One of those "dang, these fragments have been crying out to be patched into a writing-thing for a long time" blog posts. I don't know how much sense it'll make to anyone else, but I'll at least get it out there so that my fingers can stop itching and my mind can clear.
Pentecost is one of my favorite stories.
You might know it: a small group of stunned and grieving friends huddled inside a room. A flaming wind descending upon them, sending them forth to teach -- and an international crowd stunned to find themselves able to understand. “Aren’t all these who are speaking Galileans? Then how is it that each of us hears them in our native language?" (Acts 2:7)
To me, this a story and a celebration of communion -- and of community, and of communication, intertwined. These are the things I thirst for, and can never get enough of -- communion is my heaven, isolation is my hell. There are three stories that join into the way I understand the flames of Pentecost: Babel, the summer lake, and Cana.
The first is the story of Babel (Genesis 11:1-9), the story of the scattering and splitting of humanity due to their pride. I don't know if the tower is historically accurate, and I don't care -- I've felt the splinter-shards of that shattering in my own life, because I stretch between dozens of worlds that don't talk to each other easily: Asian/American, arts/technology, deaf/hearing, femininity/male-dominated-fields, the span of generations in my family, the gap of distance that is part and parcel of a heritage of immigration, and many others.
Humanity splits itself apart in millions and millions of ways, stretching and snarling. It's part of how the world is broken. It's part of our job to help repair it. Pentecost reverses Babel, restoring our ability to understand the mystery of others. The connection of those two stories is nothing new or unique; they're read together every year at Mass.
The second story is from last summer, and probably won't make much sense to anyone who wasn't there. I was with church friends at the end of a long day, exhausted and unable to communicate. Too much lipreading for too long will burn the brightest brain out, and mine was fried. We were by a lake, in a large circle, chatting. Or rather, my friends were chatting. Ironically, they were chatting about the Holy Spirit -- the same Spirit that descended at Pentecost, bridging and understanding -- and the way that Spirit had recently acted in their lives. And all the while, I was struggling in my tiny hell of isolation, straining to catch the communications that were being flung across the space, failing again. And again. And again.
Until I wasn't. Something shifted, and the understanding became effortless. I couldn't hear the words any better than before, but they made sense. They slipped into my brain, instantly -- and I could localize the speaker with pinpoint accuracy (an ability that wearing hearing aids is supposed to destroy, and usually does) -- and I could recognize their voices individually, and I could understand them. I could understand them, I couldn't hear them any better, but I could understand --
With a start, I realized that night had fallen. I couldn't see who was next to me, let alone lipread them. This made no sense at all; exhausted deaf person loses the ability to see and gains effortless conversational comprehension? Everything was backwards! I began to laugh, and then I tried something I'd always wished for -- I flopped backwards in the grass and watched the stars. And the effortlessness continued! I've never been able to look at something else while listening -- my eyes and neck are always riveted to track the speaker's lips, my concentration straining -- and now I could watch stars, or stretch -- or even close my eyes! -- and still remain connected to the conversation, sweet and easy.
The spirit of Pentecost, the spirit of communion and of understanding, had descended upon me as well. I relished this for a long moment with a sense of growing awe.
Eventually, I piped up and somehow semi-coherently explained to my friends what was happening. Then I began to shake and weep into the grass in gratitude. We were all stunned. But we were also (mostly) science majors, so of course we tested out this strange ability with small experiments to check what I could do -- and yep, I could understand them with my eyes closed, point to them, couldn't hear any more sounds than I usually could (I was definitely still profoundly deaf). Some of them jumped into the lake, swam out -- I could still hear them, pinpoint their location, understand them without strain.
The next morning, I woke up, and it was gone. But I've carried that tiny taste of heaven with me since -- what it's like, what it could be like, to touch that understanding and connection that goes deeper than our words. To have my gnawing hunger for connection lifted, for a moment, in one way.
The third story is Cana (John 2:1-11). The version in the Scriptures is short and sparse; Jesus turns water into wine at a wedding party when the couple (ok, mostly the groom) doesn't even realize they're about to run out. I didn't think much of this story until my first Ignatian retreat, when I abruptly found myself caught in the middle of it, watching a scene unfold within my mind's eye for over two weeks every time I sat down to pray.
The wedding I saw was not the sort of wedding that my family historically has had -- two people from within the same community, already known and intertwined in the same social fabric long before their birth. My grandpa's sister married my grandma's brother. My two grandmothers were childhood playmates; years later, my mom's mom recognized my teenage dad by family resemblance the first time he showed up at their house to see my mom. My parents' older (and younger) siblings and the siblings of their friends were school classmates, and a collective set of older sisters set my mom up as the prom date for my dad's friend since kindergarten. That friend later married my mom's 7th sister. Another of my dad's friends since kindergarten threw the college parties where my parents started dating, and later married my mom's 8th sister... I could go on, but yes, this is normal. Filipino-Chinese society is small and deeply intertwined. (I've had relatives who married outside it, more recently -- and that was weird.)
But the version of Cana I saw (in my prayer -- your mileage may vary) was a patchwork of people who'd never met, and who you'd never expect to find all in one place. Apparently, the bride and groom were from -- and/or had been -- all over, so the people they had met along the way were a bizarre collection of "how in the world are you even in the same room?" People who'd journeyed from far-flung places, disparate social circles, mutually unintelligible languages, with clothes and foods and customs strange to one another. The groom's schoolmates from one place, the bride's cousins from another, the many circles of friends, family, and colleagues -- wild diversity, something that should be shattered, fragmented, unable to connect --
And yet -- instead, they danced their way into a mosaic. Connecting. Pointing, laughing, learning new words foreign on their tongues. Finding ways to patch themselves together. Sometimes with translation help from a few bilinguals, but often without words -- children playing variants on universal games (tag!), cooks helping to prep and sample one another's unfamiliar dishes (nom!), laughing, stretching, miming, scribbling, drawing -- dancing, hugging, listening with bright, attentive eyes. Reaching out to share and thread together a great tapestry of stories from all over time and space and viewpoint -- a polyphony of lives joined together by narratives that started with "so, how do you know the couple?"
This seemed to have nothing to do with anything, and I was terribly confused, and spent quite a few prayer periods going "uh, God, I... explanation, please?" Eventually, I grasped the point -- or at least one of them, as best as I could. It wasn't that this was a wedding -- it could have been something else without a bride and groom. A classroom, a town hall, a cafeteria, a conference table. Ordinary human places, convened by ordinary human people.
The point was that this tapestry and this communion was knit around -- and threaded through by -- ordinary human people, doing ordinary human things. (Which also happen to be miracles. For instance, being born -- a miracle we've each experienced.) And I looked upon the scene at Cana, and heard -- or rather, felt -- somebody tell me: hey, look! That's your job, Small Human Mel. You're made to weave impossible communities together.
That's why, for me, Cana is also Pentecost.
At the end of the Pentecost story, some people make fun of the disciples. They see these ordinary people teaching a crowd they should not have been able to communicate with, and they snicker: "They have had too much wine." (Acts 2:13)
Yep yep. They are. They're absolutely sloshed on wedding wine -- transfigured wine from Cana and the marriage supper of the Lamb. Inebriated with the spirit that has come to dwell and make a home within them (John 14:23), they embody the love that draws all people to itself (John 12:32). In other words -- in software words -- they merge and patch the world. Filled with fire, they patch the stories of the world together, bring people to listen to each other, teach them how to build communion and hold it together -- both at the loud and joyful party full of fellowship, and within the privacy of a quiet tent. ("The second is way easier for lipreading," my brain chimes automatically. I laugh and shake my head at deaf-environmental-scanning-habits.)
And this is why I love Pentecost. It's communion. It's my heaven. It's my job. (Also, it's fire. I like fire. Fire is shiny and fun.)