Tongues of Fire teaches a new language.

Mankind is beginning to understand each other not because it has learned a foreign language, but because all people are talking about the same thing.

Places where we’ve felt uncomfortable or associated with bad experiences (theft, accident, pain), we like to skirt around. For us, they are monuments to evil. It’s so human…

If Jesus were only human, he would certainly have avoided the apostles who did not stay by his side, except for John. After the resurrection, he would have fled to the Father in heaven as soon as possible to complain to Him about what we had done to him. But He is not merely a man, so as the Risen One, He would spend forty days in a glorified body among His own. He is in no hurry to go anywhere and today, without a hint of remorse, He will visit those who have failed.

Quite simply, the magic of God’s love transcends the limits of our reasoning. Jesus does not want to come before the Father alone. This is the logic of the heaven from which he came and where the love of the community of persons is lived out. That is why he wants to come to the Father with those whom his blood has won. He comes out of communion and will gladly reveal himself in it.

Jesus will present his wounds to men as healed, filled with the glory of God. These wounds were touched by God the Father in the Resurrection (a theme dear to Pope Francis), so Easter morning does not belong to reproaches and the bringing up of old grievances. In this way, even today, we can identify the presence of God. As the theologian Thomas Halík says, God is there where, together with the Apostle Thomas, we touch the wounds of the world, the wounds of the people with whom Jesus identifies.

This is what Chiara Amirante has been doing in Rome for several decades. She has immersed herself in the underground Termini railway station, where she touches the wounds of the world. At night, she encounters a world of drugs, prostitution, and human wreckage. What led her to do this?

The descent of Jesus into the depths of the earth after death. In one of her poems, she describes her mission this way, “My home is the world, my earth is heaven, my homeland is the heart of every man. And in every man I meet is my treasure; in the endless darkness is my light; in the anguish of suffering humanity crying out is my heart.”

Before we get to the connection of Chiara and the Spirit, let’s look at the opposite of Pentecost, the building of the Tower of Babel. It is the condition of humanity that no longer understands each other, even though they speak one language. One of the Jewish interpretations of the Tower of Babel connects this to the history of the possession of the land.

People after Adam was greedy, trying to grab more and more land, to expand their possessions. As they acquired more and more land to add to their land, they began to move away from their home. Sometimes they happened to get lost on the way home, so they decided to build a tall tower near their home. Even from a distance, it could be seen, and they were able to return.

To build the tower, bricks were needed in large quantities. The people agreed that whoever provided the most bricks would get more land. The different clans invented a language among themselves by which they argued so that the competition would not find out how many bricks they had brought. Thus, new dialects were created. And that’s when God decided, “Okay, that’s the way you wanted it, that’s the way it’s going to stay.” This midrash captures that behind human misunderstanding is a desire to possess that clouds reason.

During Pentecost, the exact opposite happens. The twelve nations are present. They each have their language and yet they understand each other because they are united not in the possession of possessions and the description of their achievements, but in the glorification of God. Mankind begins to understand each other, not because they have learned a foreign language, but because all the nations are speaking the same thing – praising God for his works.

This is how the true unity of people all over the world comes about. This is the Catholicity that unites people of different nations, languages, and periods of history. This is the universality of the Church that we experience when St. Augustine, Francis de Sales, Therese of Lisieux, or Faustina Kowalska speak to us with their spiritual experience.

When the Holy Spirit enters the heart of a person, his tongues teach us a new, universal language. What happens then? What does he tell us then? The result of some football match? Or what the weather will be like on vacation? These are unimportant things. The Holy Spirit is always guiding us and telling us about God’s work, telling us about God. It is the Spirit of the Son, the Spirit of Christ, that connects us to God. We receive the Spirit to see how God is working in our lives.

“It illuminates the lived, the suffered, the studied, the experienced, but in a new light. In emptiness, he has nothing to illuminate.”
Let us return to the man of the Spirit, to Chiara Amirante. In her book, Only Love Remains, she describes how the Holy Spirit stands by every work to serve all. The first members of the community, gathered at Rome’s Termini station, were approached by her courage to encounter in the Roman underworld people who lived as if without a soul. She suggested that together they turn to the Holy Spirit, who makes it possible to be born from above, to pass from death to life.

After nine days of preparation, the young people asked many questions about the existence of God, about his love, asking why they had to experience so much suffering to discover this joy. In the meantime, they were attending the chapel with the Eucharist, but it was not doing them any good. It was as if the young people were entering a gas chamber. After a while, they had to run out of there.

They began the day of Pentecost with simple singing, invoking the Holy Spirit. “I explained to them that it was important to turn this song into a prayer… After a few spontaneous prayers, we sang again. Then the Lord surprised us, and we experienced the special effects of His action – the experience of Pentecost was so palpable that none of us could hold back our tears.

The strange thing was that these were people who had not shed a tear for many years. As a matter of principle, they could not let themselves cry, because, in the streets and prison, it would be considered a sign of extreme weakness,” Chiara, founder of the New Horizons movement, describes Pentecost in the community.

This community has imitated the disciples of Jesus who chose to be together today, even though they could have used the time differently. Chiara and her group were ready, and the Holy Spirit came with a ministry of enlightenment.

Illuminating the lived, the suffered, the rehearsed, the experienced, but in a new light. In the void, he has nothing to illuminate. Then we would be like the blonde who was reproached with a vacuum in her head and she concluded that it was better to have a vacuum in her head than nothing…