Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost - Year C

Acts 2:1-21

Pentecost is an artificial way to gather. Any excuse could work. Gathering is critical to the presence of new life.

An individual can gather their various identities together through bodywork, counseling, spiritual disciplines, or just being open in nature (and these only scratch the surface of possibilities). When gathered, new life (creation/resurrection) becomes an option (reducing the ways in which one part can subvert another).

Any size group, from a pair to the world, can gather their various identities together and find an opportunity for not only a new vision, but a new practicality of policy and practice. Again, any opportunity will do. While the odds are it will be in the face of a common crisis, it may also be some idea(l) to avoid repeating a recent difficulty.

Those gathered become kindling for refining the current dross and extending light into the dim recesses of tomorrow with the effect of seeing further and beginning to act now as we see it is possible to act then (bringing heaven to earth, so to speak, bringing health to disease).

In and of itself, gathering is but background for possibility. Here silos of experience engage one another and an "Aha!" arises out of previously set apart aspects of a larger whole. In learning to speak another's experience/language there is set in motion a new culture leading to new common governance and nurturing of commonalities (new wine) rather than differences (old wineskins).

From the outside this is out-of-control behavior - drunkenness or new love. From the inside this is engagement with prophetic wisdom - imperative and consuming.

And then we are back into our various venues of experience and begin schism-ing ourselves, unable to gather based on being consumed by our variant imperatives. We grudgingly await a next inevitably needed gathering, a new creation from dark water and lightning word. The next one won't be called Pentecost, as neither G*D nor Neighbor nor Self seem to grow through repetition of past or present.

Ready - or not - gather. Who knows, this may be a "Day" where we could only have expected a "day".