Episode Details

Pentecost 2025For thus saith the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: “In returning and rest shall ye be saved, in quietness and in confidence shall be your strength.”Isaiah 30:15The Turmoil of the World and the Silence of God ContrastedIn silence, not in the turmoil and noise, God enters into the innermost depths of our being. Father Marie-Eugene de l’Enfant-Jésus was right when he wrote…“This divine law surprises us. It goes so much against our experience of the natural laws of the world. Here below, any profound transformation, any great external change produces a certain agitation and noise. The great river, for example, reaches the ocean only by the sounding onward rush of its water.”Cardinal Robert Sarah, The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of NoiseHow right Cardinal Sarah and Father Marie-Eugene are in these observations: what is considered worthwhile by the world is always measured in visible, often frantic activity, and in ways that be quantified, counted, evaluated, often in financial terms. Significant achievements are things that can be pointed out: great works of physical, economic or bureaucratic infrastructure.And we almost always think of ourselves and our own lives in this way too: what is valuable about me and what I am is what I produce, what I can be seen to be doing by others, maybe also by God, maybe by myself. Every movement, every action is rushed, every step speaks of a desire to get further along a path to somewhere else. When we stop for a moment, it might seem that we struggle to be present to the place we are and to who we are.Cardinal Sarah goes on: ‘If we observe the great works, the most powerful acts, the most extraordinary and striking interior transformations that God carries out in man, we are forced to admit that he works in silence.’Indeed, when the Prophet Elijah sought the face of God, he found what he was looking for not in a great wind, not in an earthquake, not in a fire, but in a still, small voice.The Holy Spirit’s PeaceI point this out because it brings us face-to-face with the question of Pentecost: that day when God poured out his Holy Spirit upon the early believers and the Christian Church came to birth. Many things are said about the person and work of the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, but I want to focus on only one theme this morning, that which is spoken about by Jesus in our Gospel reading:“These things I have spoken to you while I am still with you. But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things…Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid.”In context, this saying comes after the disciple Philip has asked Jesus for reassurance and more broadly in the atmosphere of anxiety created Jesus’ talk of him leaving the disciples.Again, everyone can relate to this context in a general sense: our lives are characterised by uncertainty, agitation and anxiety. It is part of the human condition, but it is also part of the modern condition.I think of a TV programme from the nineties I used to watch. It was called ‘Stressed Eric’. It is about a man called Eric Feeble, a forty-year-old divorced father living in London. His daughter Claire is 6 and allergic to nearly everything. His son Brian is 10 and has learning difficulties and a fixation with putting everything in his mouth. His au pair Maria is an unreliable 18-year-old with a drinking problem. And his ex-wife Liz, now a Buddhist, constantly nags him. His wealthy and snobbish neighbours, the Perfect family, highlight his weaknesses. And in his workplace he has to contend with a rude and overbearing boss, Paul Power, and a useless secretary, Alison. As the events of his life grow ever more stressful, a vein throbs and pulsates on the side of his head.Imagine how much more stressful Eric’s life would have been in an age of smart-phones and ubiquitous broadband internet