Between Ascension and Pentecost, Near the Harvard Encampment

Cambridge, MA. In the Catholic calendar, today – May 12, 2024 – is an odd, in-between Sunday. The feast of the Ascension has passed. We have marked again the departure of the risen Christ who walked in our midst after his Resurrection. We are a week short of the feast of Pentecost, the “birthday of the Church”, when the Spirit blew in like a great wind and descended upon those gathered in the upper room in tongues of fire, sending them forth to speak of the Risen Christ in their own words. Caught in-between: Christ gone, the Spirit not yet come.

So what to do? In the Acts of the Apostles 1, Luke tell us: they gathered daily; they prayed together; they waited – for exactly what, for how long, they could not say. They also began to face up to the grim reality that Judas, one of their own, had betrayed Jesus with a kiss. Peter hides nothing in his description of what happened to Judas – he bought a field with the betrayer’s silver coins; he hung himself; his innards burst and trailed on the ground. Peter also thinks it is time to move forward, filling out the ranks of the apostles with a new apostle chosen from among the men – women seem excluded – who had been with Jesus from the time of his baptism by John. Two candidates are brought forward, Barsabbas and Mathias. Ordinary men, perhaps, neither of whom had been mentioned in the Gospels, neither of whom is ever mentioned again. Yet they were there from the beginning. Unguided by Jesus, uninspired by the Spirit yet to come, they pray and then cast lots – perhaps names in a hat – and Mathias is chosen. In this in-between moment, Peter and others did the best they could, options limited, on their own. As the chapter ends, they go back to waiting, for the Spirit yet to come.

As I write these words (May 12), there is still an encampment in Harvard Yard, only a five minute walk from where I sit. The quarrel is over the safety and well-being of people in Gaza and people in nearby Israel: when will the violence end? How to show compassion for present victims, without being uncaring about past and likely future victims? The protest continues; the fate of Rafah uncertain. Good people, mostly students in the Yard, and other good people, mostly middle-aged and older, worrying about how to end the protest, so that the university can get on with its business, most immediately commencement, looked forward to by so many students and their families.

Caught in-between: At the moment, Harvard seems to lack Jesus-like persons who can show us how to act, speak prophetically, take on ourselves the suffering of others – and how to run an institution of great value without being deaf to inconvenient truths. The Spirit seems silent, there is no liberative eloquence all can hear. We remain in-between people, unsure about what comes next, depressingly dependent on ourselves.

Of course there is no reason for many at Harvard, even most, to care about the Ascension, Pentecost, Acts 1. Other sacred stories will be more persuasive for many, and some will live by truths that are not sacred at all. But those of us who live at once Christian sacred-time as well as Harvard’s ordinary-time,  ought to remain convinced that God’s promises – peace plus justice, solidarity plus compassion, good order plus good disruption – will come true, when ordinary-time is enlivened again by Jesus-like speakers and the arrival here of a much-needed Spirit. In the meantime, we guess as best we can.