“When the day of Pentecost came, they were all together in one place. Suddenly a sound like the blowing of a violent wind came from heaven and filled the whole house where they were sitting. They saw what seemed to be tongues of fire that separated and came to rest on each of them. All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages as the Spirit enabled them.” (Acts 2: 1 – 4)

Curious, I checked. I went to hallmark.com and searched for a Pentecost card. Here’s what popped up: “We’re sorry, no results were found for ‘pentecost’. You may want to broaden your search by using more general terms.”

No Hallmark card. Not bad. But surprising in a day when so many people like to say, “I’m spiritual but not religious.” Pentecost is about Spirit, and it’s one of the major feasts of the Church year, right up there with Christmas, Easter, the Feast of the Ascension, and All Saints.

That Pentecost is inconspicuous is as it should be. The Spirit is unassuming, televangelists notwithstanding (my kids think televangelism works great as comedy). The Spirit doesn’t go in for klieg lights. To hear Jesus talk about it, the Spirit’s primary business is to teach us and remind us of what Jesus said. That’s a big deal, that clarifying and sacred work, and we celebrate it this Sunday.

The first Pentecost was connected with an event well attested in the earliest history of the Church. The Day of Pentecost c. 33 AD already had a Hebrew festival celebrating the giving of the Law, and so Jerusalem was filled with pilgrims from the diaspora of Jews. The apostles of Jesus — hunted, depressed, confused, uncertain of their future — were together and were overtaken with a wind and what Luke calls “tongues of fire.”

To the sentiment that Jesus would stick around, a wish expressed by the Apostles themselves, Jesus’ gave remonstrance. He told his disciples that they would be better off if he left. “It is for your good that I am going away,” he said. “Unless I go away, the Comforter will not come to you; but if I go I will send him to you… . When he, the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth” (John 16).

And so the Spirit does. The Spirit gives us the language by which we are able to talk to God at all, to pray, to say the Creed or to say “Jesus is Lord.” The Spirit gives us breath to speak these things and, as Billy Shand put it, “apart from that breath we have nothing to say.” Eugene Peterson writes,

Turnips complete a fairly complex and useful life cycle without the use of words. Roses grace the world with extraordinary beauty and fragrance without uttering a word. It is quite impressive really, what goes on around us without words: ocean tides, mountain heights, stormy weather, turning constellations, genetic codes, bird migrations — most, in fact, of what we see and hear around us, a great deal of it incredibly complex, but without language, wordless. And we, we human beings, have words…. This human nature of ours with its mysterious capacity for language is paralleled in the nature of God. God speaks our language. In the term we use to refer to our interest in God, theology, the two words are set along side each other and then combined; theos meaning God and logos meaning word. Theos is capable of logos, logos is characteristic of theos. Then the significance of the parallel hits us: We are capable of speech; God reveals himself in speech. In the complete revelation of God, the Word became flesh.

The Spirit who brooded over chaos made possible roses and the world as we know it. It’s nothing to sneeze at. If you think you could make a better world give it your best shot. Knock yourself out. And remember this. The same Spirit came down upon the Church at Pentecost and forged a ragtag band of individuals into a force invincible against the whole might of the Roman Empire. 

White never went back to work at the magazine. Caught up in media attention (which he shunned but thrilled to), prodded by friends, and perhaps provoked by overly solicitous overtures from McGraw-Hill, White fell under the sway of renown and grievance, and then that of the legal establishment. He got a lawyer, and came to believe that returning to work might signal a degree of mental fitness detrimental to litigation. Instead, he spent eight weeks in Anguilla. Eventually, Business Week had to let him go. The lawsuit he filed, for twenty-five million dollars, against the building’s management and the elevator-maintenance company, took four years. They settled for an amount that White is not allowed to disclose, but he will not contest that it was a low number, hardly six figures. He never learned why the elevator stopped; there was talk of a power dip, but nothing definite. Meanwhile, White no longer had his job, which he’d held for fifteen years, and lost all contact with his former colleagues. He lost his apartment, spent all his money, and searched, mostly in vain, for paying work. He is currently unemployed.

Looking back on the experience now, with a peculiarly melancholic kind of bewilderment, he recognizes that he walked onto an elevator one night, with his life in one kind of shape, and emerged from it with his life in another. Still, he now sees that it wasn’t so much the elevator that changed him as his reaction to it. He has come to terms with the trauma of the experience but not with his decision to pursue a lawsuit instead of returning to work. If anything, it prolonged the entrapment. He won’t blame the elevator. ♦

Nick Paumgarten, The New Yorker

White’s ordeal as captured by the building’s security cameras [here].