The Season OF Pentecost

Celebrating the Feast of Pentecost with Fr. Austin, Aja Paola and our favorite shoes :)

We find ourselves now in what we call “ordinary time” – a moniker that frankly grates at me like sandpaper on the skin. The language we use is critical. As a practice, we in the ecclesiastical world have taken to labeling our holy days in various seasons “The second Sunday OF Christmas”, or “the second Sunday OF Easter” etc, because we’re talking about not just the day, but the season as a whole. But Pentecost, for whatever reason, does not garner the same honor. Instead, we’ve taken to say “the __^th Sunday AFTER Pentecost. But why? The seemingly never-ending season of green, when we focus broadly on the teachings of Jesus and the “regular” life of the Church, is not “ordinary” at all. It’s the season of the Holy Spirit. It’s the season when we not only remember the lessons Jesus taught us but we carry them into the world and live them every day through the power of the Heavenly Dove. And It’s the season in which we take Christ’s words  - the language that brought our faith into being – and live them out in all of the words and all of the languages of the earth.

Pentecost, as I’ve found myself saying often this past week, is by far my favorite feast day of the church year. Yes, even beyond the joy of Christmastide and the Paschal awakening on Easter day. Perhaps it’s because unlike its more celebrated counterparts, Pentecost has never taken on the secular & commercialized atmosphere that pollutes the celebration of the sacred mysteries. Instead, there remains such an unencumbered purity to it, like a gem hidden in the open and yet preserved providentially throughout the centuries.

But above all, my favorite part of this mystical day – amidst the decorative tongues of fire and bright crimson streamers, the birthday celebrations for the Church and the beckoning call of the Veni Sanctus Spiritus – is the absolute grandiosity of the gift of language. Something has always captured my imagination about that particular wonder.

Until eight months ago, the great miracle of this favorite feast was something of a theoretical treat to tickle the imagination – a cartoon without the benefit of animation. I mean think of it – flame-headed disciples speaking incoherently in tongues and people from all over the world (the Scripture mentions groups with at least 16 native languages and several different alphabets) all impossibly understanding each other all at once without need of translation! No matter they all thought they were drunk – I might’ve assumed the same thing!

After all, the one thing in this world that’s always given me envy as green as the Amazon, it’s seeing people with the facility to speak several languages easily & skillfully. Should I ever meet a genie in a bottle or stumble upon a sack of magic beans with superpower-granting ability, I’ll pass on extreme wealth or the ability to fly or teleport or have amazing athletic ability (although that might help my beloved Cincinnati Reds have a winning season this year)! Nope – All I want to be is a polyglot someday…

After horribly failed attempts at studying Spanish & Russian & Latin & German & Greek  over the last 15 years or so, I had more or less resolved that the Pentecostal gift just wasn’t meant for me. Then I arrived in Rome.

In my very first blog post after arriving in Rome, just two weeks after making landfall in this weird and wonderful city, I marveled out loud “At St. Paul’s everyday is Pentecost”.  The last eight months have taught me just how true that was – even more than I imagined. Every single day I am absolutely dumbfounded by the linguistic diversity of this world and the remarkable microcosm here at the corner of Via Napoli & Via Nazionale. As I’ve mentioned here before, on any Sunday morning our pews are filled with speakers of at least a dozen native tongues, from Spanish and Italian to Igbo and Swahili to Tagalog and Japanese. And a brief venture downstairs to the refugee center acquaints you with probably two dozen more including Bambara (from central Africa), Eritrean, Hausa, Ewe, Urdu, Pashto/Persian, Uzbek & Arabic. And just for good measure, we are blessed daily with tourists and visitors who greet us happily in Mandarin, French, German, Portugese, Russian and countless other tongues. Last week I came across an American volunteer and an Afghan refugee speaking fluently with each other in Turkish – a language I had no idea that either of them knew! Even still nobody, no matter how talented, could be useful at all in all, or even half of those myriad voices. Heck, I’m awkward at least once a day in English alone!

Refugees & volunteers link hands, hearts and languages at the JNRC

But that – That right there is where the Holy Spirit shows up every single time. Every week I get to welcome visiting groups of students, normally from the United States, to our refugee centre to meet, learn about and share moments of bonding with “the guys” as we’ve been known to fondly say. Every time, I have the honor to hear them revel about for the first time meeting new friends with whom they don’t share even close to a common language. Sometimes knowing nothing more of Italian than “Ciao” and “Grazie”, they track down someone to translate, maybe even through two or three telephone-like connections (ex. English to French to Italian to Persian). but more often than not, the far more powerful intermediary of smiles and handshakes, games of checkers (with chess pieces, oddly enough), enthusiastic foosball matches, drawing artistic works together, eating together and just plain presence that makes all the difference.

Upstairs in the church, the Holy Spirit is still always doing her thing. It’s not unusual to have conversations where one person knows only English & Spanish, another knows Spanish & Italian, another knows English & Italian but nobody knows all three. Even each of our three office computers is set to a different language! So there’s always an odd sort of relay going on, and somehow or another we all manage to figure one another out. Sure, there are mistakes and miscommunications all the time. I manage to embarrass myself in at least one foreign language every day! But every single time, that Heavenly Dove manages to arrive right in the nick of time.

Our multi-lingual Pentecost bulletin cover!

Although I’ve always wished to be fluent in a range of languages, never have I come closer or been more motivated to actually accomplish it. As I’ve been heard to say, I can get along in Italian (good enough to impress those who don’t speak the language but sometimes poor enough to make real Italians cringe). And I can actually read quite well in Spanish – from time to time I’ll read whole newspaper articles with very little trouble, but still some days when I open my mouth to speak it, nothing but a jumbled mumble falls out! But amazingly enough, for someone who loathed and occasionally even failed foreign language classes for more than a dozen years, I’ve actually fallen in live with the quest to grasp a foreign tongue. In fact, I find myself scheming every day on how to achieve greater levels of immersion & dedication in the coming months & years.

I want to carry this Pentecost spirit from this year in Rome to every life & ministry in the Church. And I pray that the Holy Spirit, who gives us the words and the languages to carry on the disciples’ ministry in preaching & living the Gospel throughout the world, will remain at the center of this sacred season. So rather than saying “Ordinary time” or “the Sundays After Pentecost”, I will call it “the Season OF Pentecost” and I hope the Church someday will too.