Wisdom Ways group celebrates Pentecost - resource center for spirituality in St. Paul, MN conducts informal evenings celebrating the Pentecost and the meaning of the Holy Spirit - Spirituality

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 12, 1997 by Dawn Gibeau

St. Paul, Minn. -- "When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place" (Acts 2:1). Eighteen or 19 came together, more women than men, on another Pentecost -- this one a Sunday evening in 1997. They spoke not in many languages, only one (English), except when they sang "Veni, Sancti Spiritus," asking, "Come, Holy Spirit."

The women and men gathered in a lower room at the Carondelet Center here for an informal Pentecost evening of recollection organized by Wisdom Ways, a resource center for spirituality. They sought insight about the meaning of the Holy Spirit in their end-of-century lives.

First they sang, then listened to the scriptural account of the first Pentecost when the Holy Spirit arrived as a whoosh of wind and appeared as tongues of fire that rested on each one and enabled them to speak in many languages.

In 1997 those in the lower room shared words that to them signified the Holy Spirit: Energy. Faithfulness. Fire. Feminine. Dove. Power. Empowerment. Enlightenment. Inspiration. Sophia. Liberation.

Words meaning Spirit, the breath or ruah of God, the life force of God, are feminine, masculine or neuter in various languages, noted Mary Kaye Medinger, Wisdom Ways director. "Somehow those words in different languages bring a wholeness" to the concept of Spirit, she suggested.

She mentioned other images of Spirit: artificial respiration restoring life to a drowning child; a spirited horse, lively and full of energy. The dove, a traditional image, "is fine, but I think it has made us narrow our concept of what the Spirit of God is all about," she said. "I think we need to incorporate another image.

A similar but stronger image from the Celtic tradition is the wild goose, she said. The men and women at small tables continued to share images and experiences of Spirit.

They sought to ground themselves in their own experience as a prelude to listening to Korean theologian Chung Hyun Kyung's videotaped presentation on the Spirit, her 1991 address to the World Council of Churches assembly in Canberra, Australia.

The women and men of Pentecost listened intently to Chung, who is a professor of theology at Ewha Women's University in Seoul. They had to, for her vivacious presentation came in language difficult to understand. She spoke in English heavily influenced by her native Korean.

"We are gathered here together today to be empowered by the Holy Spirit for our work of renewing the whole creation," she said. "Let us prepare the way of the Holy Spirit by emptying ourselves."

Then she urged her WCC colleagues in Canberra to take off their shoes "to enter the holy ground." She called on the spirits of many who have gone before to join them. "Come. The spirit of Hagar, Egyptian, black slave woman exploited and abandoned by Abraham and Sarah, the ancestors of our faith.... Come. The spirit of Joan of Arc, and of the many other women burnt at the witch trials throughout the medieval era.... Come. The spirit of Jewish people killed in the gas chambers during the Holocaust.... Come. The spirit of Mahatma Gandhi, Steve Biko, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Victor Jara, Oscar Romero and many unnamed women freedom fighters who died in the struggle for liberation of their people.... Come. The spirit of earth, air and water, raped, tortured and exploited by human greed for money. ... Come. The spirit of the Liberator, our brother Jesus, tortured and killed on the cross."

In Korean tradition, han is anger, bitterness, energy to struggle for liberation, she explained. "Living people's responsibility is to listen to the voices of the han-ridden spirits and to participate in the spirits' work of making right whatever is wrong." Without hearing their cries, she said, "we cannot hear the voice of the Holy Spirit."

Chung, who spoke during the Persian Gulf War, said, "We feel suffocated by the wind of death." She called war an unholy spirit of Babel that separates us from God's life-giving breath. "The story of Babel is the story of human greed without limit," of upward mobility, acquisitiveness and division, when people divided "talk to each other but no longer understand each other. They have lost the ability to feel with each other."

In the midst of this evil spirit, this "mammon," she said, "God empowered us to choose life. When God's Spirit was upon the people on the day of Pentecost, God confronted their broken hearts and "the wild wind of God breaks down the Babel tower and all the divisions it produced within us, among us and around us. This wild wind of life calls us to be passionate lovers and workers for a new creation."

The first response to the Spirit is repentance, Chung said. When she asked other Korean women what to tell the Christians in Canberra, they told her "don't spend too much energy to call the Spirit because the Spirit is already here with us. Don't bother her by calling her all the time. ... Tell them: Repent!"

She added, "Indeed, repentance is the first step in any truthful prayer."

Repent of the mammon of greed, of "our secret desire for the Babel tower," she urged. "Genuine repentance, metanoia, also means a radical change of direction" to that of the Holy Spirit, "the direction leading to creating, liberating and sustaining life in its most concrete, tangible and mundane forms."