Homily of Fr. Arnel Aqunio on Pentecost Sunday and also a thanksgiving celebration of 25years in Religious Life for Sr. Cecille Tuble, RC at Cenacle Retreat House:
Bet you didn’t know that Fr. Peter speaks Hokien. Bet you haven’t heard him speak it. For a long time, I myself wondered how Fr. Peter sounded if he ever spoke Chinese. Then, one day, after so long, when he was on the phone with his family, we finally heard him. And we went, “Whoa!” We saw a different side to Fr. Peter, a side we rarely saw: Peter the son, the sibling, Peter “at home.” That’s exactly how I feel when I’m far from home & I bump into someone who speaks Cebuano. The farthest place I’ve been to is Lebanon. When we were touring Beirut, I heard someone say, “Kanindot lagi diri,” I was instantly drawn to say hello & chat. The language of home spoken away from home, it just brings you back, & brings you together, brings you, well, home.
Jesus spoke mostly Aramaic & Greek, & understood Hebrew because of the Torah & prayers. Also a little Latin, maybe, because of the Romans. But I bet he also spoke a smattering of dialects; he walked everywhere! From Judea to Caesarea Philippi, & all 218km in between. But see, sisters & brothers, I was thinking, the Lord couldn’t have drawn huge crowds merely by speaking in different tongues. What the Gospels tell us is: he told them stories, parables, vignettes in which people strangely found themselves. He quoted from songs, lifted from poetry, quoted from their favorite prophets. His images were spun from threads of the everyday life of everyday people. And to bring that home, he was also proficient in God’s love languages. He affirmed people. He touched to heal them. He graciously received even the little they could offer. He spent time with them. Jesus language revealed God as Father again, anew. Because something got lost in translation. Religious authority turned up the volume of divine law, muting the language of divine love.
Our readings for today, Pentecost Sunday, may be understood as about languages. The 1st reading talks about the different tongues that people hear the Apostles speak. The 2nd reading talks about different charisms, which translate into a language people see the Apostles serve them by. Finally, in the Gospel, the risen Jesus appears & speaks to his friends the language of peace & of mission. After Pentecost, the once-upon-a-time cowardly Apostles set off broadcast & formed the first Christian families the world had ever known; underground, mind you, hush-hush, & in secret codes. By the time the last Apostle died in 100AD, (John), the number of Christians was estimated at 7 to 10-thousand; all underground, hush-hush. I was thinking, conversions that high couldn’t have been made by sheer spoken language alone, but also by a language that drew ordinary people close, made them feel at home, & at peace; with a grammar of divine love & mercy, rather than of Pharisaic legalism & mercilessness. On the First Pentecost, the Apostles were filled with the Spirit who dwelled lastingly in them. So, all they did & said thereafter looked like, sounded like, & felt like Jesus, God’s Grace Incarnate.
Our dear Cecille speaks Tagalog, a smattering of Cebuano, & very beautiful English. Cecille’s written English not only reads well, it sounds mellifluous. But there’s another language Cecille knows that not all of us have been gifted enough to speak or understand: the language of disquiet quietly suffered. I don’t think anyone ever masters the language of depression until one accepts that it masters you first. And depression is masterful at switching off all emotion, all feeling, all passion. It makes you feel worthless because nothing you do, not one thing, is even infinitesimally consequential to anyone. We’d rather feel angry or anxious or sad over something we can name, than not know why. We’d welcome feeling sick & tired as long as we know tomorrow will be a better day, rather than never know for sure if this darkness is that of dawn or dusk or endless night. You & I can sometimes be harsh with people who suffer disquiet quietly. We’re better off praying that we never suffer from it. It really takes you to the edge where, they say, you really don’t want to kill yourself, but you wouldn’t mind dying either.
Our dear Cecille knows this language of disquiet more intimately than anyone in this room, I bet. We’re fortunate to have someone in community who can speak & understand it. What many of us brush off as sumpong, Cecille has made a Church ministry. People seek her so they can talk & be understood without being judged, scoffed at, & brushed off. And to today’s world where 264-million of our sisters & brothers are suffering from depression, Cecille is our humble offering. The Spirit that drove the Apostles from their obscure hiding place out into the world is the selfsame Spirit gently driving Cecille to evangelize about the Light…even from a place of fragility, helplessness, melancholy, & sometimes seemingly endless darkness. But only by grace can illness turn into a charism, & Cecille knows this very intimately. Only by God’s grace can darkness be turned into light.
Let me ask you, ask us: how have we been Church, sisters & brothers? Is our language still ministerial? Is it still evangelical, Good News? By what we say, both with our tongues & our bodies, do we still draw people towards God & make them feel at home? Does our ministry or our authority still look like, sound like, act & feel like Jesus of Nazareth—light filled & warm-hearted? Or is our language cold because it’s turned legalistic, officious, forbidding, & objectivizing?
Because the Spirit of the Father & the Son dwell within us as their home, let us beg God to recreate us back into their image & likeness—& be their living, breathing, walking language in the world.
[Here is the article featured in Inquirer Lifestyle]
