Pentecost 2019

Staff Bulletin 10/6/19

My mind has recently gone back that glorious Olympic summer of 2012 and my experiences as a Games Maker volunteer Chaplain in the Olympic Sailing Village in Weymouth. In particular, the unforgettable Wednesday evening I spent in the Olympic stadium in London as one of the lucky volunteers invited to attend the final dress rehearsal of the unforgettable Danny Boyle and Frank Cottrell-Boyce-inspired Opening Ceremony. This pairing of an agnostic former seminarian (Boyle) and a practicing Catholic (Cottrell-Boyce) managed to create a spectacle that was, at the same time, intensely personal and deeply British, which nonetheless struck a chord with audiences and critics alike around the world.

Something that Cottrell-Boyce wrote in an article for the Jesuit website a few weeks after the Games came back to mind the other day when thinking about the theme of Pentecost. He describes the time after that Weds. evening dress rehearsal:

“It must have been the same night, after midnight: The performers and the audience had all gone home. The stadium was dark and eerily deserted. Anxious little knots of people were meeting in doorways and technical areas. There was a sudden hush and everyone drifted out into the seating areas. We sat in ones or twos in the vast, empty stands. We were about to see ‘Betty’ for the first time. ‘Betty’ was the codename given to Thomas Heatherwick’s Olympic cauldron. It was made of 204 ‘petals’ – one for each nation. Each national team brought their petal to the stadium with them. During the parade of athletes, the petals would be fitted to their metal ‘stems’ and, at the lighting of the torch, these stems and petals would rise up to create, from each nation’s spark, a single flower of flame. At the Closing Ceremony, each nation would reclaim its petal and take it home. It was a simple, beautiful idea, an idea with a story to tell – an idea in which so much could go wrong! In the deserted stadium that night, the flames were lit. They formed a circle on the floor like a huge campfire. One by one, the tongues of flame lifted into the air… As more and more of the flames rose up, until they were almost all joined together, Mark Tildesley, the ceremony’s main designer, leaned over my seat and whispered, ‘There you go, Frankie, Pentecost’. How did I miss that?!...”

The cauldron petals before they came together as a single flame.

What I really like in Cottrell-Boyce’s anecdote is this idea of a kind of Pentecost in reverse. The petal-bearers, representing each participating country, brought their own spirit, their own fire, and when these little fires were put together they created something great and beautiful.

What if, 50 days after Jesus’ resurrection, it was less a case of “tongues of fire coming down” upon Jesus’ followers and family in that upper room, and more a case of God’s Holy Spirit entering the heart of each person present and setting it on fire with a passion to share what they had received from Jesus and a courage to fearlessly go out into the world? Each person brought their own fire into that room. So powerful and beautiful was the flame that they created together, that it is still burning today in the hearts of Christians, despite efforts in the intervening 2,000 years (including today in the Middle East and elsewhere) to extinguish it.

As a teaching staff, of mixed backgrounds and levels of religious belief and practice, what can we learn from this? Well, that passion and enthusiasm for our work with young people, for our subjects and for our religious faith is attractive and potentially contagious, even more so when we are seen to be working together.

So, let us think about what can we do to help light the fire in our pupils’ hearts, to help them to share in our passions, to better engage with the subjects they study and the other activities that we offer and to discover God within them.