Body
In the schema of the Christian Year that most of us follow Pentecost Sunday is revealed as a single event, a “birthdate” of the universal Church, so to speak. Unless it is treated, as only a few of us do, as the commencement of a Season of the Church Year, it closes off the Easter Season of some weeks, which itself follows the Lenten Season “of forty days,” and opens “ordinary time.” Yet Pentecost betokens a movement of God that is far from ordinary— “the falling of the Holy Spirit on the community of Jesus followers blessed by a number of appearances of the Risen Lord only to witness to His ascension “to His eternal place at the right hand of God” and lately to become preoccupied by reordering the life of the left behind through the election of a twelfth apostle. The coming of the Holy Spirit upon this dis-spirited Church is, rather, quite extraordinary. Certainly not an annual calendar event, the subsequent Pentecost events make up a short list of occurrences during the over 2,000 following seasons.