Fragmented Catholics, Fragmented Protestants

Pentecost in this Gospel reading was all about priesthood.  “‘Peace be with you.’  When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side.”  Priesthood was all about putting the hands and feeling people’s pain inside.  The institution of the church usurped the focus on priesthood in the readings to call attention to itself.  But the day was about real people who had committed their lives to the formation of others, coming together in the name of love.  It was a day that honored the Spirit of God.  Words seemed inadequate to simply call this Holy Spirit.  With all the sound and fury given to Christmas, little is given to Pentecost. 

The Spirit of God was all about the interior development of the soul.  What we called the 3rd Person of the Trinity was the mortar between God, me and the real world.  In that sense it was the church within me.  The Spirit of God was why I wanted to belong to a church of the past, of the present, and of the future, the church where my great grandfather worshipped, where the Irish had always worshipped, and where I hoped my children would one day worship.  I was not here today to celebrate the Papacy but to find God, within others, within myself, in a world where faith had always been a struggle, individually and communally. Because looking at his hands and side, I was more likely to find joy than pain inside. 

The incredible part of the story was that the corps of 11 men, an uncounted number of women, and various disciples had created a church that now nearly 48,000 months later had well in excess of one billion Christian people, many of them Catholic but just as fragmented amongst us as we were with the Protestant churches, all called not to be consoled by God that we were the new Chosen People but asked like the Jewish people always have been to take  life as seriously as Jesus of Nazareth did.   We were called by The Spirit to witness the hands and the sides of those who suffer in this world, to respond and share with kindness some aspect of my identity, that Christian identity, so it did not evaporate without ever having been opened.  Those 48,000 months had gone by fast.