Accessing the World of God

24 May 2026  Acts 2:11

The Feast of Pentecost

“And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind…. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire…, [and] they began to speak in other tongues….” (Acts 2:2-4)

Perhaps the most striking feature of human consciousness is that we can be both the subject and the object of our own thought simultaneously. We can think about ourselves. We can think about the fact that we are thinking. Not only that, but we can evaluate the quality of our own thinking, and so learn more about ourselves. We can become better people. No other animal can do that. Other animals can think, but they can’t think about thinking; they can learn, but they can’t learn about learning. Dogs can’t make themselves better dogs; fish can’t make themselves better fish. All animal species are doing now what they have always done, but we can become better. We can make better tools, more complex societies; we can make art and music, and then make them better. Why?  What does the complex nature of human self-consciousness tell us about ourselves and our place in the universe we inhabit?

We can become better, but only around people who are already better, who speak the language, and know the way. The mission of beginner disciples is to find those people. The mission of the Church is to be them.

The Trinity is how the Church has tried to describe the inner life of God, and the Holy Spirit, which was given to the Church on Pentecost, is the way God thinks about God’s own self.

The fact that God now includes us in His thought about Himself means that when God is thinking about Himself, He is thinking about us, too. It also means that when we are thinking about ourselves, we have access to the inner life of God. Is it any wonder, then, that we humans can become better? God is already intimately involved in our self-consciousness, so every thought we have can potentially make us better. The Greek word meaning “to confess” is homologeo, which means literally, “to say the same thing.” In a good confession, therefore, we say the same thing about ourselves as God says, which is something we are able to do because we are already involved in God’s own inner life. We have access to what God already knows about us. Of course we can make a good confession and become better.

Of course, we also need to make the right choices about that access to God’s inner life. It isn’t automatic. Being able to learn a language is not the same thing as actually learning a language. We have to learn the various mechanisms to achieve that access – the habits of thought, the disciplines of vocabulary, scripture, and prayer, the resources of sacraments, liturgy, and fellowship that open the portals of divine friendship. Discipleship, in other words, is the means by which the thought world of God becomes accessible to us, and Discipleship is like learning a language – you never learn a language without learning a culture at the same time, and getting the words right requires also getting the culture right.

In all language learning, students begin by the mental act of hearing/reading the target language, translating the target language into the language they already have, formulating a response in the language they already have, and then responding in the target language. It is a slow-moving and time consuming process, and only improves when people start to think in the target language.  That only happens after long and repeated exposure to the target language, and the people who speak it.

We can become better, but only around people who are already better, who speak the language, and know the way. The mission of beginner disciples is to find those people. The mission of the Church is to be them.