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Pentecost, from the Ingebord Psalter c.1210
Synergy reminds me that yesterday was Pentecost in the Christian calender. This day commerates the day the Apostles were visited by a “Comforter,” Spirit itself.
This must have been a transcendant mystical experience. Gnostics for example look to the Pentecost as the pinnacle of the Gnostic mystical journey, looking to me a lot like a collective Buddhist awakening experience:
To know the event of Pentecost as an immanent and interior reality is the goal towards which the Gnostic’s striving is always directed. If we are to know this other Comforter, we must somehow come to the place in spirit where we can reach out and touch this timelessness and transcendence; we must pass over to a non-ordinary state of consciousness and perception.
Of course others talk about the Pentecost as the intial ordination of the first preists of Christiantiy, ordained by Spirit and setting in motion the design of the hierarchy of the Church:
On the Day of Pentecost the Spirit descends not only on the Apostles, but also on those who were present with them; not only on the Twelve but on the entire multitude (compare Chrysostom’s Discourses and his interpretation of Acts). This means that the Spirit descended on the whole of the Primitive Church then present in Jerusalem. But though the Spirit is one, the gifts and ministrations in the Church are very varied, so that while in the sacrament of Pentecost the Spirit descends on all, it is on the Twelve alone that He bestows the power and the rank of priesthood promised to them by Our Lord in the days of His flesh. The distinctive features of priesthood do not become blurred in the all-embracing fullness of Pentecost. But the simultaneity of this Catholic outpouring of the Spirit on the entire Church witnesses to the fact that priesthood was founded within the sobornost of the Church.
I am struck by this institutionalization of what is probably the most mystical experience a Christian might have. In the book of Acts, the experience is described in the second chapter as the onset of a rushing wind accompanied by tongues of fire which sat on the Apostles. Being filled with Spirit, they began speaking in dozens of different languages. The whole scene was so weird that Peter had to stand in front of horrified bystanders and tell them that, no in fact, all of these people are not drunk at ten o’ clock in the morning, but filled with Spirit of a different kind. What an experience.
And yet, what happened with that experience is that it became the basis for which spiritual authority was to be passed down the hierarchy of what then became called “the Church.” A spiritual lineage that became an entrenched organization.
