower, to claim by force what can only be received. As a
punishment, the Lord says to his divine cohort: “Come, let us go
down there and confuse their speech, so that they will not
understand what they say to one another.” (Gen. 11:7) In the
second chapter of Acts, God’s Spirit comes down and reverses the
punishment of Babel: “Why, they are all Galileans, are they
not, these who are speaking? How is it then that we hear them,
each in our own native language?” (vs. 7-8) We who receive the
Spirit of God, given through Jesus, are restored to the depths
of our common humanity and thus to our kinship as children of
God. With our disposition of awe restored to its proper Divine
object and by that restoration our capacity to recognize and to
live the will of God, we again speak the same language.
Before the Ascension of Jesus, his
Disciples ask him if this is now the time for the
re-establishment of the sovereignty of Israel. As he most often
does, Jesus responds with a confounding and expansive answer.
When and how the promises are to be fulfilled is known only to
God, he says, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit
comes upon you, a power that will enable you to bear witness to
me “away to the ends of the earth.” (Acts 1: 6-8) The gift of
Spirit and the sign of the Spirit’s presence and activity is a
sense of personal potency and an expansiveness and inclusivity
that is not bounded by the limits of our societal, cultural,
ethnic, and religious understandings. When human fear and
ambition are the sources of our actions, the result is
inevitably division, distance, and conflict. When we act out of
the inspiration and impulse of the Spirit, born of a humble
presence to God’s will, the fruits of our actions include
connection, communion, and peace. This is the message of
Pentecost.
The reversal of Babel at the
heart of the Pentecost story holds a special significance in
these days in which our personal and societal relationships are
so marked by fear, exclusion, and conflict. In times of great
personal and societal change and upheaval, the bonds that
connect us to each other undergo terrible strains. In a
recently published book entitled Ill Fares the Land,
Tony Judt, the historian and Director of the Remarque Institute
at NYU, describes our society in the following way:
Something is profoundly wrong with the way
we live today. For thirty years we have made a virtue out of
the pursuit of material self-interest: indeed, this very
pursuit now constitutes whatever remains of our sense of
collective purpose. We know what things cost but have no idea
of what they are worth. We no longer ask of a judicial ruling
or a legislative act: is it good? Is it fair? Is it just?
Will it help bring about a better society or a better world?
Those used to be the political questions, even if they invited
no easy answers. We must learn once again to pose them. (p. 2)
We have become, in fact, so self-centered that we no longer have
a language by which we can ask ourselves as a people what public
acts and decisions serve and what hinder the common good.
At the heart of Pentecost is the
“miracle” whereby those who are estranged from each other,
actually experience mutual understanding. Yet, we presently
find ourselves in a state where even those of us who speak the
same language have no way of speaking about the common good.
Judt quotes John Stuart Mill: “The idea is essentially
repulsive of a society held together only by the relations and
feeling arising out of pecuniary interest.” (p. 55) In almost
all of the recent political debates in the United States, even
those regarding the common welfare like health-care, global
climate change, and regulation of lenders and other financial
institutions, our shared discourse revolves almost solely around
“pecuniary interest.” When the language of values does enter
the debate, it is almost solely that of personal morality and
righteousness and the self-interest of individuals.
Why have we become unable to
speak, and thus work, together toward the common good? How can
this year’s celebration of the Feast of Pentecost help us to
recover our potential to receive and transmit the Holy Spirit
that is the gift to all of us? Perhaps one of the most
influential people of the American formation tradition is Adam
Smith, sometimes called the Father of the modern free-market
economy. It is Smith himself who wrote: “To feel much for
others and little for ourselves; to restrain our selfishness and
exercise our benevolent affections, constitute the perfection of
human nature.” (Judt, p. 63) The gift of the Holy Spirit is
that which brings to life the image of God in each of us. It is
that which gives us the love and the courage to bring into the
world, in our words and actions, the life of God in which we
uniquely participate. “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the
Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and
remind you of all that I told you.” (John 14: 26) It is by
means of the gift of the Holy Spirit that we will remember all
that Jesus has told us, what our self-preoccupation and sense of
personal entitlement has led us to forget. As with the citizens
of Babylon and the disciples huddled in the upper room, when our
fears and our self-concern are primary, the others are aliens
and threatening to us. But, in the life of the Spirit we are
“one body . . . all given to drink of the one Spirit.”
The Spirit is indeed a gift to us, one that we can only
receive. Yet, the Feast of Pentecost calls us to dispose
ourselves to receive this gift of God by stilling our fears and
anxieties and by taking a Sabbath from our own ambitions. In
Psalm 20: 7 we pray: “Some trust in chariots and some in
horses, but we trust in the name of the Lord our God.” Over and
over again, fearful and proud peoples have attempted to rebuild
the Tower of Babel, to put their trust in their own capacities.
And the cost of such hubris is always the same: the breakdown of
community, the growth of mistrust and suspicion, and the loss of
the transcendent power of the Spirit that emerges from the life
of the One Body. Pentecost invites us to come home to our own
humble and limited humanity and to discover that this is, in
fact, what we share in common. But it also reminds us that it
is not just the limitation that we share but the One Spirit that
is the Source of life and that finds its home and exercises its
power not despite but because of that very limitation.
