PENTECOST 2012
by Gregory Talipson
a.k.a. Snark
"Snark!" Advocatus began, his voice rising, but obviously in a teasing mood. "You and your metaphors! They will be the death of me yet! It's a good thing you don't regularly preach, because even though the Church has withstood 'the gates of Hell' over millennia, your metaphors would surely do it in!"
I was having lunch with him at his house a couple of weeks ago when he said that. We were enjoying a superb chicken Caesar salad he had prepared, and we sipped on some glasses of Bumbulum Antiquus Profundus I had contributed to the cause. Our conversation turned to Pentecost, celebrated this year on May 27.
At one point I in the conversation I was trying to get at how I saw the meaning of Pentecost and used a metaphorical example. "Advocatus, imagine that Higgs Boson . . . or the Spirit if you prefer . . . is the quarterback on a football team. Higgs would join Dark Energy and Dark Matter in the huddle to call the next play. Okay, Advocatus, I see your frown. Higgs is in the huddle with God and Jesus. Feel better? Anyhow, the three are considering how to score a touchdown. Observing how the opposing team has consistently been playing the game, Higgs calls for the team to execute "The Reverse Babel" play. That's what Pentecost is about."
That's when Advocatus said what he did about my metaphors. And he might be right.
For those unfamiliar with the word "Pentecost", it comes from Greek and Latin roots and means "fiftieth day." It was just that many days after the first Easter that Jews from all around the Mediterranean Sea gathered in Jerusalem to celebrate "Shavuot", as they did every year. That's one of three "pilgrimage festivals" observant Jews made to Jerusalem, and it celebrates God giving the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) to Moses.
Some Jews . . . those who would later be called "Followers Of The Way", and only a good deal later, "Christians" . . . began to remember that particular Shavuot celebration as a special one, for something strange, unexpected, and quite wonderful happened. Because of that, they eventually gave the celebration a new name, "Pentecost."
The events of that day are recorded in the second chapter of The Book of the Acts of the Apostles, or simply "Acts." (Young children, upon hearing the name of that book, sometimes wonder if it's a book they can use it to chop down trees. It's helpful to clarify for them that, while the book is certainly sharp enough, it doesn't have anything to do with an "axe", but rather with the actions or activities of some of the earliest followers of Jesus.)
Anyhow, enough of this Jewish background, already! What I was about to say before I was so rudely interrupted by my verbosity, was that Advocatus became a bit hyper-focused on the first few verses of the Pentecost story.
3 Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them. 4 All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.
"You know, Snark, I think if that 'speaking in tongues' phenomenon with its tongues of fire were to happen in my church, people would run for the doors and not come back! And I'd probably be right behind them! Glossolalia may be fine . . . more than fine . . . for the Pentecostals, but that kind of ecstatic, nonsense speech would turn 'high church' folks like me wrong-side-out. Even St. Paul didn't much like it and was suspicious of it. He said if folks are going to do that sort of thing in worship, there'd better be someone around who could interpret it to the rest of the people. Parenthetically, Snark, I would cite that remark of St. Paul's as justification for Anglicans in John Wesley's day disparaging you early Methodists for having 'too much enthusiasm', though to be fair, your people weren't 'speaking in tongues'."
"Well, Advocatus," I replied, "I'm at least glad you're in a mood to be fair with me! And I join you in your apprehensions. For if 'tongues of fire' literally came among us at Elsewhere and rested on our heads, I think our homeowner's liability insurance policy would be cancelled straightaway!
"Of course, what we're dealing with in this story isn't literally tongues of fire . . . the story even says that. What the story is recounting is a profound spiritual experience that came to the disciples as an unexpected gift. When we're in that narrative territory, Advocatus, we have to use metaphors."
"There you go again with your love of metaphors, Snark! Don't you take anything literally?"
"Sure, Advocatus. Sometimes I do. In fact, once I'm able to understand something of what a passage of the Bible is expressing, I often take that meaning to heart quite literally. The Bible is full of truth. It's just that if we read its words literally and with all the imagination of a cinderblock, then I think we often miss that truth."
"True enough, my friend, though you're being a bit clever now, aren't you? But when the writers of Acts say that something resembling flames of fire rested on the disciples' heads, might they have been recording an observed event and not creating a metaphor at all?"
His question surprised me, so I conspicuously looked at his glass of wine, then at the bottle and asked, "How many glasses of Bumbulum have you had already, Advocatus?"
Enjoying the opportunity to give me a hard time, he continued to tease: "My snarky friend, that's precisely what some of those present at the first Pentecost thought of Jesus' Galilean disciples, who were by then speaking in languages incomprehensible to those who sneered and said: 'They're filled with new wine!' Well, Snark, it's only 12:30 in the afternoon, and while later in the day than the events in the story took place, I'm still working on my first glass! So what about it, Snark? Might that part of the story be something to consider taking rather more literally?"
"Touché, Advocatus! Well said . . . but I'm at a loss how to take that piece of the story as other than a metaphor. Say some more."
"Snark, you know how artists, from the earliest centuries right up through the Renaissance, painted certain figures of the faith with haloes around their heads? The golden circle or disk above them, though it doesn't resemble a fire-like tongue, is symbolic of what people might actually have seen on that first Pentecost. Some of the artists didn't just put a halo like that above their heads: they painted a glowing field all around the person . . . a field that was particularly colorful around the head. In art, it's called an aureola, which means 'golden.' These haloes and aureolas represent the presence of the sacred. When placed above the head or surrounding a person, that's the artist's way of saying that this person has a particularly deep connection to God.
"As too many commercials would say, Snark, 'but wait . . . there's more!' As it happens, some people throughout history seem to have had the capacity to actually see this glowing field around a person. In fact, am I remembering correctly that you told me you once worked with a pastoral counselor who could see these fields?"
"Well I'll be darned! So I did, Advocatus. She called it an 'aura' and said that she could tell something about the emotional mood and spiritual state of a person by the color and size of the aura around them! She said that there was some evidence that many infants and young children naturally see this aura . . . but because adults typically don't, and therefore make no reference to what the child sees, the child unconsciously concludes it is of no importance and loses the capacity to see it.
"I think I see now where you're going with all this! Are you saying that at the first Pentecost, which was certainly an intense spiritual experience, it's entirely possible that the auras of the disciples increased dramatically in size and intensity of color . . . and that at least some of them saw these auras and incorporated what they saw into their recounting of the story?"
"You're the one who keeps going on about the weird world of quantum physics and 'Higgs-what's-her-name', Snark! As the Bard once said, 'There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in (our) philosophies.' Yes, Snark, that's precisely what I'm saying. Much of the material in the Bible is best taken metaphorically; but sometimes the literal meaning is what it intends. And we'll all argue until Doomsday over which passage is which!"
"Well, Advocatus, it's good to be your student! Why don't we pour another glass of Bumbulum and consider some other aspects of the story?" Advocatus is seldom one to refuse a glass of wine . . . even when he sometimes should. But we had the afternoon . . . neither of us had anywhere we had to go, and between Easter and Pentecost it's been our custom to give up juggling chain saws. So we were probably safe. After we'd poured ourselves another glass, Advocatus asked me what else we should pay attention to in the story.
"Advocatus, the Jews who saw all this . . . the ones who had travelled from many different countries with so many different languages . . . the story doesn't say that they saw the auras. Instead, they heard the unfamiliar speech of the disciples as though they were speaking in the native tongue of each of those who heard them! There's some obvious meanings there that we'll need to explore . . . perhaps later today or on another occasion. But Advocatus, the story says that they were 'amazed.' They hadn't grown cynically closed to the experience of wonder like those who sneered at the disciples had. I wish more people in our time could preserve that child-like capacity into their adult years."
"I'm struck by how much I agree with you on that, Snark! You and I normally see things so very differently. We've had our conflicts over the years . . . and one memorable falling out that almost ended our relationship for good. But I think there was something in both of us that we had somehow been able to preserve . . . maybe it was a gift to us that we were given rather than an achievement of ours. I don't know which. But, looking back on how we got back together, I think our mutual capacity to receive something new, wonderful, and unexpected is what did the trick. I guess you could say that we, too, had an openness to something new and hopeful . . . we could let it in when it came . . . and when it did, we were both amazed."
I replied to Advocatus, "I like what you're doing with that part of the Pentecost story, Advocatus . . . applying it to our own story. And you're right on target, I think. It segues well into something I read recently that Brother David Steindl-Rast wrote in his book, Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer. In it, he said, 'The heart's response to life as surprise is hope. The more the insight that life is surprising takes hold of us, the more our life will be a life of hope, a life of openness for surprise.'
"And then there's the Quaker author Parker Palmer, who continues to explore the metaphor of the heart. In his important new book called Healing the Heart of Democracy, he maintains that the polarization in our politics and society has to do with how our hearts have so often responded to disappointment, tragedy, attack, and betrayal by shattering. After awhile, to defend our hearts against further pain, we harden them yet again, armoring our hearts with absolutist, black and white thinking, and a cynical lack of trust in one another . . . a sort of 'trust not-hurt-not and my-way-or-the-highway solution. This only leads to an even more brittle heart . . . and further shattering.
"The alternative, he says, is to allow our hearts to break open. That's so that the Word of God, which the Bible says is laid upon our hearts, can 'fall into' them when they are broken. When that is what happens, we develop empathy, compassion, and a more supple and cooperative spirit. So those witnesses to the first Pentecost who retained an openness to wonder, preserved the capacity to be amazed. In that sense, Advocatus, we really need that aspect of the Pentecost experience in our political life as well."
"Well said, Snark. You've again brought our conversation back around to our political life, and I think that's useful. The life of the spirit and the practice of politics belong together. It's amazing, isn't it Snark, how so many writers in our time are converging on this ancient theme! I know that warms your heart . . . it does mine too. And I think that it's very much on that level that we must heal if our society and the body politic is to change. As Christopher Fry once wrote, "affairs are now soul-sized and the enterprise is exploration into God."
And with that, Advocatus said he wanted to raise a toast. As we raised our glasses of Bumbulum Antiquus Profundus,* he said, "To that ancient spirit revealed at Pentecost, Snark . . . by whatever name it's known!"
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* Translated from the Latin, "Profound Old Spirit."
