The Whitsun Festival

Report by John-Peter Gernaat

​We celebrated a Whitsun Festival on Sunday, 24 May. Among the many mysteries of this festival is that of a new speaking and hearing of language. The Word, the Christ, becomes available to everyone in their hearts and as the Apostles speak, the people hear what the Apostles say as if they were spoken in their own language.

We listened to the story of Whitsun as told in the Acts of the Apostles Chapter 2. From what we read we were asked to think about the imagery presented. The rushing as of wind, the fire that descended and the tongues of flame that appear above the Apostles.

We celebrated the Whitsun Festival through an experiential sharing, in community, how the Word can be heard by another. We work from the seed planted in the individual to recognise the seed of the Christ in the other, so that the word I speak may resonate for the other. We experienced this through greeting another and through the resonance of music.

Then we listened to the same words spoken in other languages to learn to recognise that the Word may be understood even when the language is not. The Lord’s Prayer was spoken in Italian, French, isiZulu, Afrikaans, Spanish, Dutch, Hebrew, Ancient Aramaic (as Christ may have spoken it), German and Greek.

The festival ended with the words of TS Eliot:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.”

​A shared lunch was enjoyed by everyone: