*Come, Holy Spirit!

 

Pentecost. 

Every single year, on Pentecost, I think about that night.

It was so long ago. More than forty years, because we were living in Chicago and didn't have Andrew yet.

We were living in a Chicago suburb that always reminded us of "houses made of ticky tacky" and looked pretty much the same. Most every family -- including us -- had a husband and a wife and a boy and a girl. We also had a cat and a dog. Joe was working at his first job out of graduate school; the hours were long and travel was involved. I was navigating the world of stay-at-home mom, my days filled with diapers and Sesame Street, and coffee with neighbors.

Out of the blue one day, my friend Sharlene asked me if I would want to go to church with her on the eve of Pentecost. We weren't church-goers at that time, and I didn't even know what Pentecost was. But it was a night out, with a girlfriend, away from the little ones.

So I went to the library and looked up "Pentecost" and learned that this was a Christian festival celebrating the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birthday of the church.

Sharlene was what was called a Charismatic Catholic. And her church was having a special service, a vigil, not a Mass, that began at 11:30 p.m. on the night before Pentecost. She just knew it was going to be very, very special, and wanted to share it with me. 

It was a pretty church, not very old, with a high ceiling. There were more people there than I would have expected at 11:30 on a Saturday night. As in a Quaker Meeting For Worship, there was no liturgy, no program to follow. But it was far from silent. It began with someone's reading the passage from Acts, "and when the Day of Pentecost had come," followed by spontaneous singing and sharing and prayer. Occasionally, someone would speak in an unrecognizable foreign language, a beautiful language, and when finished, another person would rise and say, "I confirm that prophecy," and translate into English what had been said. I had never heard anything like this, and somehow I knew it was real.

And when it was Midnight, there came from above, from that high ceiling, a sound of rushing wind. The people gathered rose up and their hands went up in the air to greet the sound and I felt myself join them.

 I've never again experienced anything even remotely like this, nor do I need to. It's one of those things that if someone told me about it, I'd restrain the rise of a skeptical eyebrow. On the spectrum of Christian practice, it is about as far from Lutheran as could be. 

And yet it happened.

*Reprinted from May 31, 2020