This past Sunday was Pentecost, a holiday on the Catholic calendar that falls fifty days after Easter Sunday.

From Acts 2, American Standard Version:

And when the day of Pentecost was now come, they were all together in one place.

² And suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of the rushing of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting.

³ And there appeared unto them tongues parting asunder, like as of fire; and it sat upon each one of them.

⁴ And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

⁵ Now there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, from every nation under heaven.

⁶ And when this sound was heard, the multitude came together, and were confounded, because that every man heard them speaking in his own language.

Now, the obvious message here is that the Holy Spirit is capable of acting like a sort of celestial Google Translate; the apostles went out into public and were able to preach to the Jewish pilgrims of many nations, with each of them hearing the speech in their own native tongue.

I don’t think that’s the real moral, though. I’ve been thinking about this all week, and I think that the real miracle is that anyone in Jerusalem was willing to listen to the apostles at all. Think about it; this was a dozen recluses, followers of an obscure cult leader who had been put to death by the state less than two months earlier. But when they went out into public and preached his message, dozens of people from all over the world stopped what they were doing to listen. It’s a metaphor for being willing to listen, with an open mind, and evaluate something on its merits without ignoring a speaker out of hand.

Considering we live in a nation split into two roughly equal camps determined to ignore and belittle one another, it might be a good lesson to keep in mind for this election year.

I hope everyone had an enjoyable Memorial Day weekend. Personally, I celebrated in the traditional manner of my people – by eating hot dogs, drinking Genny, and washing a station wagon in the driveway with a garden hose.

You?

In the current issue of “Working Mother” magazine, I imagine in celebration of the upcoming Father’s Day holiday, there’s an article about things that mothers can learn from how fathers interact with their kids. The lead-in from the table of contents is, without exaggeration, “Sure, we know we do everything better, but you might be surprised what you can learn from Daddy.”

WTF? This is blatantly sexist claptrap, right? The “all dads are morons” meme in popular culture drives me crazy.

Last night, I was watching an episode of Frontline about the recent economic crisis. One of the early facts they mentioned was that the financial sector is not only the single largest component of the American economy, but that it’s fully twice the size of American manufacturing.

How strange is it that shuffling money around in a databank somewhere is twice as lucrative as actually producing something of tangible value?

This is a postmodern world, to be sure.