From the Gospel: Overcoming forgetfulness

Pentecost Sunday, Cycle C. Today’s readings: Acts 2:1-11; Romans 8:8-17; John 14:15-16, 23b-26

A month ago today, on May 8, Europe marked Victory Day. Eighty years after the end of World War II, all those who remembered this day, young and old, shared a common experience of longing for peace after the destruction of war and deep sorrow for lives wasted on bloody frontlines.

Remembrance is one of the subtlest of acts and yet perhaps also one of extraordinary power.

Remembrance is more than just memory. While memories are passive recollections of the past, whether positive or negative ones, which remain imprinted in our mind, remembrance is the deliberate bringing to the fore life-changing experiences.

Remembrance gives us identity. It brings us back to our roots. It restores the depth of meaningful encounters. It helps us relive and give due value to significant turning points in our life.

Unfortunately, we often get distracted and easily drift into forgetfulness. As a result, we simply get by, seeking one powerful experience after another one, leaving us shattered into many different disconnected pieces and with no unifying reality.

By calling to mind Jesus’s words as a Church, we remain ever new and vibrant in our attitude, and turn into an outward looking community

Throughout the Old Testament, the People of God is called to remember one very significant experience: their being saved by God from slavery in Egypt and led into the promised land.

After Jesus’s raising from the dead, remembrance takes an even more powerful significance. On Easter morning, the angels urge the disciples standing dumbfounded at the empty tomb: “Remember what he told you while he was still in Galilee.”

From that point onwards, from the experience of the disciples of Emmaus, and almost every speech by Peter and by Paul in the Acts is an act of remembrance as the story of salvation is told and retold over and over again.

Remembrance is an act of the Holy Spirit. As we celebrate Pentecost today, the liturgy gifts us with the words of Jesus in the Last Supper. Before his departure from this world, Jesus promises to send the Counsellor, the Holy Spirit, who “will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you” (Jn 14:26).

Jesus promises to send us the Holy Spirit who will help us overcome the dreadful plague of absentmindedness and forgetfulness.

The roots of the Latin word for remembrance, ricordare, evokes a return to the heart (cordis), just as concord implies coming together as one heart. Thus, the Holy Spirit, promised by Jesus, leads us back to the core of our being. With the descent of the Holy Spirit upon them, a group of fearful men and women are filled with courage and are turned from a group of individuals closed in on themselves into an outward-looking people.

The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance, by Erik Varden

In his book The Shattering of Loneliness: On Christian Remembrance, Erik Varden insists that “to be consoling and complete, remembrance in truth has to be shared”. The Spirit consoles us, the Benedictine monk continues, “by drawing us out of our cloistered selves into a shared remembrance that sweetens even bitter memories with gratitude”.

This was the experience of the first disciples on that first Pentecost. The Church is constantly called to relive this experience, that is, to engage in a shared experience of remembrance for it to be renewed and alive.

This is done by calling to mind Jesus’s words as a Church, making sure that we remain ever new and vibrant in our attitude, and turning us into an outward looking community that receives its reason for being not from the nostalgia of tradition but from Christ himself.

The feast of Pentecost evokes joy, youthfulness, newness and dynamism. The Holy Spirit constantly nudges us, as Church, to call to mind Jesus’s words and deeds with us. Only then will the truth be gradually revealed to us as we journey ahead as a community, as we let go of our amnesic attitudes and embrace the new life Jesus wants to share with us.

carlo.calleja@um.edu.mt