According to a recent opinion poll about 92% of all Germans favour the traditional observance of two public holidays in celebration of Pentecost. No further questions were asked about motives, nor whether a definition as spring celebration was considered an appropriate description.
Nature itself supports such understanding. When in springtime the rape fields display their intense bright yellow surface one wonders how nature could bring about such brilliance. Which special type of UV light within the solar spectrum could explain why the colour meets the eye with such intensity? Well, beauty needs no explanation. It is self-evident. Some would however like to know why in past times the celebration of Pentecost had its own light effect, pointing towards a type of experience which remains alien to modern man. Born in a different culture and nourished by a different cultural background Pentecost resulted in a Christian holiday. Even if its origin and meaning is increasingly forgotten, there remains a social attitude which favours maintaining the old tradition of observing two holidays.
What remains as well in spite of all attempts to celebrate, to recount and remember is forgetfulness. Made in 1966, a Russian film by Tarkovsky about their greatest painter of icons, Anton Rubljov, shows an old Greek man telling a youngster: “Today they hail what they condemn tomorrow and forget the next day! You and I and everybody else will be forgotten. They have forgotten quite a lot of things!” More often than not I have to restrain myself so as not to get too angry about a certain type of my contemporaries who declare without hesitation that they don’t have any interest whatsoever in the past. How it works showed e.g. the moment when the black/white photography of that film all of a sudden changed into the incredibly beautiful colours of those icons. Immediately lots of spectators rose to leave the cinema. They were not interested in holy paintings that came from a world full of misery, treason, persecution and murder…
Today the tales of Pentecost which result from an experience of total emotion and holy inspiration have apparently lost all meaning and influence, although they imply an invitation to use the celebration of the Holy Spirit to go and search for analogous experience. Because the biblical report claims that it has always been (and still is) God’s intention to pour out his spirit upon all flesh, as predicted by the prophet Joel: “The day shall come when I” – i.e. God – “will pour out my spirit on all mankind; your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall have dreams and your young men see visions” (Joel 2:28). Like life spending waters should God’s spirit soak soarched fields, the deserts of human souls were to become fertile land. It is a pity that believers of today have hardly any opportunity to meet an experience of comparable intensity according to the prophetic promise: “They shall become like a watered garden”, including the priests (Jer. 31:12). One would occasionally wish to feel likewise when meeting fellow Christians, their ministers of theologians. During recent elections a poster of the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism, the follow-up party to the ex-DDR Communistic party SED) warned that the human heart was no capitalistic commodity to be traded at the stock market. Right they are. The joy of hearts and the gardens of the soul are found in other places. Each of us is born with the desire of a liberating experience and a spiritual change at depths. As human beings we long for a perhaps unique occasion to experience such spiritual intensity and arrive at a state of total emotion.
There is no reason to blame anyone who doesn’t understand what Pentecost is all about. In any case we continue to wish each other a “Blessed Pentecost”. But who or what is to be blessed vis-á-vis the facts that it took more than a thousand years for a ruling Orthodox patriarch and a high-ranking representative of western Christianity to meet for the first time, as accounted by the press – because of a war in the Balkans! And what to make of a piece of news that “Bishops and Archbishops declare: We can not celebrate Pentecost unless we continue to also pray for peace”? They list war and the misery of refugees as a challenge to the Christian faith. What about the centuries of iron-curtain-like separation of Eastern and Western churches? There were sufficient opportunities to exercise mutual understanding and pardon. The challenge of the historic situation should have induced long ago a movement on both sides towards a genuine recognition, identifying the areas of common hopes and expectations alive in all human beings who were always disappointed time and again. No wonder that in the end they turned away from the old traditions and celebrations.
There is still time left to promote mutual understanding, time for better communication and for attempts to arrive at a better understanding of the ways and errors of the past.
What sense does it make to continue celebrating Pentecost while neglecting the invitation it provides?
