Today, we celebrate Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit to the early
followers of the Jesus. The day of Pentecost is seen as the birth of the Church. On that day, enlivened by the Holy Spirit,
the disciples went out into the world and preached the Gospel to all, each
speaking in his own language and being understood by all. The word Pentecost comes from a Greek word, “pentekostos,” which means 50.
Pentecost occurs 50 days after Christ’s resurrection on Easter morning. Indeed, today we conclude the
Easter season, returning to ordinary time once again this Monday in our
Church’s liturgical year.
But how does the Holy Spirit work in our lives?
How does the Spirit manifest itself?
There are many answers to those questions. There is not just one way the Spirit works in
our lives. The past few weeks I have shown you different objects that have illustrated
aspects of our faith or the Gospel message. Today, I continue to do so by showing you this beautiful framed display of
holy cards that I have. Terri Zeibart, one of the ladies who went through the RCIA program at St
Richard Catholic Church in Jackson when I served there as associate pastor, gave me this as a gift a few years
ago. She was given it by one of the
Carmelite nuns in Jackson, and thought of me when she received it and wanted me to
have it. Anyone who knows me knows how much I love the saints. As a convert to Catholicism, the saints are
one of the things that have drawn me to the Church. Each one of them can us something about our
faith. Each one of them can show us how
the Holy Spirit can work in our lives in different ways.
Dorothy Day is a woman who came to my mind when I thought about the community
of saints and the way the Holy Spirit works in our lives. The Church has not yet named Dorothy Day an “official” canonized saint, but she
is seen as a saint and as a great example of faith by many in the Church. Day was born right before the dawning of the 20th century and lived
as a young adult in the Roaring 20s, a time in which a lot of people were
living in a very worldly, secular way.
She professed to be an anarchist and an atheist as a young woman living
in New York, she had an abortion, and she did not find much time for God in her
life. At a talk he recently gave at the Dorothy Day Conference, Archbishop Jose Gomez
of Los Angeles remarked how it was not the Church’s ideology that drew Dorothy
Day to the Catholic faith, but rather “she was changed by love, changed by the
over-powering awareness of the reality of God’s love and mercy.” She felt God's love and mercy in her life through the
birth of her daughter and through her relationship with a
Catholic nun while she was living on Long Island in New York. Dorothy Day became a very devout Catholic after her entrance into the Church
and one of the great social activists of the 20th century, founding
the Catholic Worker movement in New York and providing outreach to the poor and
the oppressed. Dorothy Day left us a legacy that illustrates how to live in and evangelize a
culture that has rejected God. She
listened to the way the Holy Spirit was calling her in the reality of her life,
and she called upon the Spirit to be a witness of faith in the world. She believed that the surest way to evangelize in the modern world “was to
raise up a new generation of saints.”
We have mentioned the book Rebuilt about one parish's journey to renewal and new life. That parish developed a mission statement that called them to love God, love their neighbor, and make disciples. It is hard to listen to the call of the Holy Spirit sometimes, isn’t it,
especially if the Spirit calls us to something new and different, to something
that appears risky and out of our comfort zone. But Pope Francis has this to say about the Holy Spirit and the celebration of
Pentecost: “Let us ask ourselves: Are we open to “God’s surprises”? Or are we
closed and fearful before the newness of the Holy Spirit? Do we have the
courage to strike out along the new paths which God’s newness sets before us,
or do we resist, barricaded in structures that have lost their capacity for
openness to what is new?”
I mentioned the Community of Saints. I
look at those saints I see pictured in this frame – well-loved saints such as
Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, Vincent de Paul, Francis of Assisi, Joan
of Arc, and Catherine of Sienna. All of these saints add to richness and depth of our Catholic faith. They represent a wonderful diversity of gifts and charisms. As individuals and as a community of faith, we call upon the Holy Spirit to
lead us and guide us in our faith. On the website for Nativity parish, the parish where the book Rebuilt
came from, it states: We believe that the Holy Spirit has prepared works for us
to do that will advance the kingdom of Christ. We recognize God’s call on our
church to serve within our parish and beyond: in our city, our country, and in
the world. I believe in those statements for our parish as well. Nothing we can do as a parish or as individuals of faith should be beyond the
realm of the Holy Spirit. As we
celebrate Pentecost today, we celebrate the Spirit of the Lord that is with us,
and we ask for the Spirit’s help.
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