Pentecost: It’s in the waiting
Nine days.
Why did God wait nine days after the Ascension to send the Holy Spirit?
Why wait at all? Why not give the Spirit at the moment of the great commissioning? Logically, given that the Spirit empowers us to go forth in Christ’s mission, that seems like the best time to empower the disciples in the Spirit—when Jesus tells them to go and make disciples! He already gave the gift of the Spirit at His resurrection, breathing on the apostles with, "Receive the Holy Spirit,” then commissioning them to forgive sins (Jn. 20:22-23). So why the delay in this next gift of the Spirit?
There is so much we could say about why God chose the day he did, the way he did. But I want to focus on the heart. What was happening in the hearts of the disciples who were waiting for the promised gift of the Holy Spirit? And what was God’s heart for them, and for us?
What is accomplished in the waiting?
For most of us, waiting is hard. There is something we want, something we desire, and we cannot have it… yet.
Waiting slows us down and invites us into stillness, and being still can be difficult for the human heart—especially in our modern era of hyper-stimulation, where we consistently attempt to avoid the feeling of emptiness within us.
In an address Pope Benedict gave to the Carthusian Order, he offers some profound insights into this phenomenon:
“The youngest, born into this condition, seem to want to fill every empty moment with music and images, out of fear of feeling this very emptiness. This is a trend that has always existed, especially among the young and in the more developed urban contexts but today it has reached a level such as to give rise to talk about anthropological mutation. Some people are no longer able to remain for long periods in silence and solitude.”
Anthropological mutation… wow. Is our heart really becoming mutated by our constant activity?
I think the answer lies in a simple question we can ask ourselves:
Since I am made to live in and enjoy abiding communion with God, is my pace of life aiding that, or hindering it? If my pace makes God an afterthought, my heart is mutating from its original design. Sin always bears this mutating quality, separating us from our heart and from the Heart of God.
Life in the Spirit is only lived inasmuch as we are living from our heart. Why?—because God lies within, and He draws us into ourselves in order to encounter him and live with him.
Living an interior life, alive with God, bears the fruit of the Spirit exteriorly. Our exterior reveals our interior. Our Lord tells us that we know a tree by its fruit (Lk. 6:44). If we have a lot of unaddressed or unprocessed places within our heart, we exteriorly exhibit agitation and restlessness, becoming busybodies, constantly chatty and ever-active. In this case, slowing down is like going against the grain, or trying to paddle upstream. This physical behavior of stillness does not align with our interior state.
The same is true with silence. In silence, we begin to encounter all the noise reverberating within our heart. That can be uncomfortable and unpleasant, and it is why it can be so easy for us to distract ourselves.
But stillness and silence are vital for connection with our hearts and communion with God.
Stillness and silence are like wings that allow us to take flight interiorly. Constant activity and extraneous noise are like hamster wheels in the interior life. We can spend a lot of energy in prayer like this, without actually getting very far.
The waiting, the slowing down, the stillness, the silence: these are all powerful catalysts of connection for our heart. There, like a beautiful mountain pond, we allow the agitated and churned up waters within to settle, and we come to see both how beautiful the water is, and all that lies within. We also see more clearly the litter that has settled in the depths, and needs to be removed in order to restore the pond to its natural beauty.
A lot can be accomplished if we can tolerate the slowing down and suffer our own reintegration. By entering into the stillness and the silence, we have the opportunity to integrate more deeply with our own fragmented heart, noticing and attending to the contents in those fragments.
One of the things I regularly try to help people with in therapy is ensuring they feel safe and secure enough to engage in this process of reintegration: to embrace and move through the pain, the unwept grief, and the trauma that arises as we slow down and begin to enter deeply into our heart.
Fear closes the heart as we turn inward and try to protect ourselves. Love and encouragement allow us to remain open even when distress arises. Love allows us to bear any emotion that wells up within us, and permits it to come up, out, and pass.
If we recall, the upper room was initially a place of fear, of locked doors. This time, because the Lord has appeared to them and assuaged their wounds with love, there is a growing capacity to sit in the unknown: to wait.
In this waiting, God desires to stretch our heart’s capacity so that we might receive more of him. Pope Benedict elucidates this insight from St. Augustine when he writes,
“Man was created for greatness–for God himself; he was created to be filled by God. But his heart is too small for the greatness to which it is destined. It must be stretched. “By delaying [his gift], God strengthens our desire; through desire he enlarges our soul and by expanding it he increases its capacity [for receiving him]”” (Spe Salvi, 33).
This is part of the difficulty of waiting–the stretching process of God growing our heart! In these moments, we can be tempted to give up prayer, believing it to be a hopeless enterprise, that God is not going to do anything with our perseverance or that he will never show up. But we must fight against these temptations of hopelessness or abandonment, for it is in these places that God reveals himself most powerfully.
Here we have an invitation to persevere like Jesus, hoping against hope unto the end, and entrust ourselves to the Father like he did. He is our invitation to never give into these lies—the testimony of the Father’s fidelity. And it is here, in the stretching and perseverance, that God will always reveal himself to us in new and deeper ways, always to the degree that we are willing to surrender any form of security that is not God. Faith and hope like that are what pave the way for the deepest communion and intimacy with God.
John Paul II said, “Faith, in its deepest essence, is the openness of the human heart to the gift: to God’s self-communication in the Holy Spirit” (Dominum et Vivificatum, 51). This is the posture of heart that the disciples had leading up to Pentecost. This is how they endured the waiting. By committing themselves to prayer in those nine days, they waited with steadfast faith, with unwavering hope. There, with Our Lady to love and encourage them, they kept their hearts open, they received what surfaced, and they kept suffering their own reintegration, accepting every part of themselves that they were ashamed of or afraid of, so that every part of them could be filled with the fullness of God.
Let us enter into this time of waiting, not in fear of what we might encounter within ourselves amidst it, but in confidence in the Lord’s desire to heal us and fill the space we make for him with the gift of the Spirit.
