Return?

Fr dear Fr: With the rules of the Church now ostensibly back at Pentecost does that mean we will all be receiving holy communion in our homes again once more just like the good old days?

Pentecost is not about rules, especially about “the rules of the good old days” in some “heaven light years away” as the charismatic songs tell us. When the Spirit came he did not create a whole new set of rules and regulations and laws like the Pharisees and Judaizers wanted just like the good old days before the Advent of the Son, he did not do such a thing, neither at first nor at the last when his Church not ours is replete with the all in all in revelations of the Alpha and Omega. There is a charismatic song that speaks to the issues involved - “Blessed be the Lord, Blessed be the Lord, the God of mercy, the God who saves; I shall not fear the dead of night nor the arrow that flies by day” and again, “He will release me from the nets of all my foes, he will release me from their wicked hands.” Let us not forget when the Seventies and Eighties Churches were riven between that very human phenomenon of left versus right imported from the ideologies of the Cold War alas, it was Charismatic Renewal that recovered and saved the centre of church life, chiefly by recovering the praxis of the sacraments as instruments of the healing powers of the Spirit, so the charismatics recovered Centrist Catholic Theology and banished the extremists to left and right, pushing them out and back to the state actors they had all become, flushing the Church of the early Christians down the portaloos of the modern imported Cold War divisions of fractiousness and factionalism and ideology, or as Fr B used to say in his lectures to students - preaching the gospel of the world in the heart of the Church. More Trojan Horses in the city of God, as Jesus might have written up that dreadful period of decline and decay and degeneration under the all too human gospel of the liberal state actors. The Gospel is not an Ideology, as Bp E used to say. So in the first flush of the Spirit, the last thing on the minds of the young Christians was a whole set of new rules that their sworn enemies the Pharisees alone would approve of, Pharisees, mind that did not practise what they preached to others far far below them, one of the fraught problems of any rule-based order system, as our own civil leaders began to glimpse when they were exposed and uncovered by the clever clogs of the mass media rapporteurs at their partygates and beergates - the first Pentecost was not like a canon lawyer conference in imperial mighty Rome, but even the older generation of canon lawyers used to begin their tribunal sessions with the solemn invocation of the Holy Spirit that hovers over our bent world with bright wings, as Hopkins the poet of the Spirit puts it, so no illusions there what they were doing at Christian and Catholic tribunals. We are told in Acts 2:42, which might appear in the introductory prologoumenon of a Red Code or a Red Codex for the churches of the far east under China still yet if the new pope gets his way, that the early Christians prayed together and shared what they had in common and went up to the temple not just once a week but every day to pray and sing praises to God, and were well seen by the people generally around the old city even. So the life of the Spirit produced many spiritual fruits and extraordinary gifts including the gift of healing- miracles of healing and still greater miracles of deliverance from the wicked spirits that wander the world for the ruin of souls always accompany the primitive preaching of the primitive Spirit-led Gospel - remember it is his quasi-alien church not ours. The Spirit was experienced like a mighty windrush, the winds of change, and not the glib and purse-lipped confirmation of old party dogmas or old party pharisee rules from the downside of the Old Testament - not the good old days dearie but you guessed it, the bad old days of human regulation and rule. The Spirit heralded the winds of change within and without of the young infant Church. Experienced so FND - fresh and new and different - that it was experienced like an alien gospel from a heaven light-years away. Very CND in the early years. It is a tendency of human society over the years to become replete and accrued with oceans and lashings of rule-based order and rule-based conservatism, just like the First Order in the Star Wars movies, against which the rebel federation of the Jedi Knights struggles hard to contend with and grapple with, and indeed when civil governments run out of ideas in which to view new things, they generally like to invent more and more laws and throw the rule book at all new problems and new challenges, as the legal philosopher Tacitus once said about the emergent tyrants of his own time - tyrannies begin where men run out of ideas, where conservatism breeds like a race of rats. The result is a society weighed down and oppressed by the book of rules, to quote the magical songs by Jethro Tull or 2112 by Rush, and if we all didn’t need an object lesson in this sage old truth then we have had to live through the painful episodes of the last year or two as the politicians were caught napping, caught red-handed, throwing around huge new books of rules while not living those rules out and while the population generally was finally twigged on the problems of the valleys of the twitching windows and the estates of the thinly parted curtains. So if the good lady is keen on a return to yet another book of rules, and the manufacture of another load of rules and regulations and laws as her legalistic concept of Pentecost assumes, then she is probably leafing through the wrong page of the wrong script in the wrong segment of the wrong bible - there is a perfectly respectable religion of the holy book down the road that deals with such things, and it is not Spirit guided Christianity. Yes, the ministers of God’s joy will be out there again on their parish patrols no doubt, but it will not be with carrying a new book of yet more old style rules - the Spirit is a wind of change, the community of the apostles is a breath of fresh air. Acts 2.