In recent weeks I’ve seen quite a few diocesan newsletters, Christian formation suggestions, and popular ‘liturgy tips’ advocating for a festive parish celebration of Pentecost. Admittedly cultural styles vary, so balloons may work in one setting, and the flight of the white dove (palombella) in another setting (the former suggestion dating back about 3 decades, the latter a lot of centuries), but the explanations do not necessarily explore the origins of practice. Some examples of suggestions last week in the US included:
wear red and celebrate with red foods. Reference the “tongues of fire” in someway such as red helium balloons tied to wrists, or balloon rockets, or streamers of red and orange to wave, or ‘tongues of fire’ hats…”
While none of these suggestions would particularly assist in my own participation of the 50th day of Easter and a feast of the Holy Spirit, these popular suggestions always seem to be rooted in the “birthday of the church”, calling for a birthday cake or other domestic image. Where in the world is this coming from?
Trying to find the starting place of Pentecost as birthday party has proved elusive. Several authors have reminisced about their childhoods in which these birthday celebrations took place, which would date this view of Pentecost back to the 1960s and even the 1950s in some places. These particular stories come from reformed protestant churches as well as some Lutheran sources and much more recently Episcopalian. What I find interesting is the language (in popular catechetical and other writing) is almost always that Pentecost is “often observed” or “understood to be” the birthday of the church, with very little explanation behind it. A few popular ecclesial and/or religious order magazines have talked about the Jewish background of Pentecost (always good to think of the archeological depth of some of our high holy days) but then there is this leap to the birthday image without much connection. A few have referenced the evangelism event that this day was in the Acts of the Apostles, which prompted the Archdiocesan Biblical Apostolate of Singapore to argue against this as a defense of the birthday imagery. This would, in their words “be similar to celebrating the birthday of a person on the day he/she started talking instead of the day when the child came out of the mother’s womb.”
I think this may be another instance where (like St. Francis Day) the conversation among scholars and the conversations in more popular teaching might benefit from sitting at the same table over shared interests. If there had been a conversation, something of the very long tradition (not just ‘history’, but the “authorizing claims of the past” as Teresa Berger puts it) would have come into play. The birth of the Church? Good Friday. Both extant historical homilies on Good Friday plus historical studies of John 19:33-34 indicate a broad sense of the birth of the church from the side of Jesus:
But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once blood and water came out. (NRSVUE)
One of my favourites from later history (16th century) is Richard Hooker’s spin on earlier themes:
By grace every one of us is in Christ and in His Church…God formed His Church out of the flesh, the wounded and bleeding side of the Son of Man. Christ’s body was crucified, and His blood shed for the renewed life of the world. His body and blood are the true elements of that heavenly being who makes us beings like Him from whom we come. In this sense, the words of Adam might be suitably the words of Christ, where He speaks of His Church as “flesh of my flesh and bone of my bones.” So it is that those who belong to the mystical body of our Saviour Christ, the Church, and are as numerous as the stars and are divided successively into many generations, are nevertheless all joined to Christ as their head. Each particular person is joined to each other person because the same spirit that animated the blessed soul of our Saviour Christ unites and creates His whole people, just as if He and they were so many limbs fashioned into one body and quickened by the same soul. (from his On the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Vol 5)
Perhaps the celebration of all that Pentecost has been can call us back to the eve of Eastertide and link Good Friday with the end of Eastertide, suspending us in the life-giving tension of Christ trampling down death by death, and bringing forth the means by which the body of Christ continues. Perhaps this approach could even re-center our parish Pentecost festivities in the glorious depths of our multiple layers of theology.