Already on Fire

There is a temptation, reading the Acts of the Apostles, to feel left out. Wind rushing through the upper room. Tongues of fire. Twelve languages spoken and all understood at once. Where is our portion of those wonders? The windows here are not rattling. No flame hovers over your head — or mine. In the absence of such prodigies, it is easy to conclude that the Spirit has moved on, that Pentecost is the Church’s Fourth of July: the celebration of a past event that has little connection with our lives today.

But that conclusion mistakes the sign for the substance.

Paul, writing to the Corinthians, makes a quiet and radical claim: every good work, in every person — believer or not, Christian or not — is produced by the same God. “It is the same God,” he writes, “who produces all of them in everyone.” The Spirit of God is not a private endowment for the visibly devout. It is the source of every impulse toward mercy, every act of reconciliation, every voice that speaks for the forgotten.

Look at the week just passed. In face of opposition from politicians, Pope Leo continued to remind the world that God blesses peacemakers, never war mongers. After the murder of 3 innocent Muslims at a mosque in San Diego, flowers, letters of support and blood donations for the injured poured in from across the city. On a recent retreat, students spoke to me about a teacher whose gentle humor and genuine care made him seem, in their words, like Jesus. And at Loyola, next Thursday, our gay students, often invisible in their fear, will be publicly celebrated by their classmates. None of these moments came with wind or fire. But if we are honest, we know what we were seeing: what the Spirit looks like now.

It looks like the person in your family who keeps everyone from falling apart. It looks like the neighbor who brings a meal to a fearful immigrant family when no one asked. It looks like the conscience that stirs in us when we are about to say the cruel thing, and stops us. It looks like forgiveness offered to someone who did not earn it. Paul calls these “gifts of the Spirit” not because they are supernatural phenomena, but because they are God’s own life flowing through ordinary people — which is the greater miracle.

We do not celebrate Pentecost to commemorate what God did 2500 years ago. We celebrate it to wake up to what God is doing now, in us, around us, through the most unremarkable-looking people we know.

We celebrate Pentecost to wake up to what God is doing now — in us, around us, through the most unremarkable-looking people we know.

So when we pray “Come, Holy Spirit,” let us be honest about what we are asking. We are not summoning an absent God back from retirement. We are asking for the courage to stop sleepwalking past the Spirit already at work in our lives — the grace to notice, to name it, and to trust it enough to follow where it leads us.

The world does not need gusting winds and fire from heaven. It needs people who have noticed that they are already on fire, and are willing to let that light be seen. It needs us.