PENTECOST SUNDAY EXTENDED VIGIL, MAY 24, 2026

MASS READINGS

Reading 1 Genesis 11:1-9

The whole world spoke the same language, using the same words.

While the people were migrating in the east, they came upon a valley in the land of Shinar and settled there.

They said to one another, "Come, let us mold bricks and harden them with fire."

They used bricks for stone, and bitumen for mortar.

Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky, and so make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered all over the earth."

The LORD came down to see the city and the tower that the people had built.

Then the LORD said: ""If now, while they are one people, all speaking the same language, they have started to do this, nothing will later stop them from doing whatever they presume to do. Let us then go down there and confuse their language, so that one will not understand what another says.""

Thus the LORD scattered them from there all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the speech of all the world. It was from that place that he scattered them all over the earth.

REFLECTION

What is language?

According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, language is:

A system of conventional spoken, manual (signed), or written symbols by means of which human beings, as members of a social group and participants in its culture, express themselves. The functions of language include communication, the expression of identity, play, imaginative expression, and emotional release.

For pretty much the whole existence of humanity, the word related to the world. This is-- word had a direct meaning with our reality. If I say chair, with or without pointing at one, even if you don't have all the details, (color, exact shape, size), you would understand what I am talking about. Language should mirror reality and truth.

However, some post-modernist philosophers, like Derrida, initiated a movement of deconstruction. In a very condensed summary, he, and others, argued that words were self-referencing signs with no stable, ultimate meaning. In other words, no pun intended, he said that words only find meaning by differing from other words, meaning that final ultimate truth is constantly postponed and open to endless reinterpretation. This is, there is no ultimate truth.

What does all this mean? How does it affect me?

Well, this kind of thinking has really affected our society at large. If you were to ask a few random persons on the street "what is a woman?", how many answers do you think we'll get?

The world is at a stage where a lot of people believe they can create their own realities, and these realities are also fluid, that we can change our minds on what things mean from one minute to another. Anything goes!

Yet, there are two thoughts that have caught my attention. Recently in the podcast Pints with Aquinas guest Malcom Guite talked about George Steiner, the late literary French/American critic, and how his writings about language, literature, and society, specifically how in the book "Real Presences" tells us that whenever we are genuinely moved by a poem, a painting, or especially a piece of music, we are experiencing an "otherness" that cannot be explained by pure materialism, psychology, or linguistic theory. True art contains a real presence, a spark of the divine or the transcendent.

Also that we are currently living in a "Sabbatarian" condition using the metaphor of Holy Week: humanity is perpetually suspended between the "Good Friday" of real worldly suffering and the "Sunday" of fulfilled hope and resurrection. We live in the quiet, uncertain space of Saturday. For Steiner, it is art and music that give us the strength to endure that waiting, providing us with a direct pipeline to the transcendent truth we spend our lives searching for. He probably didn't know he was looking for the absolute Truth that is Jesus.

What happens when we completely open to another person and they talk with each other? When they speak directly to their core?

When we stop creating our own realities, and shed our pride, we can truly communicate with each other. Cardinal Saint John Henry Newman tells us that real persuasion and spiritual conversion happen through a deep, personal intimacy and authenticity, where one whole person speaks directly to the core of another.

For Saint John Henry, this dialogue occurs simultaneously on two levels: it is the way God intimately reveals Himself to the individual human soul, and it is the standard for true human relationships, where intellectual ideas must be animated by personal love, sympathy, and shared experience to truly bear fruit.

Praying to God that our modern Babel crumbles, that we speak the truth, never stop searching for the Truth. And find those whom we can speak heart to heart: Cor ad Cor Loquitur!

God bless y'all!