In Good Company Roses For Pentecost

May 25, 2010

Last week I took a personal day and visited Franciscan Monastery. It is a sweet little refuge tucked away not far from where I live. You’ll find it in the same neighborhood of our nation’s capital as the Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, Catholic University and the John Paul II Cultural Center.

I like to go there for Confession (short lines in comparison with the nearby basilica) and to have a little chat with St. Francis, as we are old friends. 

When I arrived, I had an entire hour to kill before a priest would arrive to hear confessions. As it was an absolutely splendid day in the height of rose season -and the monastery garden is lined with rose bushes- I took the opportunity to pray the rosary while strolling the grounds. Every conceivable color of bloom met my eye.  And, as I ambled, I thought about the One who created them and the Queen whom they were planted to honor and delight. 

I stopped and sniffed one of the bushes. A revelation of scent greeted me. With the shock of recognition, I realized that it has been ages since I smelled a rose! It isn’t becuase I fail to take the proverbial time to stop and smell them. Rather, it is because many of today’s hybridized roses have little perfume. 

The monastery garden has some new varieties, but is full with bushes of an older provenance. Each variety has its unique fragrance: some intense and heady, some sweet and delicate, some peppery. All of the roses are beautiful, but it’s not quite the same experience without the exquisite scent.

In Rome, there is an old tradition of dropping thousands of flame-colored rose petals through the oculus of the Santa Maria & the Martyrs Church (aka the Pantheon) to symbolize the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.  Eyewitnesses have told me a lovely delicate fragrance wafts through the Church, evoking the “odor of sanctity” sometimes associated with holy persons.

The Church, whose birthday we celebrated Sunday, makes us holy, but she doesn’t make us the same.

In Democracy in America, Toqueville observed that “the human idea of unity is almost always barren; the divine idea is infinitely fruitful.”  He meant that when human beings strive for unity, we create soul-crushing conformity and bureaucracy. God, on the other hand, draws all people to himself while helping each individual to become free and more fully himself.

Reflecting on this same idea in his homily for Pentecost, Pope Benedict XVI notes that the unity of the Spirit doesn’t lead to homogenization, but harmonization.  “At Pentecost… the Apostles speak different languages in such a way that everyone understands the message in his own tongue. The unity of the Spirit is manifested in the plurality of understanding.”

Sometimes we imagine we must give up our individuality in order to be disciples.

Not so, says the Pope. On the contrary, what’s required is to be truly open so we don’t block out the Spirit. “When a person or a community limits itself to its own way of thinking and acting, it is a sign that it has distanced itself from the Holy Spirit,” he teaches. “The path of Christians and of the particular Churches must always confront itself with the path of the one and catholic Church.”

In other words, we have to repeatedly confront our own ideas and cultural shibboleths with sound doctrine, or we risk falling into the very stale conformity we fear when we try to keep the transforming fire of the Holy Spirit at arm’s length. 

We risk becoming, as persons, like those hybridized roses that look lovely but don’t give off the fragrance they should. There is something lacking on the inside.

Human unity produces the Department of Motor Vehicles. The Holy Spirit inspires the myriad and beautiful cultural expressions of Christianity and saints as memorable and distinct from one another as Jerome and Teresa, More and Therese, Francis and Catherine.

It’s only in God that each of our full and unique identities comes into full bloom.