This weekend, we celebrate Pentecost, the end of the holy season of Easter and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon Christ’s apostles and the Blessed Virgin Mary in Jerusalem, 50 days after Christ’s resurrection from the dead. A part of today’s reading from the 2nd chapter of Acts that we do not hear states that Peter’s preaching at this Pentecost event resulted in the conversion of 3,000 Jews to the Way of Jesus. Thus, our celebration of Pentecost is seen as the inauguration of the Church and its evangelization efforts in the world.
Our celebration of Pentecost is also a celebration of Christian unity, with the people of different languages and cultures brought together and they are all able to understand one another. In a world where there are literally thousands upon thousands of Christian denominations and conflicts, wars, and violence in many different forms, we none-the-less are called to work toward Christian unity and peace and justice throughout the world.
An important theme we hear throughout the readings today is that the gift of the Holy Spirit that we receive is to be shared with others. The message of the Spirit does not just stay in our own lives and our own hearts; the Spirit moves us to action and inspire us to share our faith and our gifts with others. In his first letter to the Corinthians, St Paul explains that the various spiritual gifts of the Holy Spirit that people receive enrich the Church, activating these gifts and charisms for the common good. They may take different forms like prophecy, teaching, administration, acts of charity, healing and speaking in tongues, and they may reside in different persons like apostles, prophets, teachers, and healers. We can see a lot of these gifts at work in the members of our parish.
We can see the Holy Spirit at work in different ways in two saints whose feast day falls on Pentecost Sunday this year. The first is the Venerable Bede, who was born in 673 in Northeast England near the city of Durham. As a young boy, he was sent to a Benedictine abbey to receive an eduction. He remained there his entire life as a monk and a priest. When he was 13 years old, his area of England was hit with the plague. Bede was one of the few who survived. In his own description of his life, he spent it studying scripture and theology and living as a Benedictine monk. But in an era when very few people in England could even read and write, Bede wrote or translated more than 40 books on topics as diverse as natural history, astronomy, poetry, and the lives of the martyrs. His most important work was The Ecclesiastical History of the English people, a history of the the English Church and the people of England, starting the Roman invasion in Britain and covering more than 800 years. I remember reading that book in a course on Western civilization in college. Bede died in the year 735. He was named venerable by the Church in 836, but was not canonized a saint until the year 1899, more than 1,000 years after his death. That same year, he was named a Doctor of the Church by Pope Leo XIII. The life that the Venerable Bede lived in early medieval England is so different from our lives in the modern world. Through the lens of Pentecost, we can see the Holy Spirit working in the life of the Venerable Bede, in his diligence and perseverance in living as a monk and in recording the history of his people when few people would have even thought of doing such a thing.
I also want to mention Maria of Agreda, who died on this day in 1665 at her monastery in Spain. A sister of the order of the Immaculate Conception in the kingdom of Castile and Leon in Spain, she was an abbess, spiritual writer, mystic, and evangelizer. I don’t even know where to begin to start to describe the life of this remarkable woman. She entered the monastery at the age of 16. A few years later, in answer to her prayers to bring the Gospel message to others, she received the gift of bilocation, where she would enter dream-like trances and would bi-locate to areas in present day New Mexico and Texas bring the Gospel to the native Jumano people. After her bilocation visits ended, 50 of the native people arrived at a Franciscan monastery in 1629, saying that a lady in blue had catechized them in the Catholic faith for years, describing the Franciscan habit and blue cape that was worn by her order. They were requesting baptism in the Catholic Church. At the same time, Maria had told her superior in Spain of her bilocation missionary visits. Maria described more than 500 bilocation visits to these native people. After a time, her gift of bilocation stopped. After her death in 1665, her apparition has been seen there in Texas and New Mexico on different occasions, including giving assistance to malaria victims in the mid-19th century. She was reportedly seen there as recently as the 1940s. If that was not enough, she wrote an important theological and mystical book on the Blessed Mother entitled The Mystical City of God, which Mel Gibson used as inspiration for his movie The Passion of the Christ. Her writings also influenced of acceptance of Mary’s immaculate conception for many important Church leaders, which influenced it being declared dogma in 1854. She also was a trusted spiritual advisor for King Philip IV of Spain. The story of Maria of Agreda, the Lady in Blue, has fascinated me in recent years. I hope to visit her monastery one day in my visits to Spain. Her fervent faith and love of God and desire to evangelize others captivates me and inspire me in my service as a priest. Unbelievably, Maria of Agreda has not been declared a saint, though her cause for sainthood is being proposed by some groups. She had been declared venerable by Pope Clement X soon after her death.
I mention these two remarkable people of faith, Maria of Agreda and the Venerable Bede in conjunction with our celebration of Pentecost, because it shows how the Holy Spirit can work in our lives in remarkable ways. Not just in huge, earth shattering ways, but in the everyday moments of our lives as well. May we feel the presence of the Holy Spirit accompanying us on our journey as we celebrate Pentecost this weekend.
