The miracle of words: a Pentecost reflection

For 30 years, I’ve been wrangling words for a living. It is sometimes exhilarating, sometimes exhausting work.

When I first trained as an editor, I would get on the train at the end of the day and open my novel, only to find that the words on the page had somehow been reduced to mere elements of grammar. Try as I might to become lost in the story, the editor in me remained stubbornly present, keeping a vigilant eye on punctuation and syntax.

Over the years, thankfully, I have learnt to let my editorial guard down when I read for pleasure. But I have also come to suspect that my efforts as an editor and writer are, in a sense, a little futile.

Don’t get me wrong: I still have strong feelings about the placement of commas and will swoon at a particularly elegant turn of phrase. But getting down in the weeds with other people’s words every day, I have come to see that all human attempts at communication, even the most sublime examples, are ultimately partial and insufficient.

Words are slippery things, often promising more than they can deliver, and sometimes giving more than we expect. It’s hard to get beyond the sheer implausibility of the idea that I could use something as shifting and unwieldy as language to convey any meaningful sense of myself or my experience in the world.

Yet here I am, trying to do just that.

I keep launching words—like arrows—into the air, hoping they will find their mark.

I keep trying because I’m human. My need to communicate is inescapable. Like the self-communicating God I worship, in whose image I am created, I am essentially relational. I want to connect and to express myself. So I keep launching words—like arrows—into the air, hoping they will find their mark.

It is no coincidence that the words communicate, community and communion all share the same root. When we communicate, we are trying to defy isolation, to bridge the gap, to share meaning and form bonds with those around us. Communication, when it’s done well, draws us closer; it makes communities.

Like so many good gifts, though, our capacity for language and communication can be twisted and misused. Our words can just as often divide and knock down as unify and build up. Instead of being true communities, our social groupings can become exclusive and distrustful, using language to shut out and shut down, rather than connect and encourage. Too often we choose words that manipulate, evade and obscure instead of those that reveal and enlighten.

But Pentecost, which we celebrate this week, reminds us that it doesn’t have to be that way, that we are made for something better. St Luke’s strange, revealing account of the coming of the Holy Spirit and the birth of the Church (Acts 2:1–21) gives us a glimpse of what it might mean to truly communicate.

When the Spirit overtakes us, the words we speak and hear (and write and read) are not homogenised or flattened into a single lingua franca but expanded and opened out into rich and distinctive layers of meaning.

Tellingly, as the Spirit descends on the linguistically diverse crowd of believers gathered for the day of Pentecost, the distinctiveness of their various languages is not erased. Instead, the Spirit momentarily and miraculously expands the capacity of the faithful to speak and understand, overcoming all the usual language and cultural barriers. As biblical scholar Mark O’Brien OP observes, Pentecost shows us that when it comes to Christian unity, ‘The gift of the Spirit and the bond of faith are more important than the “apparent” barrier of language.’

St Augustine famously described the Holy Spirit as the perfect, mutual love that flows unceasingly between Father and Son. Through this trinitarian lens, we see more clearly that true communication is grounded in God’s love. According to Augustine, it is this unifying love of Father and Son that establishes unity within the Church.

When the Spirit overtakes us, when we are truly ‘inspired’, the words we speak and hear (and write and read) are not homogenised or flattened into a single lingua franca but expanded and opened out into rich and distinctive layers of meaning. The unity that the newborn Church discovers in the Pentecost story isn’t univocal or uniform but generously open to new possibilities of listening and understanding, leading people into deeper relationship with each other and with God.

When inspiration takes hold of us, there’s a kind of miraculous, loaves-and-fishes thing that can happen in our communication. Words that on their own seemed meagre and insufficient suddenly combine in strange ways to produce something more abundant and surprisingly profound.

In his message for the 58th World Day of Social Communication, which we celebrated last Sunday, Pope Francis counsels that a fully human communication requires us to rediscover ‘a wisdom of the heart’. In an age of ‘big data’, ‘deep fakes’ and artificial intelligence, he warns, ‘such wisdom cannot be sought from machines’. Instead, he says, this wisdom is a ‘gift of the Holy Spirit’, enabling us to look at things ‘with God’s eyes, to see connections, situations, events and to uncover their real meaning’.

When we communicate in the Spirit, our language finds new and unpredictable ways to connect.

When inspiration takes hold of us, there’s a kind of miraculous, loaves-and-fishes thing that can happen in our communication. Words that on their own seemed meagre and insufficient suddenly combine in strange ways to produce something more abundant and surprisingly profound. In the Spirit, our words transcend themselves. Without knowing quite how it happened, we find ourselves with more than we started with and certainly more than we expected—a gratuitous surplus of meaning. Poets, I expect, are more familiar with this feeling than most, but we all experience it from time to time, perhaps especially in worship.

In the liturgy—and particularly the Eucharist—we encounter the truest and most meaningful communication of all, Jesus Christ, the living Word of God, who transcends all barriers, linguistic or otherwise, and bridges the unbridgeable gap.