Tomorrow is Pentecost Sunday. As someone who has not regularly attended church in many years, it’s one of those days in the liturgy that I easily overlook. I always have to remind myself that holidays are really seasons—of preparation, like Advent and Lent, and afterwards, too, that Christmas technically lasts through Epiphany, and Easter until the current celebration of the Holy Spirit’s fiery descent upon so many tongues.
Easter is my favorite holiday. Joyous, hopeful, trees budding, flowers blooming, bursting with colors mimicked by Sunday hats and new dresses and hair ribbons. Unlike Christmas, however, followed by a lethargic week of transition into the new year, Easter ends so quickly. After the fanfare and hymns of praise, hopefully a ham and some pie shared with family and friends, Monday is just another day.
It can be quietly devastating, to be changed, to feel reborn, and then to wake up and keep on living, day in and day out, the same life in the same body in the same broken world. As if, like a child on the morning of a birthday, we, too, are teased: “do you feel any different?” God lives, and I am forgiven! Therapy has been going well, and I have forgiven myself! The boxes are unpacked in the new apartment, the job onboarded, the toxic relationship finally ended, and yet still I feel like a stranger, and a fraud, and a fuckup.
Fifty days later, Pentecost is our reminder that Easter is just the beginning of the story; change takes time. A seed planted must germinate before it sprouts, and there is no way around the messy process of becoming, just as there is no way to know when exactly something new has arrived. Fitfully and painstakingly, the waiting is a necessary part of the story, too. “Let us prepare our hearts to receive the Word,” I chanted so often during the church services of my childhood, as unreflective of the meaning of my prayer as I was of the scripture itself. Only now am I coming to understand that receptivity is not a passive state of being. To be open to the spirit of inspiration, to embrace connection, to fear not the pull of change, these are actions we choose to take each day. We must polish our hearts like mirrors, as the Sufis say, so that we may see ourselves and our world honestly in pursuit of unity with the divine.
There is so much in the world we cannot change, at least not by ourselves, not overnight, not in ways completely under our control. There is so much death and destruction, civil war, genocide, systemic oppression, capitalism, imperialism, climate change, bigotry, the MTA, Hinge. But maybe still we can prepare the way for change. We can prepare ourselves to embrace change, and to hear the Spirit whenever it speaks, whether it be from the mouths of students, teachers, preachers, or friends. May we have the courage to welcome God’s presence in our lives however it appears, and the faith that, when love blooms, we will be ready.