Reflections by Ron Rolheiser, OMI
We all live with inferiorities, dashed dreams, and deep frustrations. Because of this we tend to grow jealous and envy other people’s lives, seeing in their lives the things that we are missing within our own. This increases our disappointment with who we are and, all too often, puts us into an attitude within which we refuse to accept what is good, happy, creative, and pleasurable within our own lives.
Instead of picking up our own lives and living them creatively, we put them on hold. We focus on something we are missing, and desperately crave – a marriage partner, a certain friendship, a certain achievement, a certain prestige, a certain physical appearance, a certain fame or place to live – and we relativize and belittle our own lives to the point of finding them unhappy and meaningless. We live in brackets, waiting; always waiting for this certain something to come along and fulfill our lives. When this happens, a deep restlessness sets in.
There is a beautiful image in Scripture that depicts this. After the resurrection of Jesus, his disciples are unable to pick up the spirit of his new presence. They want, instead, to have their old earthly Jesus back. Eventually, they are reduced to huddling in fear in a locked room, paralyzed.
When they do receive the spirit of the resurrected Christ, they burst from that room, now alive with the spirit for their actual lives. When we live in restless unhappiness, not satisfied with our situation in life because we are unmarried, or because we are not married to whom we would like to be, or because we would want a different job, or different family, or different body, or a different set of friends, or a different city to live it, we live, like the Apostles, huddled in fear.
Pentecost in not an abstract mystery. We are asked to accept the spirit of our actual lives. When we do this, then we no longer belittle our own lives but know that even with all our inferiorities and frustrations, we are something.
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