Pentecost Sunday

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

There was a Dutch missionary priest in Singapore who used to say that he liked to call Pentecost the Feast of the ‘Ahh!’ of the Apostles.

When a teacher comes into a classroom and explains some new concept, two or three of the class understand what he or she is talking about.

Then he goes away and comes back a second day and explains it again. And now a few more in the class understand the idea.

He goes away, or he or she goes away, and comes back a third time, explains it a third time, and now the vast majority of the class understands the new idea.

But there are still a certain few who haven't quite caught it. And so, he or she goes away and comes back the fourth time. And the fourth time she explains it.

Now that's when everybody understands. And that's when they say: ‘Ahh! Now we understand.’

Pentecost was like the Feast of the ‘Ahh!’ of the Apostles because that's when the penny dropped. They began to understand the Scriptures.

With the Spirit of Truth, they began to link up all the different things that Our Lord had said and did. It's the beginning of their new mission, and in some ways, it's the beginning of the Church.

Some theologians say the Church began on Good Friday when the side of Christ was opened and blood and water flowed—the fountain of life, the fountain of grace, the fountain of the sacramental life of the Church.

Others say it was fully founded and completed with the coming of the Holy Spirit. That's when everything began to function.

We are told in the Acts of the Apostles, “When Pentecost day came round, they had all met together, when suddenly there came from heaven a sound as of a violent wind which filled the entire house in which they were sitting; and there appeared to them tongues as of fire; these separated and came to rest on the head of each of them. They were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak different languages as the Spirit gave them power to express themselves” (Acts. 2:1-4).

The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth and of light. He comes into our soul with all of His gifts and His graces, which bring their fruit in our soul.

Hopefully, we've spent the last 10 days preparing for this great feast. After Christmas and Easter, the next biggest feast in the Church is Pentecost. We need to upgrade the image of Pentecost.

If you ask a child what Christmas is, most of them know what Christmas is, because there are many material things that help to convey the message. Pope John Paul liked to say that we go to the great spiritual messages and mysteries through physical signs and symbols (Catechism of the Catholic Church, Point 1146). Christmas has plenty of them: carols, the crib, trees, lights, presents, all sorts of things.

If you ask a child what Easter is, often the child has some idea what Easter is. But often children have no idea what Pentecost is. If you can come up with some material thing that helps to get the message of Pentecost across, you could do very well; a Pentecost chapati or a Pentecost diwali, something of that nature.

It's a great feast whereby we focus on the third Person of the Blessed Trinity, whom we call the Lord and Giver of life. It's good to get to know more about the Holy Spirit and how He acts in our soul and in the Church.

One of the key truths of our faith is that the Holy Spirit is guiding the Church. He's guiding the Pope and the bishops.

God is with His Church and therefore, everything that the Pope and the Magisterium of the Church say becomes extremely important.

A very good practice for us is to read the pronouncements of the Pope, to get familiar with the encyclicals, or the apostolic exhortations, or what the Pope is saying or what his ideas are; and also the things that previous Popes have read; or to know well over time the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

If you're the mother or father of a family, or if you're thinking of getting married and founding a family at some stage in your life, take a good read of what the Catechism of the Catholic Church has to say about marriage and the family. It's a passage that's very rich, full of beautiful ideas.

Our Church knows the truth, the beauty, and the meaning of conjugal love. It sees human love as something wonderful, the most beautiful reality on the planet, a reflection of divine love. As followers of Christ, we're called to get that message to the whole of society.

Therefore, with the help of the Holy Spirit, we need to know it well ourselves and be putting it into practice. The Lord and Giver of life come to lift our lives up onto a new supernatural plane.

We're called to lead a supernatural life, not just a natural life. Our life has a supernatural goal: to be with God forever in heaven. Our intellect and our will are continually searching for infinite truth and infinite goodness, which we don't find in this world.

The Church invites us to receive Baptism soon after we're born, to get that grace into our soul, to wash away the stains of original sin, so that the child, from the very earliest moments, can begin to be a child of God, to lead a supernatural life.

There was a little boy who was being prepared for First Holy Communion. The teacher was explaining what was going to happen in Holy Communion and what happens in the sacraments: that we receive divine grace; our sins are washed away; and divine grace comes into our soul and it doesn't just wash away our sins, but it lifts us up onto a supernatural plane, so that we can perform supernatural actions, actions above our nature.

This kid thought this was the best news he'd ever heard in his life because he'd seen the movies of Batman and Batwoman and Superman and Superwoman and Spider-Man and Spider-Woman. Now he hears that he is called to lead a supernatural life. This is just fantastic!

He decides the best thing he can do is to go home and baptize his pet dog, Rufus. He goes and he gets Rufus, and brings Rufus to the bathroom, and he fills a mug with water, and he pours it over the head of Rufus.

He said: ‘Now Rufus, I baptize you in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Now, Rufus, you should be able to perform supernatural actions, an action above your nature. So, talk to me, Rufus, talk to me.’

The story ends with Rufus beginning to talk and saying, You'll have to be patient with me while I learn to talk, because I'm not used to talking.

For Rufus to talk would be an action above his nature. That analogy helps us to see what it means that we are led to lead a supernatural life, lifted up by the Holy Spirit, with a supernatural goal to everything we do.

It helps us to see the very limited value of everything in this world. It leads us to take very good care of our soul, to lead a sacramental life, to treasure the graces of God that we get in the sacraments. The Holy Spirit is truly the great Sanctifier.

If the goal of our Christian life and Baptism is holiness and apostolate and the Holy Spirit is the one that brings that about, then it makes an awful lot of sense that every day of our life we would say some prayer to the Holy Spirit, asking Him to come.

If you look in your missal or in your hymn book, you'll find a lot of hymns there or prayers to the Holy Spirit. One particularly beautiful one that you might look out for is part of the Mass on Pentecost Sunday. It's a poem that comes just before the Gospel. It's called a Sequence.

It may be known by its Latin title, Veni Sancti Spiritus–“Come Holy Spirit”, a beautiful prayer to say every day of your life, particularly on your Thanksgiving after Mass, asking the Holy Spirit to come with all of His gifts and all of His graces and asking Him to come to the souls of each member of your family so that you may be spiritually rich.

We might not have the capacity to be materially rich in this world, but we all have the capacity to be spiritually rich.

We're all called to be spiritual millionaires because we have the gifts and the graces of the Holy Spirit: wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, piety, fortitude, fear of the Lord.

When the Holy Spirit comes into our soul, He brings fruits in that soul: a peace, a serenity, a joy. That's why one of the greatest things we can do for our family is to live a life of grace.

Many fathers and mothers of families have told me this over the last forty years. They see the benefits in their family life of weekly sacramental Confession, because somehow, “When I have more grace in my soul,” they say, “I can see there's more peace in my home.”

It’s the Holy Spirit who forms that domestic Church. The Church tells us that the Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church, the life-giving principle of the Church.

If the Holy Spirit is not in the Church, then, the Church is just a human organization; it’s another multinational organization. If we miss the supernatural dimension of the Church in all its forms, then we miss the point.

Likewise, the Holy Spirit is the soul of the domestic Church. If we're trying to build a Christian family, it makes an awful lot of sense that we are very good friends of the Holy Spirit, so that we build His presence in our home.

We ask Him to act in the souls of each one of our children and we ask Him to help each one of us to walk along truly spiritual pathways, so that we find that “something divine is hidden in the most ordinary human reality or situation” (Josemaría Escrivá, Conversations, Point 114), so that we look at things from a supernatural perspective, try and see things the way God sees them, which ultimately is how they are in reality.

It's easy for us to get lost in human things, or in human emotions, or in feelings. We may not ultimately focus on what is important. The Holy Spirit helps us to focus on what is really important.

The really important thing about our life is that we save our soul, that we go to heaven. That's what it's all about. The human things are all elusively passing.

When the Holy Spirit comes into our soul, He also brings the supernatural virtues. We get an increase of faith, an increase of hope, an increase of charity.

Every day of our life we need that increase of faith, of hope, and of charity. With reason, we can say today: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, enkindle in us the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created, and you will renew the face of the earth” (Prayer to the Holy Spirit).

We're here to renew the face of the earth. “I have come to cast fire upon this earth, and what would I but that it be enkindled” (Luke 12:49).

And so, we ask the Holy Spirit for our apostolate, for our apostolic zeal to see souls in all situations, in every moment and every day, so that the Holy Spirit may be working in us and through us, seeking opportunities to influence people for the good.

Let the Holy Spirit work through our words, through our actions, through our virtues lived well in the home, so that we teach our children what it means to lead a Christian life or what it means to practice certain virtues.

We try to live like great human persons, so that they see what that means and hopefully learn to imitate it.

The history of the Church is the history of the Holy Spirit working in the world. The history of our Church is a very glorious history.

We can be very proud of our Church, of what the Church has achieved, building up civilizations of love, educating millions and millions of people, minds, souls, teaching them what this world is all about, taking care of those bodies when they become ill through hospitals and clinics.

You find somebody working in the name of the Catholic Church in every last outpost of every country in the world.

The Pope is the great spiritual leader of the world. We can ask the Holy Spirit to enlighten him and guide him in everything that he does.

We can ask the Holy Spirit that He might lead to a great new flourishing of the Church in the 21st century.

Some very holy people in the latter part of the 20th century like to use those terms: “a great flourishing of the Church.”

After every Council in the Church there has been a clarification of doctrine. There has been a period of a little bit of confusion, but then there has been a wonderful flourishing and spread of the Church.

Hopefully, in our lifetime, we will live to see these realities, but to a certain extent it also depends on us, that we be instruments of the Holy Spirit fostering unity, spreading charity, spreading truth and beauty and love, because “God is love” (1 John 4:8,16).and the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of love.

Society is very much hungry to know and to see and to experience that love. Today’s Feast day of Pentecost is a celebration of God not just with us, but within us.

Our hearts are the home of the Holy Spirit. We are temples of the Holy Spirit. He comes to dwell in our soul in grace. Ponder that incredible reality.

St. Peter says, “We become partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 4). There is a phrase we could chew on for a long, long time: “partakers of the divine nature.” We are lifted up to partake in the nature of God.

John Paul II has a wonderful encyclical on the Holy Spirit. In Latin, it is called Dominum et vivificantem–“The Lord and Giver of Life.” I think it came out in the 1980s or 1990s, a very wonderful document on the Internet to bring to your spiritual reading sometime; very beautiful ideas talking about the power of the Holy Spirit.

After his assassination attempt, when he was recovering in the following months, he talked, when he came back to make public statements again, how he had experienced the Holy Spirit, how the Holy Spirit has spoken to him very clearly, that it was the will of God for him to lead the Church into the 21st century. This was only in 1981. It was 20 years before that.

In that document, he says there is a chasm in the human heart, and that chasm can only be filled by God. If we try to fill it with other things, it doesn't work.

He says, “The Holy Spirit ‘breathes’ prayer into the soul of man” (cf. John Paul II, Encyclical, Dominum et vivificantem, May 18, 1986).

“We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Holy Spirit comes to help us” (Rom. 8:26) to learn how to pray.

We are told in St. John, “You must see what great love the Father has lavished on us by letting us be called God's children—which is what we are! The reason why the world does not acknowledge us is that it did not acknowledge him” (1 John 3:1).

St. Paul says to the Romans, “The Spirit himself joins with our spirit to bear witness that we are children of God. And if we are children, then we are heirs—heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ, provided that we share his suffering, so as to share his glory” (Rom. 8:16-17).

We are heirs—heirs of this great legacy, this great spiritual richness that the Holy Spirit wants to pour into our hearts. A spirit of unity. A spirit of prayer.

It is very important that we are docile to the Holy Spirit, that we listen very carefully to what He has to say to us.

There may be moments in our life when we realize, more than others, that the Holy Spirit has spoken to us.

It could be using one of God's instruments in the sacrament of Confession—things that the priest says to us. It could be a teacher in our class, or it could be our two-year-old child, who looks at us straight in the face, and can hardly talk, and says something that pierces our heart and soul and mind.

Or it might be in those moments of silence that we need so much during our life, during a retreat, during a recollection. The Holy Spirit will use that silence, when we've withdrawn a little bit from the world, from our normal activity, to whisper something into our ear.

Sometimes the Holy Spirit may whisper and sometimes He can shout and we can get the message really clearly. Or we might find ourselves in the grip of some vice, some defects or habits, or addiction that we want to conquer.

Father Benedict Groeschel, who used to hear confessions in downtown New York, says in one of his books that there is no addiction, no problem in this world, that cannot be cast out with prayer and sacrifice. Very encouraging words. You can imagine a Confession in downtown New York. He has probably heard everything.

In the third Eucharistic Prayer of the Mass we say: “Grant that we, who are nourished by His Body and Blood and filled with His Holy Spirit, may become one body, one spirit in Christ.”

If we grow in our unity to the Holy Father and grow in our unity to the Church, we become better instruments to bring the good news to all sorts of people in all sorts of places. There is a lot of work waiting for us.

Our Lord said, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me. He has sent me to bring good news to the poor, to heal the brokenhearted” (Luke 4:18). There are many wonderful tasks ahead of us.

As we look back over our own personal Christian vocation, hopefully we can see the Holy Spirit working in our life. There has been a ceaseless divine activity that can be summed up in the work of sanctification.

The Holy Spirit has led us to where we are—to this vocation, to this marriage, to this family, to this professional vocation.

God has arranged things, all of these things, to teach us, to be His intimate friends, and to sanctify us, so we could be in a continuous act of thanksgiving to God, for all the ways that the Holy Spirit has acted in our soul.

All of that sanctification is attributed to the Holy Spirit. He is the one who has truly been our guide, who helped us to make this decision and that decision. He has showered upon us an abundance of graces—of graces which are now in our hands.

God wants us to use those graces to set upon those deeper spiritual pathways, pathways of a more intense interior life that will lead us to discover, more and more, the indwelling and the powerful action of the Holy Spirit in our souls, so that from there we can stride out, at a pace of confident love and of friendship, our total receptiveness to God's action in our life.

The readiness to respond to the divine plans is often a specific characteristic of souls who converse a lot with the Holy Spirit. The great stranger for us is to be the great friend.

With Him, we will make all the pathways of the earth divine, so we can perhaps see that the Holy Spirit is inviting us to make a great leap in quality in our spiritual life.

That leap in quality passes through the stage of talking much more to the Holy Spirit, that great guest of our soul, so that we can find much more fruit in our personal life, in our apostolate, in those around us, in our family and social surroundings.

Lord, help me to seek this divine guest in the center of my soul, to listen to Him, to ask for light for all that I have to do every day, so that I could do it according to the Spirit of God.

Holy Spirit, may you work on my will so as to make me entirely docile to your inspirations, entirely faithful.

Enkindle that fire in my heart, so that I can be filled with that infinite charity and mercy towards other people that you bring about in my heart. Give me that light that I can understand, that flame that I can make burn in other people's hearts, so that I can help you to transmit your gifts to so many other souls that await us.

If we want to deal more closely with the Holy Spirit, then the pathway is to deal more frequently with Our Lady and with St. Joseph in this year of St. Joseph.

They were the great friends of the Blessed Trinity. They knew how to listen very carefully to all the inspirations of the Sanctified Spirit.

They were the ones who most perfectly followed the pathway that God wanted them to be on this earth, with all its changes and contradictions and challenges and so many other things.

St. Louis de Montfort says, “Whenever the Holy Spirit finds Our Lady in a soul, He’s irresistibly drawn to that soul because she is His Spouse” (cf. Louis Marie de Montfort, True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin).

And so, we could ask Our Lady that from her presence in our soul, she might truly draw the Holy Spirit in ever more effective ways, to make us better and greater children of God.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

OLV