The Feast of Pentecost has long been my favourite celebration of the Christian calendar. I was a nursing student attending mass after a long night shift when the priest who celebrated mass in our hospital chapel one Pentecost Sunday was a patient with terminal cancer. He queried the nature of school or team spirit and invited us to consider what the Spirit of God might be like. The Acts of the Apostles describes how the Holy Spirit descended on the frightened apostles and disciples of Jesus in the form of the sound of strong wind and of tongues of fire. People from “every nation under heaven” in Jerusalem gathered at the sound and were bewildered to hear Galileans, speaking in their own language, yet were understood by each of the diverse hearers in his or her own language. My love for Pentecost has been long-standing. I learned that this Spirit of God, is love, God’s first gift. The Holy Spirit gifts us with the traditional seven gifts of wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear (awe) of the Lord.
“this Spirit of God, is love, God’s first gift”
The Holy Spirit is spoken of as wind, the breath of God, and fire. The Holy Spirit is the Advocate, the Spirit of Truth whom Jesus promised the Father would send to teach the apostles “everything” and be with them forever. (John, Ch. 14). This Spirit is the bond uniting the Father and the Son in our trinitarian Creator. Laurence Freeman in Jesus, The Teacher Within, (p. 183) states that the Holy Spirit is essentially a relationship and makes all relationships holy. While living and working among the Dene and Inuit in northern Canada, I came to appreciate the awareness of spirit in people who were close to nature and lived in unity with the spirit world. Before missionaries arrived on our shores, indigenous people were immersed in the Spirit present in animals and all of creation. They knew that all relationships were grounded in the presence of the Creator.
Pentecost is indeed a day of rejoicing. I pray in the nine-day novena following Ascension Thursday, that on Sunday, Pentecost will bestow on us each of these seven gifts – blessings which our world so urgently needs. May our consciousness of all peoples and all creation being unified in our Creator help us to heal our divided world.
- Sister Patricia McKeon, csj
The traditional novena for this feast starts on May 14th and continues for nine days before Pentecost Sunday on May 23, 2021.