This Sunday is the feast of Pentecost, when fire came down from heaven on the apostles. And it still does, according to the testimony of the editor of Good News, the newsletter of the Catholic Charismatic Movement. PENTECOST has always been a special feast for me because it was 18 years ago in a small chapel in Panama in Central America that I experienced my own personal pentecost. I was working at the time as a volunteer for the Church. I had come with great ideals about serving the poor but had ended up teaching English in a middle-class school and had a non-job in the archbishop?s curial offices. To top it all, my contacts with the poor had been far from edifying. Any messianic do-gooding that I might have harboured soon crumbled in the face of the reality of human sin and suffering. There were no easy solutions here any more than at home in England. The people I met were trapped by their personal histories as well as their poverty and I could see no escape for them.

It was at about this time that I was invited to a charismatic prayer group. The first time I went, I remember, I hated it. It was held in Balboa, in the US zone, and made up mainly of US military personnel and expats with some local Panamanian business people. Not the kind of gathering that a Guardian-reading liberal would automatically warm to. What irritated me most of all, however, was their na?ve belief that God was helping them in the day-to-day concerns of their lives. I could believe this for saints, maybe, like Mother Teresa, but not for US army majors or Panamanian society women.

My problem with this, I now realise, was the frontal assault it delivered on my world view. I may have been brought up a Catholic but I didn?t actually believe in a God who had power in our world. He couldn?t have power, because if he did, how was one to explain the horror of human suffering? No, it was easier to believe that it was all down to us, and we just had to try harder and be better and fix it. Yet here were people with the audacity to say that they knew a God who did intervene, a God who was involved, a God who healed bad backs, who helped people with the rent and generally had the ability to transform people?s lives. And each member of the prayer group had some personal experience to back this up. They told amazing tales of drug addicts converted and healed and of broken marriages restored, all through the power and grace of God.

By then my own belief system had been somewhat dented by what I had seen and experienced, so I was prepared to consider what they were saying. I began to read the Acts of the Apostles in a new light. Could it really be true, I wondered. Was it possible to receive the Holy Spirit in the same way as the apostles and disciples did 2,000 years ago? I had never noticed before all the works of power ? the healings, the miracles ? that are mentioned. No wonder Simon Magus wanted to buy what he saw as this power of the Holy Spirit. I hadn?t connected it with real life, with my life. It was simply Christian mythology. Something that happened then. Not now, surely? But that is what these people were claiming.

Having studied thought reform in Communist China as part of my politics degree at university, I knew about the power of group dynamics. I had no intention, therefore, of allowing anything of the sort to influence me. Thus I made sure I was on my own when I went to the convent chapel to face God with all my questions. I deliberately chose the night of Pentecost for my encounter, as I felt that if anything was going to happen, Pentecost surely would be the best time.

I didn?t really know what to expect. I wasn?t a particularly spiritual person and half of me didn?t want anything to disturb my life. I didn?t want to be a nun and I could imagine the horror of my friends if I became a bible-toting charismatic. But at the same time, if it was true I couldn?t afford to pass it by, whatever my fears.

I had been told ? and in fact Peter says the same thing after his Pentecost sermon to his listeners ? that to receive the Holy Spirit, one must first of all repent. The problem was I didn?t feel much of a sinner. Although I had a niggling sense of not doing enough or being good enough (Catholic guilt?), I also considered myself much more virtuous than most of my contemporaries and couldn?t think of what I had to repent for. The reverse side of this loss of a sense of sin is that while you may feel more comfortable about your life, it also means you don?t feel the need of a saviour either and shut out God as well. Thus you end up locked in self-justifying behaviour and never change. As Jesus told the pharisees: I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (Lk. 5:32).

But whatever my spiritual blindness and shortcomings, I was sincere. I did want to know the truth and God had mercy on me. At first nothing happened. I remember I just sat there feeling uncomfortable. For the first time I wondered what I would do if nothing happened. I realised I was actually also putting at risk the comforting faith I did have. For if nothing happened, this could open up even more terrifying questions. Maybe God didn?t exist at all? That really frightened me. I could cope with a distant God, but not no God. What would life be about then? As I sat there in the dark and reflected on my faith, I realised that I had been making God in my own image and likeness all my life. Although I never read the Bible, never prayed, knew nothing really about God, this did not stop me arrogantly pontificating about him. A favourite turn of phrase of mine always began: I could never believe in a God who. . . ? as if I, not God, was the centre.

How could I communicate with God? I wondered. The only thing I could think of was that when priests get ordained, they prostrate themselves on the sanctuary, so I did that, feeling rather vulnerable as I did so, in case one of the nuns might come in and catch me. The precise sequence of events that night becomes hazy, but I remember at one point that the atmosphere of the place somehow changed. I have heard many different conversion stories over the years (it?s a favourite pastime among people in Charismatic Renewal to tell their stories), and often people experience joy and peace and liberation on coming into relationship with Jesus Christ. For me, however, the initial experience was fear of the Lord. I had a revelation that I can?t explain, but I knew suddenly that it was all true and that God the Father was the creator of the universe and that he was totally other, not some cosy grandfather or strict headmaster in the sky bound by my Western middle-class liberal sensibilities.

I also became aware for the first time of my sinfulness. I realised I was riddled with pride and I felt like Isaiah ? Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts (Is. 6:5). It was then that I began truly to repent. I realised all the good deeds I had been so proud of were as Isaiah says filthy rags in front of the triune God. I knew that from that moment I had to abandon whatever plans I had for my life and spend the rest of it worshipping and serving this amazing Being.

THIS experience, I was told later by the members of my prayer group, was Baptism in the Holy Spirit, the release into consciousness of my baptismal and confirmation graces. Graces are very difficult to define and explain and how this all fits in with being born again or conversion or illumination I still don?t know almost two decades later. All I know is that it changed my life. It also has changed my world view, which is no longer secularist but biblical. I now believe in the reality of many of the phenomena mentioned in the Bible, which I didn?t before, such as tongues, and prophecy and healing, miracles and evil spirits. This is because I have experienced them for myself or seen them in the lives of others.

Having heard hundreds of faith stories, I know I am not special or unique. Whether people?s experiences of Christ are gentle and gradual or dramatic and sudden, everyone is called to a vital and living relationship with him. We are all called to have our own personal pentecost, however God chooses to give it to us, because this alone will give us the power to give witness to our faith, to believe in a God who can change things, who can work miracles, who is greater than the evil around us. This I believe is normal Christianity, not the domesticated Gospel of church-going and niceness that I was brought up to believe and expect.

The Pope has been constantly calling for a new evangelisation of Europe which has reverted to paganism. Like the early apostles, I believe we need the Holy Spirit in a powerful way if we are to complete the task. For me charismatic renewal is not about a particular movement but a move of the Holy Spirit in our time, calling all those who recognise their need of God to repent and open their lives to the fullness of his gifts. Once one starts to believe the Bible is true and to live accordingly, I have found amazing things start to happen. One begins to experience the Book of Acts all over again.

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