Our most mysterious holiday, perhaps the one described in the most ways, is Pentecost. In terms of content, it is far beyond the linguistic limits of pronounceability, the cold or warm forms of the church liturgy, the kind effort of folk customs to make Pentecost an uplifting occasion for everyday life.
Preceding these all by millions of years in time, surpassing all individual and community memory boundaries even in our retroactive memory, the essence of the holiday emerges. Holy Trinity in the actions of our God, in fire and wind, in the deepest desire to sing and in the voiceless prayers of the human soul, in the rapturous moments of experience of holiness, and in uncountable tuning light, color and sound effects.
Long-long before all sloppy and often senseless human speech, as the primeval force that lays a planetary nest for the future human world, from the futility and uselessness of material and energy, the Spirit of God, his Rúah, floated there with the tremendous law-giving power of the spirit at the alpha of earthly existence. God, the Holy Spirit has dreamed to us of a beautiful and fertile park of life, a blissful wellness of goodness and beauty, created Eden is for us, “Welcome!” artfully furnished as an unlabeled wonderland for the future of the first couple of people and the mankind.
The divine Spirit was there when the Lord breathed life into Adam, who was formed from the dust of the earth, he was glorified dust, because God cherished him already in mud, and when the storms roared and the elements raged, fire and thunder traversed the earth, he showed perfectly: He does not dwell in the creations of his own hands, nor in any corner of our living planet, but all this exists in Him, is from Him and through Him, exists.
After every rock-shattering sound, a soft and gentle voice rang out, and He dwelt in it. In his own voice and his own speech, in his words and advice. And to Elijah (1 Kings 19), who was hiding in a cave in his fear, the Spirit of the Lord gave him not only the food he carried on during the dramatic consideration of his perceived loss of personal meaning of life. It was the sign of the presence of God's Spirit, above all of the pneumatic, Holy-Souled ability to hear the voice of the personal Spirit. Elijah had faith in God strong through surrending that overcomes doubt, cynicism.
Since then, this inner fine-tuning, the self-emptying readiness of the human psyche and our entire personality is the beautiful movement of existence, the personal condition with which we can call upon God’s Holy Spirit. This inner humility in the form of grace. This is a deep thirst for God and a hunger for God is how He resonates in us. He, the Spirit of God notices this spiritual thirst ad hunger in us, therefore He will step into the emptiness of our inner chalice that yearns for Him.
And then deep inside, with a gentle word or a silent tenderness, he tunes our soul to a hymn to God, like a Mother who gives to her child’s soul safety and joy.
Earth and heaven are full of spiritual songs of the Spirit, spiritual hymns, the most beautiful chants and thoughts of the human word. The spiritual lyre of thousands of years echoes in infinity, like a great cosmic concert between our earth and the stars. A million spiritual improvisations, and confessional chords, or as the playful gurgling of a spring bubbling as a thin, crystal-clear trickle. Like the incredibly tiny source of the Danube at Donaueschingen/Germany with her telling soundlessness. We wander through the historical liturgy of the yearning for God's Spirit at Pentecost in preparation for this year’s Pentecost, with spiritual three-minute quotes.
ON THE STRINGS OF THE SOUL, OUR GENTLE WORDES FLY TO YOU, LORD, AND TO EACH OTHER
At the end of the 300s, between the Tigris-Euphrates rivers, he lived the life of a Soul-singer in very simple circumstances. A Father of oldchurch, Kyrillonas, absolutely attuned to God, is been the author of the gentle harmonies of hymns and odes.
His melodies, which are more than 1,600 years old, still sound on the eternal strings of the Spirit in a way that appeals to our hearts. This is how the old man of God calls Him:
“Oh, my brothers, sons and daughters of the church, come, let’s gather together! Let’s put on the weapons of faith and tune our souls to the songs of the prophets! Let’s sing the psalm melodies on the strings of the heart! We must stand in the struggle, do not hesitate. Let us grasp the sword of the cross and strengthen our hearts with the pillars of prayer”.
He offers the spiritual weapons of faith and the sword of the cross not against people, but against the destructive cynicism of the devil, the worldly prince of unbelief. In the midst of destructive historical storms, he plucked his Soul strings like this:
“The country is sick, the earth is sick, but your medicine is strong, Lord; the world is weak, but Your chastisement is mighty, Lord; the created world struggles, but Your strength is fruitful; people fell to the ground, but Your teaching staff reached out to us. Let us pour out our complaints before you, and while I speak, let me breathe a little from my burden. Just give me a drop of mercy, Lord, heal my children and all the sick!… Daily news of unrest, misfortunes, hourly news of calamities reach us, everywhere there is only fight and fear! Lord, if You don’t come to us, we will become a wasteland.”
His words are almost pleading, begging for God to listen to the prayers of children, women and everyone. Does the Spirit find such pleading words with us, here in the great country China? “Lord, turn away the sword of your wrath from us! See and hear, Lord, that hymns sound on the lips of children, and women sing psalms to You! Fill the earth again with salvation and peace! Lord, give us again fruit-ripening, sunny summers and blessed winters!”.
On the beauty of the gospel, of reading the Bible, on its purifying and reshaping power: “When I think about the gospel, I realize: I encounter the message of life in it. The preaching of the evangelist János grabs you and makes you wonder. John and those with him became a source of water in creation. This is how humanity tasted the sweet flavors of a perfect life, the exhausted world was satisfied by the gospel… And the Spirit comes with tongues of fire, with the declarations of the Paraclete (Spirit). A new language will be born and will live in you, the subtle vibrations of the Spirit will linger in your hearts”.
THE SOURCE OF VOX HUMANA IS VOX DIVINA
Let’s hear the vox divina, God's Word, and hear it with others, a true cure for silence. The new language, the language of the Spirit, is what can be born in us even today, subtle vibrations, with inner voices attuned to God and fellow man, to peace. This is true even if we live in the neighborhood of the lion’s roar of willful and evil human peace-breakers. The Spirit teaches and enables conscious internal self-defense, warding off the harmful effects of sin, and detoxification with His superpower. If such voices, the spontaneous words of the Spirit arise or come together in us, then in today’s flood of murderous and filthy words, in the mudslide of only speech after speech, a pearl of truth suddenly shines forth: the true voice of humanity, the vox humana.
But only if we are able to return to deep silence for three or ten minutes, listening, asking, concentrating to hear the gentle, creative divine voice, the vox divina.
Retune and purify our noisy inner man, our attention cup, our speech by psychically and prayerfully attuning to the divine voice. Let the improvisations of thousands of years or conscious, internal attunement exercises, the harmonies of the Kyrillon prayer, and the miracles of confession help you in this preparation for Pentecost.
