Today is the birth day of the church. No, not the “Birthday of the Church” but the birthing day of that mysterious “communion of saints”, the koinonia of all who love, hope and believe, and includes all who are born anew and from above … by the Spirit (cf. John 3).
God’s Spirit is giving birth to the church now … and forever. That’s what Pentecost is: a “timeless today”, an “eternal now”, in which God—who, as Pope John Paul I said, “[though] our Father; [is] even more … our Mother”—gives birth to us.
The Holy Spirit, our Divine Mother, who, at the Incarnation, descended upon and took up abode in Mary, the Mother of God, the Most Holy Theotokos, now abides in us, too, as the temple, the earthly dwelling place of God-with-us. As Mary is the “holy of holies”, the inner sanctum and “womb of God”, so we, too, are the living where and concrete how by which God is becoming incarnate in this world; the world that the Spirit brought into being “in the beginning” when the ruach (“spirit/breath/wind”) of the Holy One hovered over the tohu wabohu (the “formless void”); when the Creator Spirit spoke over the primal chaos and called forth a cosmos, a universal temple: creation rightly ordered towards light, towards life, towards joy—towards God.
Today is Pentecost … because every day is Pentecost! All times and seasons, all ages and worlds, every living thing and life-bearing being—all creation—is breathed into life with joy and fanned into flame with fire by the Glowing Breath of God, the Loving that unites the Lover and the Beloved in the single Mystery who alone is God: Love.
Today we celebrate what is eternally so . . .
Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth.
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