Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement with Dorothy Day, once said: “When you don’t know what else to do, keep going to meetings.” In our uncertain times, those words remain strikingly relevant—and deeply scriptural.
At the end of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus gives a final, urgent directive to his hesitant followers: “Stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49). What followed, as we read in Acts 2, was Pentecost—the fire, the wind, the Spirit—descending upon a small, confused, and frightened group gathered in an upper room. That room became the birthplace of the Church.
In 2025, this image feels timelier than ever, and the Church again finds itself in a kind of “upper room” moment—exhausted, scattered, uncertain. The pandemic may be officially behind us, but its aftershocks continue to affect worship attendance, community life, and the mental and spiritual well-being of many. Meanwhile, societal shifts accelerate artificial intelligence, changing how we think and work, climate anxiety grips the youth, and political polarization fractures not only nations but parishes and families.
All of this raises a pressing question: What does Pentecost mean for us now?
Much like the early disciples, we too are gathered—across countless humble spaces—waiting, discerning, hoping. Today’s “upper rooms” are diocesan gatherings such as recent Installation of Archbishop McKnight and the expectation of new beginnings in the Church of Northeast Kansas, parish renewal groups and future planning, meetings of parish groups and organizations, and online prayer communities. They are kitchen tables, Zoom calls, conference centers with bad coffee and folding chairs. They may not look like much—but neither did the original.
And like the original, these spaces are gardens of possibilities. We are here not because we are triumphant, but because we are being pruned. The credibility crises of the Church, especially in the wake of abuse scandals and financial mismanagement, have left many feeling ashamed or disengaged. It is not a season of glory. It is a season of humility, purification, and preparation.
This is our Pentecost posture: waiting in the upper room, not to escape, but to be renewed.
The Church has seen ages of privilege—and now it must weather the age of forgetting. As faith becomes increasingly optional in the cultural mainstream, we are discovering the hard truth that many of our children are indifferent to our religious institutions most because their parents are the same, even if they retain spiritual longing. The old methods of catechesis, evangelization, and sacramental formation often no longer “hit home.”
What should we do? The same thing Jesus told the first followers to do: Return to the city and wait. In Luke’s writings, the “city” is not just Jerusalem—it’s the symbol of the community of believers, the dream Jesus planted. To return to the city is to return to the mission, the Church, the hope. The upper room is not a retreat from the world, it’s a place of grounding in the essentials: charity, humility, forgiveness, prayer, patience, and above all, trust.
The temptation in 2025 is to respond to the crisis with noise and overactivity. But Pentecost teaches us that the Church is reborn not through strategic plans or perfect messaging, but through Spirit-led surrender. In an age of climate summits, AI ethics debates, and uncertainty with morality, the most radical act may be to pray together, to discern together, to sit together powerless, and yet expectant.
This Pentecost, we might ask: What fire are we waiting for? Where are our upper rooms? Are they not already here—in parish halls, in silent monasteries, in protest marches for the poor, in coffee shops where the lonely gather, in the hearts of students wrestling with faith amid doubt?
And so, we keep going to meetings and we volunteer for parish activities and jubilees. Not because these are magic—but because they are how we remain together. They are where the Spirit finds us waiting, listening, showing up, again and again.
When you don’t know what else to do, return to the upper room. Keep going to meetings. Involve yourself in your Church community. Pentecost still happens.
God Bless,
