05/26/2026
Pentecost Sunday
May 24, 2026
I went to a non-denominational Christian church on Pentecost Sunday because two women, Arnetta and her daughter Ashley, had come into my gallery and invited me to worship with them. It was an all-Black church, and I already knew this was going to be a big day there. Pentecost Sunday. The Holy Spirit. Speaking in tongues. I knew enough to know this was not going to be a quiet little service.
Honestly, I mostly wanted to hear the singing.
They told me service started at noon, so I got there right at twelve. My friends had saved seats for us in the second row, right beside the band. There was a drummer, keyboard player, saxophone player, trumpet player, guitarist - the whole setup. I looked at all of it and thought: this is going to get loud.
And it did.
The children came up first and sang. Then the choir sang. They sang for probably forty minutes straight, and nobody seemed impatient about it. Nobody was checking watches. Nobody was waiting for the “real part” to start. The music was the worship.
Then the pastor came up and preached for another hour.
I knew the theology was going to be different from my Catholic roots. In the Catholic Church, if you asked what the greatest thing Jesus ever did for humanity was, we would say He died on the cross and rose from the dead. That’s salvation. That’s everything.
But this pastor said the greatest thing Jesus did was send down the Holy Spirit and give believers the gift of tongues.
That was the center of it all.
And he preached the way some Black ministers preach - not quietly from behind a pulpit, but with his whole body. He sang through parts of it. He shouted. He lifted his hands. He threw his arms wide. His voice rose and fell like music itself. He worked the congregation into greater and greater enthusiasm, and the congregation gave it right back to him.
At one point, the pastor asked for anyone willing to come up and pray. My friend Arnetta asked me if I was going to go up and pray.
“Well,” I said with a cheeky smile, “I’m not afraid to go up there and pray.”
“I didn’t think you were,” she answered with a giggle.
So we walked up toward the stage. There wasn’t really an altar, just a stage with a few carpeted steps. I remember wondering whether Catholics and Protestants kneel differently. Catholics can kneel anywhere. We’ll kneel on marble if we have to.
So I knelt on one of the steps.
Someone draped this thin purple blanket over me. It reminded me exactly of those little blankets they hand you on airplanes, light and synthetic and slightly slippery. I held it up around my shoulders while I prayed. I stayed there a long time with my hands raised, and I remember being oddly impressed with myself that I could hold my arms up that long. I had a lot to pray for.
That part was beautiful.
When we sat back down, the music started again, but softer this time. Lower. More restrained. And then I realized everyone was looking toward the other side of the church. A woman was coming forward. She was large - very large - dressed in white like everyone else for Pentecost Sunday. She had a cane in one hand, while several people cautiously surrounded her, watching her every step and holding her opposite arm. Every step looked difficult. You could see how hard it was for her to move the weight of her body forward.
And the whole church waited.
Nobody rushed her.
Nobody looked annoyed.
It took a long time for her to reach the middle of the room. By then it looked like she could barely stand any longer, so someone hurried to get her a chair. She lowered herself into it heavily, almost collapsing into the seat.
And I thought: Oh. This is who everyone has been waiting for.
Someone handed her a microphone - black - but the pastor immediately walked over shaking his head.
“No, no, no.”
He was holding a gold microphone.
He handed her the gold one.
And I knew.
This was it.
I don’t know what song she sang. I honestly couldn’t tell you a single lyric. I just know it was about Jesus, and when she opened her mouth, that woman wailed. Loud and raw and powerful. She sang with more conviction than anyone else in that building. Her voice rose above the band, above the choir, above everything.
She carried that whole church up to God’s ears.
It was beautiful.
When she finished, they helped her stand again. Slowly, step by painful step, she made her way across the church until I couldn’t see her anymore.
After that, the pastor started preaching again, though by then it felt less like preaching and more like testimony. Catholic priests talk about themselves, too, sometimes, but usually as an illustration that circles back to Scripture.
This felt different.
He talked about himself a lot - about when the Holy Spirit came upon him at ten years old and how his ministry began and what God had done in his life. And I realized something about Protestant churches in that moment: people have to like the minister. His personality is part of the ministry itself. Maybe even part of what keeps the church alive.
Then he started praying over people.
One by one, people began falling backward. They called it being overcome by the Spirit. As they fell, workers rushed over and covered them with those same purple blankets.
At one point, the pastor came near our section. Ashley was sitting to my left. Beside her was another woman the pastor had begun praying over. The woman started swaying like she might fall, but not quite enough for his liking, apparently, because suddenly he puffed his cheeks, pursed his lips, and blew his breath into her face.
But the breath hit Ashley too.
And down they both went!
They fell backward over the chairs behind us, tangled together, with Ashley trapped underneath the other woman, while church kept happening around us.
I turned and saw the box filled with all those purple blankets sitting right in front of me. So I reached for one to help cover them, but one of the church women, a very large woman whose official duty seemed to be blanket distribution, stopped me cold. She was not about to let me hand out blankets.
Apparently blanket ministry required authorization.
So instead we tried pulling Ashley out from under the other woman. Eventually we got her up, but the other woman stayed laid out behind us under her purple covering, deep in the Spirit. Ashley turned around, and there on the back of her white outfit was this enormous brown makeup stain from the woman who had fallen on top of her. And because everybody wore white for Pentecost Sunday, it stood out significantly.
Time was passing, but not boringly. Wanting to be considerate of my time, Arnetta leaned over to me and quietly said that if I wanted to leave, I could.
So I looked at my phone.
I had been there for two and a half hours.
Long enough to be moved. Long enough to get hungry. Long enough to understand why people came back every Sunday.
I went out to a late lunch with my friend, Nicole, who lived only four miles away from the church. I told her about my experience, and when she heard I was there for two and a half hours, her eyes widened.
“And we complain about a fifteen-minute homily!”
We both laughed.
And yet, driving home, I kept thinking about the difference between the worship I had just witnessed and the Mass. Catholics believe the miracle is not only in the emotion or the music or even the preaching, but in the Eucharist itself – the quiet mystery that Christ gives us His body, blood, soul, and divinity.
That Pentecost Sunday, I had witnessed a church reaching for the Holy Spirit with all its strength, and then participated in the faith I was baptized into – a ritual deeply rooted in tradition, and one for which I am deeply grateful.
