Letting Go
and Living Forward: Pentecost and the Right Spirit Letting Go and
Living Forward: Pentecost and the Right Spirit Letting Go and
Living Forward: Pentecost and the Right Spirit

Letting Go and Living Forward: Pentecost and the Right Spirit

This Sunday, Christians mark Pentecost, when the Church remembers the day (50 days after Easter Sunday) when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the disciples, transforming them from terrified figures hidden away in an upper room, clinging to their past and not knowing what to do next, into men and women fearless and confident in their public proclamation to the Roman world that a crucified man was now risen from the dead and alive!  In last week’s Friday Thought, I mentioned that Pentecost is entirely dependent on the event that took place 10 days earlier - the Ascension.  A small, frightened group of people, huddled together and not knowing what to do with their lives, suddenly found a new energy, a new sense of purpose, and burst out into the world to transform it. It's a striking image: people paralysed by loss, transformed into people fully alive.

What made the difference?  The Spirit of God, the Holy Spirit, we are told.  But in order for God’s Spirit to be able to help the disciples get on with their lives the way that they were now, they had to be helped to let go of the way their lives had been.  They had lost someone they loved, somebody who had shaped everything about how they saw the world for the last few years, and six weeks that someone, Jesus, had been trying to wean them off his physical presence, wean them off clinging to the way things had been, so that they could embrace the ways things had to be going forward. They couldn't move forward because they were entirely focused on what was gone. Only when they stopped waiting for the past to come back did something new become possible.

Canadian theologian Ronald Rolheiser explains beautifully that we don't have to be religious to recognise that pattern.  He does say, however, that it is curious that the rhythms of the Paschal Mystery - loss (death of Jesus), new life (resurrection of Jesus), readjustment to a new situation (40 days of Jesus appearing to them), letting go of the past (Ascension) and living the new life we now have with the right spirit of acceptance, instead of the wrong spirit of pining for the past (Pentecost) - are at the heart of what it is to live a fulfilled and joyful human life.  As a young man in my teens, I was a pretty serious amateur boxer for eight years.  At the age of 21, just after Hillsborough, I made the decision to apply for training for the priesthood and was sent to Rome.  It felt like the right call - to try it and see what emerged.  Three years into the six years of formation, while watching the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, I saw a former sparring partner of mine (Robbie Reid) win a bronze medal.  For the next 6 months, I kept wondering, “What if?”  That might (more likely might not) have been me.  It wasn't a passing thought.  It lingered, and it gnawed away. I had freely made a choice about the priesthood in 1989 and believed in it at the time, but here was a life I hadn't lived playing out on the BBC in vivid colour.  My regret was as real and sharp as the blue of Robbie’s vest and headguard!

I chatted with a wise old priest and explained how I was feeling. He listened and said, “Your life is a seminarian’s, not a boxer’s life.  The boxer is gone and, after three years away, is probably not coming back.  You have to let that life go and embrace the life you have.  Stop living a seminarian’s life with the spirit of a wanna-be boxer.  God has plans and a future for you, but you have to let go of what was.”  In other words, to start living my life, I had to live it with the right spirit - God’s Spirit of promise, the Holy Spirit - and not the wrong spirit of nostalgia.  Pentecost can only follow on from Ascension.  This wily old priest wasn't dismissing in any way the value and goodness of what I had given up. He was simply naming something true: that until I stopped mourning the boxer I might have been, I couldn't fully become the person I actually was and the future to which God was calling me through this painful present. A life not lived and now impossible was keeping me from living the life I had.  It was not a nice, neat and tidy, painless letting go, but the genuine grief of mourning of something of value.  I saw Robbie’s bronze medal on the telly in my imagination for months and months.  He had actually stepped into the life I'd (probably unrealistically) half imagined for myself.

That is this Sunday’s Feast of Pentecost in ordinary language. Before energy and purpose could come, the frightened disciples had to really let go. So too we might all have a version of the path not taken. We could all fill in our own blanks with what we want: a different partner or spouse; a partner if we are single, or single status if we are with someone!  A different job, a different position in the company; maybe we want a different family?  Or a different body (I wanted a straight, unbroken nose at 16, but am now quite glad I left it because it adds “character” to my face!), or a different set of friends, or a different city to live in. Some of us may recall a relationship that ended, or the health we used to have, or a career that didn't quite pan out.  We all know (at least once in life) the quiet misery of comparing our actual life to the life we once imagined for ourselves. Living happily is, in many ways, a long practice in letting go, and it is painful!  The disciples were not ready to let go after 40 days - and some things in life we don’t move on from so easily, even after 40 weeks or 40 years!

A friend of mine was told very suddenly that he was going to die.  He said to me, with quiet clarity, just a few weeks before he passed, “Life is life and death is part of life.  God is good. He prepares us for this by taking things.”  We lose things and people.  Life takes away many things before life itself is taken from us.  It gets us ready for death if we cooperate with a lifetime of letting go.  This is not resignation - something much more like the freedom of detachment, so that we learn to get our priorities in better order and relish who and what we have.

The question this Sunday’s Pentecost puts to all of us, whether we are religious or not, is a simple one, albeit not an easy one: What do I need to let go of, so that I can live more fully the life I actually have?  What do I need to release to live the life I have with the right spirit (the Holy Spirit), not the wrong spirit?  A grudge? A version of myself I’ve outgrown?  A grief I’ve been carrying so long it's started to feel like my total identity?  A phase of my life that was genuinely life-giving, but is also genuinely over? A bronze medal on someone else's chest?  Whatever it is for us, letting it go isn't giving up on the past. It's trusting that something real is waiting in the present and future. God always gives us something else.