The Feast of Pentecost

CHRISTIANS MUST BE THE AGENTS OF THE HOLY SPIRIT
By Michael de la Bedoyerc
WE have had many opportunities of noting that the doctrinal and mystical significance of the great feasts of the liturgical year afford an infinitely more helpful commentary on the world's news than the ad hoc, short-range, observations which are the stock-in-trade of the ordinary publicist. And this perhaps applies with even greater force to the feast of the Holy Spirit which the Church will observe on Sunday and for eight days after.
For Pentecost is essentially the feast of the spiritual illumination of mankind. The wonder of the first Pentecost was the illumination by the Holy Spirit of the first members of the Church so that in a flash what they had previously only realised in part and darkly was converted into a blinding. burning certainty.
They were changed men. The faith was born in them. The Church came into the world. Only then did they realise the full meaning of the events in which they had been participators and spectators. As the Church, they were invested with the authority of the Holy Spirit — " it has seemed good to the Holy Spirit and to us "; as men, the Holy Spirit took its residence in the inmost core of their being.
This was the transcending power, promised them by Our Lord, which permeated them and gave them the strength to break with the past and go forward on the mission of spiritually conquering all nations, without distinction of race or place.
A renewed world
ALL this is part of the elemen tary knowledge of every Christian; yet, bow little we realise the truth that the veritable change in the face of the world which took place on the first Pentecost within the beings of the first disciples has occurred in us also, so that we, like them, belong to a renewed world renewed with the authority and power and grace of the Holy Spirit.
The Holy Spirit is our Faith, is our religion, is our true vision on to the world.
So little do we remember this revolutionary truth that even where it is a question of the Church itself, we commonly muddle up our thinking.
Thus we are apt to imagine that the authority and dogma of the Church conies from the written words of the New Testament or from tradition, whereas, of course, they come direct from the Holy Spirit within it.
It is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit which makes and animates the Church, a living. growing, developing thing whose Divine authority guarantees the Gospel, rather than the other way round.
If this were at all understood, there would he much less scandal about the definition by the Church of dogmas.
The Church, from the first Pentecost, has swept forward through human history, ever the same, as the Holy Spirit within her is ever the same, yet ever absorbing into that unity more and more of the changing order of time and space.
And it is precisely this strength and guidance and light of the Holy Spirit within the Church and within the being of every Christian, since the day of Pentecost, which should give direction and significance to every !moral event in the world's history and in our own lives,
The Christian failure THE moment we realise this, we
can begin to understand why it is that the temporal history of the world has been so disorientated and confused, so full of tragedy and suffering, so apparently vain and purposeless.
Christians—men utterly changed by the spiritual forces which descended upon the first disciples in Jerusalem-have s:rnply failed in practice to canalise into the world around them the grace and guidance from within them. Since Pentecost, they have it in them to realise the Holy Spirit within them, and in thus realising the Holy Spirit, to spread His light and grace around them, but only the saints have achieved their vocation.
The Church, as the Church, to which Our Lord promised infallible nrotection so that the gates of hell should never prevail, has permanently witnessed to the truth of the Holy Spirit within her, and she has steadily grown, spreading across all peoples, since the first Pentecost; but Christians themselves have failed to live up to the truth and light of the Church, as well as to the truth and the light of the Holy Spirit within each one of them.
Clue to hisiory THis is simply a fact—a fact of
history, as much as any other fact. It may not be a surprising fact. It may be accounted for by the Fall of man whose corrupting consequences were not removed by the Redemption and the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and subsequently through the sacraments of the Church. It may be accounted for by the power of Satan. It may be accounted for by our own pride and perversity. But it remains a feet.
And as a fact, it has profoundly affected the course of history. It is the true explanation of the course of history, It is the one clue to straightening again the crooked course of history.
One can bring the matter down to the most practical of politics— and never more so than in these days.
Our Lord immediately after promising the coming of the Holy Spirit who " will make everything plain and recall to your minds everything I have said to you " went on : " Peace is my bequest to you, and the peace which 1 give you is mine to give; I do not give peace as the world gives it."
It is that inner spiritual peace of those who realise the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within them which, spread outwards over the world, can alone give to the world the real peace for which human beings crave.
Yet is it not a fact, and has it not always been a fact, that whether a state of non-war, of cold war, or of hot war reigns over a world cut off from the renovating power of the Holy Spirit, there is in it no peace?
Ludicrous situation OUR generation has reached the
stage when the accumulated consequences of trying through generations to run the world without the light of the Holy Spirit have brought matters to a pass which would be ludicrous, were they not so utterly tragic.
Was it thinkable, even a few years ago, that the statesmen of the world could fruitlessly meet over forty times in order to try to agree, not on the basis of some future order of things, but on the agenda to be discussed in a conference purporting to find an international way of living!
Was it thinkable that with the fullest realisation of the cataclysmic effects of modern atomic warfare and the devastating economic consequences of such a war statesmen should coldly and coolly plan, prepare, manoeuvre, quarrel with one another to ensure the best strategic and political position in which to meet their " gotterdammerung "?
But such things cannot be truly surprising to those who have once understood the significance of Pentecost and the whole world's turning its back on the Divine Spirit which descended into the beings of men precisely to comfort, guide and enlighten them in their ways, secular as well as spiritual.
It is only against the background of these tremendous mysteries, these supreme facts, that the meaninglessness of the world as we know it takes on a meaning.
And if the realisation of all this from one point of view terrifies us, from another it must be of the greatest comfort and inspiration.
Our inspiration BECAUSE the Holy Spirit descended into us, we know we have the answer to otherwise unanswerable enigmas.
We have first, the personal answer. We know that the Holy Spirit is God within us, the Eternal and Unchangeable. Whatever may happen to the order of time, our realisation of the Holy Spirit within us raises us out of the changing order of time and brings us into ever closer union with the Eternal.
And we have, second, the certaintythat in so far as we communicate to others the truths which we may learn from the Holy Spirit within us, we are doing more than all the statesmen and politicians and generals— apart from what they learn in the same way—can do to save the world from the logical end of the confusion and misplanning of history.
Nor is this merely an act of blind faith. We know well enough how much of good there is in our fellow human beings. We know the seriousness and earnestness and idealism which permeates so much of human planning. All this, too, is of God.
The problem is to release, as it were, this goodness, this Godlireass, and to re-order it into the channels which God designed and That re-ordering. that right direction, must spring in a quite direct way from the guidance and inspiration and values of the Holy Spirit who, if we will and wish it, can speak and act through us within whom He dwells. The only condition is that we shall do those things which are necessary if He is to act and speak through us, instead of, as at present, insisting on having our say in spite of His guidance and grace within us.