6/2/2014 – Monday of 7th week of Easter season – Acts 19:1-8

Wow!  As I look at the statistics of my postings on this blog, this is my 1200th post.  Little did I know that when I started this blog when I was a priest in the Mississippi Delta that I would find myself still posting so many posts later!  Thanks to all that read my blog.  I have told some friends that it feels like I am always writing a homily, which is pretty much true, since I have daily mass Monday through Friday and have masses on the weekend in both Spanish and in English.  Blessings to all of you on your journey of faith - I hope you find something here that touches you.

     We are in the last days of the Easter season before we celebrate Pentecost this upcoming weekend.  Paul’s missionary travels take him to the city of Ephesus.  Ephesus is now a bunch of ruins, but in Paul’s day, it was one of the great cities of the Roman Empire. The people whom Paul meets claim to be disciples of Jesus, but they only seem to know Jesus indirectly.  They didn’t know about the Holy Spirit that Jesus sent into the world.  They didn’t feel the joy of the Holy Spirit in their lives of faith.  We feel the Holy Spirit in different moments in our daily lives.  We feel the Spirit in different moments in the Church as well. I thought of the moments that I felt the Holy Spirit this past weekend in the different liturgies and events that I attended as a priest. The Spirit was present at the ordinations of three men to the priesthood in the Cathedral of St Peter the Apostle in Jackson, where Catholic from all over the diocese were gathered to celebrate the day with them and their families. In the joyful wedding celebration that I celebrated in a small church in the middle of nowhere on a dirt road in Calhoun County with a young man in the military as the groom who asked me to give him and his bride a Catholic blessing as a part of their wedding ceremony.  In the confirmation mass with Bishop Kopacz Sunday afternoon, with all the joy that the confirmation students and their families were experiencing. And then we were with Bishop Kopacz blessing the new worship space at St Thomas in Saltillo, and then sharing a meal with the people there and getting to know them. The Holy Spirit is here in a lot of ways in our community.  But we have to be open to the Spirit and willing to bring the gifts of the Spirit to others.