MY QUESTION to the taxi driver was more of a statement of fact: “So you pray for your passengers?” I knew he would say: “Yes, ma’am. I do.” He had told me that he was a Pentecostal Christian and he worshiped regularly in a Black-led Church. His experience could not be further than my own because he came from Nigeria and I from the UK — yet what we have in common is more important than what separates us, and he knew that as well as I do.

We have both been touched by the Holy Spirit of God and this weekend, when we celebrate the Christian feast of Pentecost, both of us will be reflecting on what this means. My own induction was through baptism at the Birmingham Oratory and then confirmation as part of a job lot at boarding school. I had entertained high hopes that day, and yet I felt nothing except a vague sense of disappointment.

So I have been praying for the gifts of Spirit ever since, in the hope that they might catch up with me, even if it is a bit late. According to Galatians v, 22-23, these gifts are “love, joy, peace, patience, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness and temperance”, with the added promise that “against such there is no law”.

On the first Pentecost Sunday though, when the nascent Christian community gathered together to pray and think about how to live their lives in conformity with the life of Jesus, they had a much more dramatic experience. In the Acts of the Apostles we are told that “when the day of Pentecost was fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” (Acts ii, 1-4.) Heady stuff — and probably closer to the experience of my taxi driver than to my own.

The day of Pentecost was the Jewish Feast of Weeks, celebrating 50 days or seven weeks after Passover by offering the first fruits of the wheat harvest to God. That explains why there were so many Jews from the diaspora in Jerusalem. The author of Acts lists them, making the point that they were “Parthians, and Medes, and Elamites, and the dwellers in Mesopotamia, and in Judaea, and Cappadocia, in Pontus, and Asia, Phrygia, and Pamphylia, in Egypt, and in the parts of Libya about Cyrene, and strangers of Rome, Jews and proselytes, Cretes and Arabians.”

The miracle for him is less that there had been tongues of fire, more that the tongues materialised into another form of communication altogether when Peter began to address the crowd. They claimed, “we do hear them speak in our tongues the wonderful works of God. And they were all amazed, and were in doubt, saying one to another, What meaneth this? Others mocking said, These men are full of new wine.”

If truth be told, the Spirit is toxic, as well as benign, but you can recognise its truest manifestations when people talk to each other and hear each other across apparently impossible divisions, whether of faith, or culture, or national identity. When they can pray together in the back of a London taxi.

They pray for each other, evidently, but also for all those Iraqis and Iranians and Jews and Palestinians to whom the earliest Christians thought they had so much more to offer than a spirit of brutal conflict. The gift of the fruits of the Spirit, in fact.

Dr Lavinia Byrne taught communications for six years in the Cambridge Theological Federation.