Spreading the Holy Fire
Today is the Feast of Pentecost in the Church, the Holy Spirit’s big day, so to speak. And it was so to speak….to everyone in their own language…that the Spirit came on the Apostles in the Upper Room with tongues of fire that filled them with a bursting zeal to spread the good news. And the sudden ability to be understood by everyone who heard them, no matter what their origin or native tongue.
In his address today in Rome, Pope Benedict reminded listeners that the Church still speaks all languages to all cultures. It’s not a matter of being able to, it’s a matter of being required to. Once you have knowledge, doing nothing is not an option.
That’s what Pope John Paul told the half a million people gathered in St. Peter’s Square for Pentecost in 1998, the “Year of the Holy Spirit” leading up to the jubilee of the millennium. My family was there, and I’ve written about it because it was so stunning. John Paul called St. Peter’s “the great upper room”, and it certainly felt that way that day. He gave the gathering of lay movements a mission, the same one Pentecost always recalls.
It’s to spread the holy fire.
When Pope Benedict was Cardinal Ratzinger, he wrote about his mission, and called it “Building a Civilization of Love.” It’s clear, and profound.
Human life cannot be realized by itself. Our life is an open question, an incomplete project, still to be brought to fruition and realized. Each man’s fundamental question is: How will this be realized—becoming man? How does one learn the art of living? Which is the path toward happiness?
To evangelize means: to show this path—to teach the art of living. At the beginning of his public life Jesus says: I have come to evangelize the poor (Luke 4:18); this means: I have the response to your fundamental question; I will show you the path of life, the path toward happiness—rather: I am that path.
The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice—all defects that devastate the life of individuals and of the world.
This is why we are in need of a new evangelization—if the art of living remains an unknown, nothing else works. But this art is not the object of a science—this art can only be communicated by [one] who has life—he who is the Gospel personified.
Start small, Ratzinger teaches, because “Large things always begin from the small seed.” Here’s one of my favorite passages:
Of course, at the end of his life Paul believed that he had proclaimed the Gospel to the very ends of the earth, but the Christians were small communities dispersed throughout the world, insignificant according to the secular criteria. In reality, they were the leaven that penetrates the meal from within and they carried within themselves the future of the world (see Matthew 13:33).