Journeying with Jesus during the Easter season is a call for us to gain greater
understanding of the risen Christ in our lives. Each
year we celebrate the weeks of the Easter season, and each year we are called
to mediate and reflect upon this reality. Part
of the reality of the risen Christ is celebrated next week in the Solemnity of
Christ’s Ascension, then, the week after that, we celebrate Pentecost and the
presence of the Holy Spirit with us. Today,
in our Gospel, Jesus tries to ready us for the reality of the Ascension by
telling us about the Holy Spirit that he is sending us as an Advocate. We
might think of the Holy Spirit as an Advocate in the legal sense, as one who
would advocate for us before a court of law. The
Holy Spirit can be seen as functioning relationally as an Advocate with us as
well, as one who brings help, consolation, comfort, and encouragement.
All
that is fine, but how to we live the reality of the risen Christ in our lives? How
do we live out the reality of the Holy Spirit? I
guess those are the big questions each of us needs to ask, and there is not
just one answer that applies. Recently,
I was reading a post in one of the forums where some of the pilgrims going on
the Camino of St James in Spain post comments and questions. One
of the pilgrims posted that he had a bad day on the pilgrimage trail and had
lost the spirit of the Camino. He
was dismayed to learn that he had to pay admission to visit an historic
Cathedral, that his friend was denied entrance to the mass by the usher when
she arrived 10 minutes late, and disgruntled when there was a sign in the
restaurant bathroom that he visited saying – “Please pilgrims – only take the
toilet paper that you are going to use right now – don’t take the entire roll
with you!” There
were a lot of comments other pilgrims made to that post, as you can imagine. Many of them were trying to give this pilgrim
encouragement through the difficult day he was having, to show him the spirit
of the Camino is love, encouragement, and grace, and that there were probably
very good reasons behind the decisions of those rules and regulations that
affected him that day. One
pilgrim responded with a quote that is a common saying on the Camino: " El
peregrino no exige , agradece." “A
pilgrim does not demand – he gives thanks.” Perhaps the Spirit of the Risen Christ is calling us to give thanks and to be
grateful for the blessings we have, for the opportunity we have this day to
serve the Lord and to serve our brothers and sisters, for the graces that the
Lord gives us to learn from our challenges, sufferings, and inconveniences. Last
week, I received a card from a family I knew from my days at St Richard, a very
hard working and humble family. Their
card included a check to help us with our recovery efforts from the
tornado. Also included was an additional
check from the daughter of the family, a high school student. She sold cookies that she made at her school
in order to help us. Opening that card
brought tears to my eyes – I received it in the midst of a really difficult
day. On the inside of the card was this
message: “Praying that God lets you know beyond any doubt that he is holding
you close to his heart. That’s the best
place to be!” I saw
in the encouraging comments written on the pilgrimage website and in the letter
I received from my friends in Jackson a spirit of the risen Lord that is alive
and comforting.
We
all need to foster a community of the Holy Spirit here. It is
easy for us to grumble and make excuses and to not take ownership about certain
things, isn’t it? It is
easy to complain about things in the world and in our lives and in our parish,
to think things should be done differently and could certainly be better? But
what are we doing to help out? What are
we doing to bring the spirit of the risen Christ into the world? Pope
Francis, in his Apostolic Exhortation THE GOSPEL OF JOY, asserts that wherever
the need for the light and the life of the Risen Christ is greatest, that is
where we want to be, both as individuals and as a community of faith. Pope
Francis says that living out our identity of Evangelizers of the Gospel and of
bearers of the light of the risen Christ, we will not stay all clean and
perfect on the sidelines, but will take on the “smell of the sheep,” embracing
human life and touching the suffering flesh of Christ that we see in others. Although we contemplate the presence of the risen Christ with us in the Easter
season in a special way, we also are called to have a sense of Easter joy every
day of our journey. We are to be people of the Spirit - we
are to be a community of the Spirit. How
do we answer that call?
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