A Homily for Pentecost
Readings: Acts 2:1-11  1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13  John 20:19-23

In 1999, Lawrence Anthony, a South African conservationist, took nine elephants into his game preserve. They had gone rogue, trampling villages and wreaking havoc.

Anthony lived alongside the elephants for weeks, knowing that if they continued to knock down high-voltage fencing and escaped his protection, they would be shot. He tried to communicate with them using tone of voice and body language, particularly with Nana, the pack’s leader. It worked. The elephants eventually settled into their new life in the game preserve.

Lawrence Anthony died of a heart attack in March 2012. The wild elephants that Anthony had saved years before, now living in two separate herds, walked some 12 hours through the bush to his home, where they stood rigid in vigil for two days. 

How does one explain this well-documented event? How did the elephants, physically distant from Anthony’s death and from each other, return to their patron’s home to honor him? How did they share their sorrow?

The philosopher David Bentley Hart mentions the incident in his extraordinary All Things Are Full of God: The Mysteries of Mind and Life (2024), a repudiation of those contemporary philosophers who think that life can be reduced to an endless sequence of mindless physical processes. 

For reductionist philosophers, the development of artificial intelligence confirms their own unprovable prejudice, that through millennia we evolved from lifeless matter. There is no soul; there is no mind. Free will is an illusion; our desires and dreams are only the residual flotsam of biological, chemical and physical properties.

But does an exhaustive chemical analysis of paper and ink really give you Shakespeare? Has a reductionist philosopher ever lived with a chihuahua?

Hart does not see a novel intelligence in computers. A mind has not sprung up from sophisticated sequences of digital algorithms any more than our minds have emerged from randomly selected, evolving neural synapses. 

As Hart points out, it is our intelligence, our intentionality, that must first be programmed into computers. Indeed, our desire to see them as artificial minds that we have brought into existence is only the newest expression of human arrogance. We fancy ourselves creators of life. 

At the close of the 20th century, many thought that a mechanistic universe could explain itself, explain us, without reference to mind, ours or God’s. But for Hart, it is mind and not matter that is the primordial stuff of the universe. Matter is a manifestation of mind. 

David Bentley Hart wipes away a century of anti-spiritual claptrap, returning to the ancients. In the 21st century, the universe again seems suffused with purpose and intention, neither of which is possible without a primordial mind. Despite all the wounds, the world is meaningful; our lives are meaningful. World and mind beautifully and purposefully correspond to one another because both are creations of a more primordial intelligence.

Like those errant elephants, philosophers are coming home, and on the Solemnity of Pentecost, theology is the richer for it. 

Pentecost proclaims that we are being drawn into the Father, the unfathomable mystery from which we emerge, by means of two distinct presences, two persons. One returns from the dead; the other is newly born within us. 

Though we receive them as distinct scenes in sacred Scripture, the resurrection of the Christ, his ascension into heaven and the bestowal of the Holy Spirit are mutually implicating mysteries. 

Christ rose from the dead not as a ghost but as an interlocutor. He stood both before the first disciples and within them. They could see him in front of them, hear him speak, all the while feeling his presence within them, hearing themselves addressed in their hearts of hearts. 

Though they then lacked the language to frame the wonder, they began to speak as though two Lords had emerged from the empty tomb. One in front of them, before he returned to the Father. The other within them, determined to show them how to follow the first.

Whatever the sequence in eternity, in our history the Spirit comes forth from the tomb of Christ, a new person of the Godhead, a new presence in the psyche, one whom St. Augustine addressed as “you.” “Tu autem eras interior intimo meo” (“You were more inward to me than my most inward part”) (Confessions, III, 6, 11). 

A lot of lonely people have started chatting with A.I., hoping that they have found a mind that understands them. It is understandable because we were created for the communion we call love. 

Grieving, hyperintelligent elephants do not prove David Bentley Hart to be right. They are simply one more sign that scientific reductionism went too fast. To free the world of God, it felt compelled to dismiss our own minds as illusory. In this dystopian fantasy, we could only hope that the computers that inherited our world would be free of our religious fantasies. 

But though it need not be the case—if you pause to consider the question—we know that the external world does correspond to our minds. One seems fashioned for the other. If not, there would be no reason to continue reasoning about anything. But more than that, we recognize another intelligence at work in the world. It does not come from us. If anything, we come from it. 

Pentecost tells us that what happened to those first disciples repeats itself in the hearts and minds of every time and place. Someone seeks to address us in the story of Jesus of Nazareth, to reveal himself in our prayerful pondering of Christ’s life.

Who is this Holy Spirit? What is his origin? He is the intelligence from which we come, speaking directly into our hearts, telling us to imitate Christ and most of all, to follow him home. 

It is not turtles all the way down. It is not genetic codes and cellular division. It is not simply energy winding toward entropy. On one level, it is all these things, but they are all swept up into something more primordial, more truly determinative. On Pentecost—we remember and realize—it is love, all the way down.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.