Dear friends,

For those of you who are of my generation, and a little before and a little after, today, Pentecost Sunday, was always presented as the birthday of the Church.  Well, Happy Birthday Church.  Several years ago I wrote on this occasion that birthdays remember an entrance into the world, and I added, “So it is with the Church, born from the side of her crucified Lord, and brought to life by the power of the Holy Spirit.  This is what we celebrate today.”

While all that remains true, there can be different foci that help us get a greater grasp of the reality we celebrate.  This year, a different point of focus might be on the Spirit, as the Divine Presence that animates the Church.  Of all the references to the Holy Spirit in the New Testament, more than half are to be found in the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles.  From the announcement of the birth of John the Baptist in Chapter 1 of Luke’s Gospel, to Paul’s final discourse to the community in Rome, in the last chapter of the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit is the guiding, teaching and empowering Divine Presence in Jesus (“Filled with the Holy Spirit, Jesus returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the desert for forty days,” Luke:4:1), in the community (“It is the decision of the Holy Spirit and of us,” Acts:15:28) and in individuals (“While Peter was still speaking these things, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who were listening to the word.  The circumcised believers were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit should have been poured out on the Gentiles also,” Acts 10:44-45).  For Luke, the Holy Spirit is no abstract third person of the Trinity, but the life-force, poured forth from God, and filling every Christian person, and the Church, to witness to Jesus Christ, Lord and Savior. 

Sometimes, at the very beginning of walking with and working with couples preparing for marriage, the question is asked whether Confirmation is required to “get married in the church.”  Without insulting anyone, this view of Confirmation (receiving the fullness of the Holy Spirit) is very narrow and out-of-focus.  It sees it as law and discipline, not as gift and life.  As something to be done, rather than the Presence of One Who directs and animates the doing.  As something static, which can be recorded in a register, rather than active, filling, empowering, motivating, strengthening for day-to-day living as witness in what can be at best, an apathetic world and at worst, a hostile world in which the living of the Christian message is seen as retarding world progress. 

Back in the late fifties and early sixties, Blessed Pope John XXIII prayed for a new Pentecost, a new outpouring of the Holy Spirit to enliven the Church once again so that it might truly give life to the world.  What I believe he may have meant was for a new awakening in the Church, and in every Christian, of the power that comes from the Spirit, a power to be the kind of believer that the men and women we meet in the Acts of the Apostles were.  As much as Pentecost remembers the birthday of the Church, it is a celebration in which that same Church cries to her Lord for the continued pouring forth of that same Spirit Who gives her life. 

Pray for that, on this day, and pray for our young people who will receive the fullness of that same Spirit next Saturday.  Pray, as Blessed John XXIII did every day, “And may everything finally be according to the pouring out of your Spirit, O Holy Spirit of love, whom the Father and the Son desired to be poured out over the Church and her institutions, over the souls of men (and women) and of nations.  Come, Holy Spirit, Come. Amen”

God Bless,
Fr. Ron