As we move through this “growing season” of Pentecost, we are reminded that the Spirit has come to dwell in each and every one of us. On Pentecost, the Spirit came (like a tongue of flame) upon each person gathered in Jerusalem, offering itself in various iterations of language, heritage, ethnicity, and variety of experience, age, and gender. What an incredible reminder to us: we are always to “leave a window open to the Spirit”, who appears in unexpected ways, which we do not control. This happens in order to refresh us, to challenge us, to offer us new life, new opportunities, new possibilities. Will we cooperate? These invitations do not come without risks. For some of us, doing it the “same old way” offers comfort and security. It is very hard to release these old ways in order to trust God who is “doing a new thing.” (Isaiah 43)
Pentecost reminds us that we are to live in community, in interactivity, in interdependence. It is in relationship with others that our lives are tested, supported, recognized, challenged, and transformed. The spiritual life is not only a private matter. The Trinity of God: Creator (transpersonal), Christ (personal), and Holy Spirit (impersonal), undercuts our dualistic mindset and invites us to experience God interactively. God lives in community with God’s very Self in the revelation of the Trinity. These parts of God (that are all One) offer various ways to experience that One. It offers us each other as ways of experiencing this human condition in all its manifestations, if we will only be open to it.
Often I reflect upon John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and our forbearer, who said, “We must delight in each other. Make other’s conditions our own. Laugh together. Weep together. Always having before our eyes our community, as members of the same body.” While we may like the sound of this idea, this kind of empathy and connection requires deep listening and a willingness to suspend our own “knowing better” so we are able to be open to learn from another who walks another part of this human journey with us. In the company of others, we make our way and learn to tell the truth about ourselves and about our experiences of God and of life. It takes great courage to release my “being right” in order to learn more about the possibility of transformation that the Spirit may be offering me through another’s experience, reality, and way of being alive.
Are we willing to listen carefully to each other to see where the Spirit may be moving us? Are we wiling to suspend the cycle of blaming someone else or some outside forces for our problems so we may explore new ways of seeing them, new opportunities to take responsibility to build together the community of which we want to be a part? Can we envision a future God is calling us toward in which the outsiders are welcomed, the hungry are fed, the lost are found, the rejected are restored, the scapegoated are heard instead of dismissed? Let us pray together, listen together, love each other, allowing God to heal and lead us! Amen.