Tongues of Fire

by Fr. Roger J. Landry - May 13, 2005

From the time I was a boy, I have always been fascinated by the feast of Pentecost.

When I was in grammar school, the wonder had to do with the fact that Pentecost is the "birthday of the Church," and, as every child knows, birthdays are supremely important.

When I got older and began my immediate preparation for the Sacrament of Confirmation, I was amazed by something else: the way God the Holy Spirit chose to descend upon the apostles and disciples in the Upper Room.

God does everything for a reason and I began to ask why God the Holy Spirit willed to come down as tongues of fire, rather than — as my active imagination suggested — "ice-cold eyeballs" or "tepid big toes" or "sizzling hairy arm pits"?

In my first experience as a baby theologian, I kept asking "Why tongues?" and "Why fire?" Eventually I came to the conclusion that the answer was simple and straightforward. The Holy Spirit came down as tongues because tongues are used for speaking; as fire, because fire is the symbol of passion, of love, of zeal. The Paraclete descended upon the apostles and disciples in this way because he was strengthening them to preach the Gospel with burning love.

That's what they did. The apostles burst through the doors of the Upper Room to share the greatest news ever heard. Everyone could understand what they were saying, because they were proclaiming, with word and body language, the universal idiom of ardent love. The Holy Spirit had worked a miracle in each of the apostles — who 53 days earlier had left the same Upper Room only to betray the Lord — converting them from chickens to shepherds, from apostates to apostles, and from sinners to saints.

And he did more. He turned a group of simple fishermen, tax collectors and relatively uneducated nobodies into preachers capable of doing what Cicero with all his eloquence would have never been able to accomplish: convince down-to-earth, incredulous multitudes that a publicly-executed carpenter from Galilee not only rose from the dead as savior of the world but was calling each of them to follow in His bloody footsteps all the way to heaven.

Three-thousand converted that first day. Countless others, in every country, soon followed. The Church was born and began to grow.

These lessons from the birth of the Church are crucial for us who are now longing for the rebirth of the Church here in Massachusetts. Rather than growing, the Church here seems to be shrinking and some pessimists are claiming it is dying. We're closing parishes. There are fewer priests by the year and even fewer nuns and religious brothers. Many Catholics are not coming to Church. The clergy sex abuse scandal has devastated the Church's credibility to teach the truth and call all people to goodness.

How do we turn these trends around? I'm convinced that the answer lies in "returning to the Upper Room," in following the example of the first apostles. They huddled around Mary, who helped them to learn how to pray perseveringly and how to be docile to the Holy Spirit who was about to overshadow them as He had always overshadowed her.

In our cases, the Holy Spirit has already come upon us in Baptism and in Confirmation. But the tongues of fire, in many of us, have grown cold and mute. The path to the rebirth of the Church will begin when we allow the Holy Spirit to reignite them.

Nineteen years ago, in a Bavarian radio address, our new Holy Father tackled these phenomena and delineated the path of the Church's rebirth. His words have not lost their timeliness.

"What distinguishes the Christian [is] that he has received a tongue of fire in addition to his human nature. That is how the Church came into being. Each person receives the tongue of fire that is wholly and personally his and, as this person, he is a Christian in a unique and inimitable way.

"Admittedly, one who encounters the average Christian today is likely to inquire: 'But where, then, is the tongue of fire?' The words spoken by Christian tongues today are unfortunately anything but fire. … We have no desire to burn either ourselves or others…

"[But] only when we are not afraid of the tongues of fire or of the strong wind that accompanies them does the Church become an icon of the Holy Spirit. And only then does she open the world to the light of God."

Like his predecessor and like his divine Boss, Pope Benedict tells us: "Do not be afraid" to let the Holy Spirit go to work. Then he calls us back to the Upper Room, where Christ feeds us with his body and blood and the Holy Spirit fills us with his fire. This is where and how the Church will be reborn:

"The Church had her origin when the disciples gathered with one mind in the room where they had celebrated the Last Supper and prayed there together. It is thus that she begins over and over again."

Father Roger J. Landry is pastor of St. Anthony of Padua in New Bedford, MA and Executive Editor of The Anchor, the weekly newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River.