Pentecostal Holy Day of Obligation

This sunday is Pentecost. Thanks to the incessant iconoclastic behavior of most Protestants, this sacred day has become little more than a good reason to have a picnic.

So, let me make a suggestion, as someone who grew up Catholic, and still loves and respects the Catholic church, let’s re-institute the Holy Day of Obligation, just for the day of Pentecost.  For those of you totally unfamiliar with our Catholic liturgical calendar, holy days of obligation meant that as a good practicing Catholic, you would go to confession, prepare yourself for Communion, and get to Mass on that day regardless of how busy you were.

The Holy Day of Obligation was also a way to fast, to repent, to stop ourselves for one day and focus on the sacred nature of the day, and it slowed us down.

That is what I am most interested in, how do we slow down? I have been, for lack of a better word, Pentecostal, for nearly 25 years, and I never thought of  Pentecost as special, as a day to slow down, to fast, to repent… never occured to me, probably because no church that I have been affiliated with since I converted ever made a big deal over it..why not?

Holy Days of obligation allows us to focus on some serious stuff affecting our respective communities…repent…justice is not an abstract metanarrative that we strive for, it is a concrete personal story of overcoming apathy, indifference and neglect…that is harder to repent of–how are you treating your friends lately?

Holy Days of obligations allows us to focus on fasting…we don’t give anything up in this society, let’s give something up, “imagine no posessions, I wonder if you can.”  A solidarity marked not by posturing, but by permanence…I know what you are going through, and I don’t get to leave it and go back to my life when I am through.

Finally, a holy day of obligation allows us to be still…to understand that ourl lives, my life, right now are busy, I am thrilled by Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination, but scared because the crazy tree has been shaken and they are all falling out now…orando para ti hermana.

Be still and wonder if the Chinese curse “may you live in interesting times” has so afflicted my institution of higher learning, that the casualies of this war are more than superficial, this war may take alot of us out…orar por mi hermana/os.

My holy day of obligation will not be spent with my hands raised to do some denominational cheer-leading, my holy day might well be spent surrendered to the power that make me more human, more capable of weathering the storm, more grateful for the quiet solidarity of friends and the constant presence of family…

Señor envía su Espíritu Santo

Prop 8 and our own liminal space

It seems that many of my colleagues and friends in the academic universes that I travel are grieved by the decision today by the California Supreme Court to let Prop 8 stand, while at the same time allow the existing 18K marriages stand as well. Victor Turner, who posited on the idea that we all need a communal space of acceptance to flourish as full members of any coherent community, also coined the idea of “liminality” meaning that there is a point in everyone’s life where they are outside the circle, they are in-between-things, and that space is never supposed to be permanent, because it risks making permanent the outside status of any given group of people…what our brethren don’t get, not at all, is that we cannot continue to allow, what one my esteemed colleagues called, “spiritual violence” to occur to any community outside our circle…until we get that, and we move toward a communitas with the GLBT community, we don’t do justice…period.