Pentecost

Fifty days after Pascha, the disciples were gathered in Jerusalem. The risen Christ had instructed them to wait — for something he called "the Promise of the Father," something he had mentioned in the upper room the night before he died. They did not know exactly what to expect. They prayed. They waited.

Then the sound of a rushing wind. Tongues of fire above each person's head. The capacity to speak in languages they had never learned. And an interior transformation that the Book of Acts attempts to describe and cannot quite contain: these people who had been frightened behind locked doors became the people who would turn the world upside down.

Pentecost is the feast of the descent of the Holy Spirit. It is, in the tradition's understanding, the completion of what the Incarnation and Resurrection began: the life that was made available in Christ now communicated personally and directly to every human being who receives it.

The Spirit and Theosis

For the contemplative tradition, Pentecost is not primarily a historical founding event for an institution (though it is also that). It is the feast of the personal theosis of the human being — the coming of the divine life into the soul not abstractly but concretely, as the Third Person of the Trinity dwelling within.

Symeon the New Theologian's insistence — his nearly scandalous insistence — that every baptized Christian is meant to consciously know the Holy Spirit's presence within them, is Pentecost theology applied to personal spiritual life. What happened in that upper room is the paradigm and the promise: the Spirit does not descend once on fifty fishermen in Jerusalem and then retire from the field. The Spirit descends on every person who is prepared to receive him.

The preparation, as Symeon never tired of saying, is the whole work of the spiritual life: the purification of the passions, the cultivation of hesychia, the practice of prayer, the deepening of metanoia. All of this creates the receptivity in which the Spirit's coming becomes perceptible — not a new event but the recognition of what was given at baptism, now consciously received and alive.

Theophan the Recluse, at the other end of the tradition's history, said it differently but meant the same thing: the goal of the entire spiritual life is the warm, constant, conscious sense of the presence of God in the heart. This is what Pentecost both promises and demands.

The Green Feast

One of the most distinctive features of the Orthodox Pentecost is the decoration of the church with greenery — branches, flowers, grass on the floor. The priest's vestments are green. In some traditions, flowers are strewn everywhere.

This is not merely decorative sentiment. The green is the color of life, of growth, of the Spirit who is the "Lord, the Giver of Life" — as the Creed calls him. The creation participates in the feast: the living world, still new in its summer growth, witnesses to the Spirit who hovered over the waters at the beginning and who descends again at Pentecost to renew the face of the earth.

The tradition resists any spirituality that treats the material world as irrelevant to the Spirit's work. The same Spirit who descends on the disciples inhabits and animates all of creation. The flowers on the Pentecost floor are not decoration — they are recognition: the created world bearing witness to the Spirit who creates and sustains it.

The Kneeling Vespers

At Pentecost Vespers — the evening service of the feast — the faithful kneel for the first time since Pascha. The Paschal season, fifty days long, has been a season of standing: standing as the risen, redeemed children of God, bodies upright in the posture of resurrection.

At Pentecost, the kneeling returns. Three long prayers are read — the most ancient surviving texts in the entire Byzantine liturgy — with the entire congregation on its knees. The prayers petition for the gift of the Spirit, for forgiveness, for the souls of the departed, for the whole world.

This kneeling is not a regression from the joy of resurrection. It is the proper posture of those who have received an overwhelming gift and know they are utterly unworthy of it. The children of the resurrection kneel before the gift of life itself.

Living in Pentecost

The question Pentecost puts to the practitioner is not: "Was the Holy Spirit given?" — clearly, yes. The question is: "Have I received what was given?"

This is not a question that should produce anxiety. It is a question that should produce earnestness — a genuine turning of attention toward the gift that has been given, a willingness to do the interior work that creates the receptivity in which the gift can be consciously received.

The Jesus Prayer is, in one dimension, a Pentecost prayer: the invocation of Christ, the petition for mercy, the gathering of the nous — all oriented toward the conscious reception of the divine life that the Spirit brings. Every breath of the Jesus Prayer is, in the tradition's understanding, a breath of Pentecost: the practitioner inhaling the Spirit's presence, held in the heart, returning in the prayer.

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and kindle in them the fire of your love.