23. Pentecost

The fire which Christ came to bring about on earth, does not burn to separate different elements and reduce everything to nothingness. This fire does not result in death, but rather communicates life! It does not devour tables or chairs; it does not divide but unifies! Like a sudden luminous interior brain wave, it facilitates communication. The fire of God loosens tongues and warms hearts. It is in a real as well as in a figurative sense, an "enthusiasm" that is mad, divine, ( pardon the pleonasm! ) prodigious, irresistible, contagious.

Will I be mad, drugged, inebriated? Who is mad? It is enough to open one's eyes. Far from extinguishing the fire, time afforded it infinite space over which to spread. Beyond deserts and oceans, from one continent to another, the fire of God has spread to lands hitherto unsuspected and to languages hitherto unknown. It can be expressed in quechua, in eskimo, in Japanese. The twenty centuries separating us from the first spark, far from extinguishing it, allowed it to take a firm hold, blowing it into the heart of cultures, of sciences, of civilisations.

Who has not felt touched by this "fire of God", whether or not he was clear about who caused the first spark? Who hasn't reached the conclusion that there is no real unity but in diversity? There is no true communication but in sharing the same fundamental experience. All tongues speak of the same reality, and point to an identical source of life and of liberty. Little by little, people come to the realisation that apart from forgiveness, there is no future possible. In Jesus tortured and risen from the dead, this has become forever manifest. There is no true security possible without a laying down of arms, and the strongest is He who was the first to take that risk. There is no other road to loving than the way of trust, that clinging to faith, and believing no matter what happens. To love, or as the familiar expression has it: "to have a shine for someone" is indeed to accept this frightening vulnerability.

Of course it will take time, a great deal of time, before what certain sharp minds, mystics and great saints captured intuitively, can be fully understood by peoples and nations. The atomic arms race has clearly shown how absurd is the "eye for an eye" and "tooth for a tooth" philosophy, and the wisdom of that which opts for non-violence. We find Jesus' logic more and more clearly in all this; we see it in black and white in our newspapers, and even progressively in our laws, not just as an individual way to salvation, but nowadays as a pure and simple condition of collective survival. The rest is but illusion and in the short term, a trap and frustration. There is no other way to find one's true identity but to forget oneself, to cast aside masks, titles and one's particular function in society. There is no other way but to lose oneself completely, in order to find oneself in the loving gaze of the One who longed for us, loved us to the point of dying for us and then rising from the dead.

It is a question of making real this huge Resurrection wave which opens our eyes, ears and hearts; of giving reality to this prodigious surge which traverses the centuries in order to lead us into the heart of a God who is Himself community; it means giving a body to this life which yearns to communicate itself, and of throwing all our dead branches on to this life-giving fire, so that the whole world may live and be transfigured. Let us leave nothing aside. Let us not measure out our generosity, for whatever is economised will be devalued, whatever is hoarded for one's own possession, will be lost. Whatever is not seized by this paradoxical fire, will be burnt. Life is in the gift. A Man died, and He was God. He is alive and we have been divinised. The present He gives us is to live by His Spirit, His Breath, His energy, and that present, immense and measureless, is none other than the gift. The gift of what? The gift of being able to give oneself.

The house can shudder since the world is shaken. The powers can tremble, for they have been unmasked as provisionary, illusionary, ridiculous! The high priests of every category are mere puppets. Politics is not an absolute, Caesar is not God! To feel one's heart beating in that simple and beautiful gratitude of a lost child who has found its Father; to feel in the depths of one's being assurance of that intimate alliance, renewed and lasting, turns us into men who are free, worthy and proud, ready for anything. At last, there is no such thing as failure; love will always triumph, Christ's tomb will remain empty, and for ever!

It is then that community springs up, a community of men and women so transformed that one might say they had been newly born from the fact of sharing and of living in community. The petty hesitations have been dissipated and the miserable fears are no more; the sun has risen; man can stretch himself, come out from the shadows, and emerge from the locked cenacles, spread his wings in God's image: with Christ, we are all sons and daughters of the living God! Here is the new community, the rejuvenated Church, the magnificent Bride robed in splendour for the wedding feast between God and humanity.

Are we sure of having somersaulted completely by means of a conspiracy, by an irreversible and decisive change of heart? Are we sure in this radical choice, of having

lost our foothold, abandoned our old spiritless ways of living, the ground of cold certainties, in order to swim into fire, with the risk of melting into divine Infinity?

Do we esteem ourselves hard as iron, iron reddened on hot coals, plunged into cold water to become molten steel? Have we the feeling that our faith has reached the point of no return? Space is wide open to continue further on our journey: that interior space where man makes progress and renews himself, a space of growth and of renewal, opened up by Christ who leads the way.

From this moment, the feast has begun: rid yourself of the old skins, enter into the dance and into the singing, join hands with the merry-go-round of the living. The feast is extraordinary, the joy contagious, an enthusiasm born of the fire of God.