Whitsun Musings

(The Day of Pentecost, rendered by an anonymous Chinese artist)

On the Western Christian calendar, today is the festival of Pentecost, or Whitsunday. This feast commemorates the coming of the Holy Spirit in the form of tongues of flame that descended upon Christ's apostles on a hilltop outside Jerusalem. An enlightenment unsought, though obliquely promised.

This day gets me thinking about the world around me as much as any world to come. By some interpretations, Pentecost fundamentally changed the world those early Christians were operating in. There was a new power afoot in creation, one that permitted them to do new things (speak in tounges, handle snakes, socialize with previously "unclean" persons) and that fulfilled the faith begun on sojourns with Jesus. Accordingly, one could see Pentecost as a continuation of the work of creation, and that is appealing in some ways.

But a question I often have is whether this event--and others in the course of "salvation history," like Christ's Incarnation, etc.--accomplished something original and unprecedented, or whether they brought our attention to what was already the case to begin with. Did they cause something new to happen, or show plainly what reality really was? Most Christians come down with the former possibility in each of these sets, though there are certainly articulate dissenters.

I'm not sure I can decide, though I'm not sure I have to either. Both readings have their uses, and if the biblical accounts can't quite agree on how the Spirit arrived, I think I'm entitled to some interpretive wiggle room. Either way, Pentecost proposes that this world is still infused with spirit, and that there is value in living accordingly. That whether we know it or not, we tread at every moment through a landscape like Annie Dillard once glimpsed:

Then one day I was walking along Tinker Creek thinking of nothing at all and I saw the tree with the lights in it. I saw the backyard cedar where the mourning doves roost charged and transfigured, each cell buzzing with flame. I stood on the grass with the lights in it, grass that was wholly fire, utterly focused on. It was less like seeing than like being for the first time seen, knocked breathless by a powerful glance....I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until at that moment I was lifted and struck.

If this--or the story of the fire-coiffed apostles--conveys any grain of truth at all, we have neither time nor place for the comforts of nonchalance and inattention.
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I don't have a fishing story of my own to post, sadly, but on another site I found this one , where a man describes taking his 2 1/2 year old daughter trout fishing. Note especially the daughter's comment at the end of the story. Sappy? Maybe, but it surely wasn't for dad.