Pentecost: To Woo Back a World’s Desire

Pentecost: To Woo Back a World’s Desire May 18, 2013

Pentecost, by Jean Restout (1732)
Pentecost, by Jean Restout (1732)

Earlier this year, in the weeks leading up to Lent, I had been looking at a few of Christina Rossetti’s poems for the liturgical year.  On Pentecost, I’d like to return to Rossetti, and her poem “Whitsun Day.”

At sound as of rushing wind, and sight as of fire
Lo! flesh and blood made spirit and fiery flame,
Ambassadors in Christ’s and the Father’s Name,
To woo back a world’s desire.

 

These men chose death for their life and shame for their boast,
For fear courage, for doubt intuition of faith,
Chose love that is strong as death and stronger than death
In the power of the Holy Ghost.

 

I.
DEAth FOR tHEIR LIFE AND sHAMe for their boast

When I reread this poem, I think of the middle two lines as particularly apt.  Although they comprise the end of one sentence and the beginning of the next—the end of one stanza and the beginning of the next—they could credibly be thought of as a single sentence, a single statement about the first-century apostles and first-century Church:

“To woo back a world’s desire[, t]hese men chose death for their life and shame for their boast.”

Consider the martyrdom that the early Church embraced for the truth of Christ!

St. Stephen was stoned to death for blasphemy after proclaiming that he could see Jesus Christ standing at the right hand of God.

St. James, the son of Zebedee, was executed by the sword at the order of King Herod.

Pope St. Peter was crucified upside down.

St. Paul was beheaded during the reign of Nero.

St. Polycarp was burned at the stake for refusing to burn incense to the Roman emperor Antoninus.

Justin Martyr, like St. Paul, was beheaded.

The first several centuries of the Church were an age of martyrdom.  But (or therefore!) these apostles and martyrs and saints converted an Empire and, in the centuries after that, built Western Civilization.  To woo back a world’s desire, they chose death for their life and shame for their boast.  It began at Pentecost.

Above is a 2008 photograph of the traditional site, on Mt. Zion, of the Last Supper and the first Pentecost.  According to Bargil Pixner (1921-2002), archaeologist and Benedictine monk, the original Church of the Apostles is located beneath the current structure.  Not all scholars are sure; it makes for a good story for tourists and pilgrims.  But the events and locations of the first-century Church should not be relegated to the dusty provinces of scholars and tourists and monks.  Pentecost is not just an event that once happened in history, 2000 years ago.

The more I look at the world I find myself in today, the more I am convinced that the twenty-first-century Church must become the first-century Church.  We must allow our hearts, our spirits, our lives to be an upper room—a cenacle—in which the fire of the Holy Spirit can ignite and prompt us, if necessary, to shame and to martyrdom.  For today the Church is confronted with the very same evil it was confronted with in the first century:  paganism.  The only difference today is that it is a secular, and often a statist, paganism.  But it is no less hostile to truth and to the ways of God.  It is no less ugly a place to find yourself in in time.

 

ii.
first build the temple

St. Paul wrote to Timothy that he was to preach the truth in season and out of season (2 Tim. 4:2).  No Christian who looks at the world today can doubt that we are out of season.  But if in the early centuries of the Church the saints and martyrs wooed back a world’s desire, well, the world has once more lost its desire and is once more in need of wooing.  We need to love the world enough that we can refuse to reconcile ourselves to its ways, so that its ways may become the ways of Christ.  And to do that, we must be willing to accept death for our life and shame for our boast.

In a poem I hope to be looking at in more detail during the remainder of the year, “Choruses from the Rock,” T.S. Eliot writes:

Why should men love the Church?  Why should they love her laws?
She tells them of Life and Death, and of all they would forget.
She is tender where they would be hard, and hard where they like to be soft.
She tells them of Evil and Sin, and other unpleasant facts.
They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.
And the Son of Man was not crucified once for all.
The blood of martyrs not shed once for all,
The lives of the Saints not given once for all:
But the Son of Man is crucified always
And there shall be Martyrs and Saints.
And if blood of Martyrs is to flow on the steps
We must first build the steps;
And if the Temple is to be cast down
We must first build the Temple. (p. 106)

Eliot is speaking here of the Temple of your body.  That is the Temple to be built; as St. Gianna Beretta Molla said, “Our body is a cenacle, a monstrance:  through its crystal the world should see God.”  Build in yourself the steps and the temple upon which martyrs may be slain, and through which the world in its clumsiness may find its way back to God.  Our task as Catholics is not merely to look at the world and point an accusatory finger and cry, “Shame!”  Our task is to show the world how to fall in love with God again.  The world’s desire can be wooed back, but first the Church must kindle the fire of Pentecost within itself.

And by “the Church” I mean all its members.  This is not an age for lazy or casual Catholics; we cannot afford to take our Catholicism light, or only when we desire it.  In Lumen Gentium (here), the Second Vatican Council said this about the mission of the laity:

For all their works, prayers, and apostolic endeavors, their ordinary married and family life, their daily occupations, their physical and mental relaxation, if carried out in the Spirit, and even the hardships of life, if patiently borne—all these become “spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” (LG 34)

All their works; all their prayers; all their endeavors; all of their life.  We are not Catholics because we happen to show up for Mass, only to make a beeline for the parking lot before the last verse of the last song has been sung, and then for the rest of the week live just as do the pagans around us.  We are Catholics, rather, only when Catholicism is the air that we breathe.  In 2007, while archbishop of Denver, Charles Chaput had this to say when addressing the topic of anti-religious bigotry and how it must be confronted:

If [the world you find yourself in today] doesn’t make you want to defend and push back for your faith, maybe you need to take an honest look at how Catholic you really want to be.  This isn’t a time for tepid or half-hearted believers.  If you claim to be Catholic, if you claim to be a person of religious faith, then you need to live it all the way. …

If you want to serve the common good and build a better future, you’ll never do it by hiding your faith in the closet.  You’ll never do it by being Catholic in private and something else in public.  History is made by people with convictions, and the courage and passion to live those convictions. … [We must] live our faith more deeply and authentically, not less.

Today, Pentecost, is the birthday of the Church.  Deacon Alex Jones, who was a Pentecostal minister before converting to Catholicism, likes to say that Catholics are the original Pentecostals.  But we need to become that Church again.  We need to become the Church of the first century again—not by throwing all away all the development that has occurred since, but instead by recovering the faith in the air that we breathe and the willingness to be martyrs to convert a pagan world to Christ.

 

iii.
let the fire not be quenched in the forge

Again in “Choruses from the Rock,” T.S. Eliot tells us how we are to do that:

Where the bricks are fallen
We will build with new stone
Where the beams are rotten
We will build with new timbers
Where the word is unspoken
We will build with new speech
There is work together
A Church for all
And a job for each
Every man to his work.

Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore
Let the work not delay, time and the arm not waste
Let the clay be dug from the pit, let the saw cut the stone
Let the fire not be quenched in the forge. (pp. 98, 102)

Let the fire not be quenched in the forge.  Elsewhere, Eliot says, “Make perfect your will.”  Pentecost is not about getting excited fuzzies at the thought of being “inspired” by the Holy Spirit; it’s not about jumping up and down and waving your arm every which way and talking in tongues and thinking that you are saying something coherent or meaningful.  I mean, please; get ahold of yourself.  Pentecost is not about you; it’s about keeping the fire alive in the forge and making perfect your will.  The apostles who received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost were about to go out and get themselves killed.

Much to cast down, much to build, much to restore.  We can do the work that lies ahead, but only if we make perfect our will, only if we become Catholics through and through, down to our breath and our blood and our bones.

So today, remember the apostles who first received the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  To woo back a world’s desire, these men chose death for their life and shame for their boast.

Happy solemnity of Pentecost.

***

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