AS FARIDAH WALKED HOME she heard a noise that sounded like an accelerating airplane engine. She scoured the sky, and when she saw nothing she looked at the distant mountains, her hand shielding her eyes like a visor. Something massive was coming toward the city. It appeared bluish-black, like the color of the peaks through a haze. Had the mountains sprung loose and begun a charge across flat soil? Faridah had never seen such a thing. Her mind, craving explanation, sorted through the possibilities until eventually the answer became obvious. This was the end of the world.

Another power—not a destructive but a creative one, of an altogether different dimension and magnitude—informs our faith. It is the release of this power that Pentecost is all about. It was a power that was received by a small, insignificant and unsophisticated group of men and women gathered in Jerusalem waiting for a promise to be fulfilled. The horizons of the world of this group of people were limited to the countryside of Palestine and Galilee, until the Spirit of God opened their hearts and minds to a greater world beyond. Nothing could have really prepared them for the magnitude of their enlightenment. To stand in its path was to catch fire with divine love. In an instant their world was turned inside-out by a tremendous rush of transforming power released into their hearts and minds, souls and bodies. This inrush of creative energy, an energy that unifies more powerfully than natural powers tear apart, poured itself among them. The eyes of their hearts were opened to a completely new category of experience, hitherto unknown to the world. They saw a new world, through new eyes. The normal and usual differences of culture and language that separated one from another crumbled before this unifying power. Suddenly each could speak and hear, with the same understanding, the stories of God's mighty deeds. They could all experience the same love.

This is Pentecost, the outpouring of God's Spirit then and now as our own first-hand ex-perience: we are not meant to be just observers. Then and now, when the Spirit rushes in and breaks open, there's no returning to the old frames of reference. Lives are changed forever, the lives of those present at the first Pentecost and also our lives. Hearts are broken open to a dimension of relationship with God and with one another that before this was unimaginable, a relationship newly reconnected and reconciled through the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ. There is now no end, no limit, to the horizons of God's embrace. The frames, the boundaries, the barriers are all gone. In a way the first disciples, newly bap-tized in the Holy Spirit, became apostles today. They were sent out beyond the comfortable yet confining horizons of Galilee. They were sent into the wider pagan world of Rome, where for the first time "others", those unlike themselves, could be seen and heard not as alien, foreign, suspicious, impure and other but as "self", beloved children of God. The see-mingly ultimate boundary ('I am not you and you are not me') is gone. In communicating the Spirit, God communicates God's self, with no limit and no boundary. Doesn't this help make sense of so much of what Jesus meant when he said such things as: "Love your neigh-bor as you love yourself", "Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do for me"? No, he wasn't just spouting poetry when he said such things! When I look at you I should see myself, and when you look at me you should see yourself. And all this is grounded in the reality that, with the sending of the Holy Spirit, when God sees us, God sees himself. When God looks upon us personally and universally, God only sees his Son.