Pentecost - Fr. Leo
God with us, is the Holy Spirit with us? In the Spirit, is the Father and the Son. The mode of God’s presence, if you will, is the Spirit, the uncreated energy of God pouring fourth into us from God’s ecstatic love for all creation. Through the Sacraments of Baptism, Eucharist and Confirmation the presence of God becomes manifest to us, and through us, to the Body of Christ-the Church, present in the world.
In a sense, the experience of the Holy Sprit is what makes our faith real. We see this in our first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. Into the room where Jesus’ followers hid in fear, the Holy Spirit comes like a driving wind and appeared to them as tongues of fire. At that moment they received the gift of tongues, a spiritual gift of God speaking in his chosen language through a person This is what we mean when we say someone is, “Speaking in tongues.” These words are then understood through another gift of the Holy Spirit, the “interpretation of tongues.” Thus the. Apostles witnessed to the presence of God through the holy Spirit and communicated God’s word to all the earth with the crowd from all parts of the earth hearing the same message of God in their own tongue.
In Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, we are reminded that all of us have spiritual gifts to build the Kingdom of God among us. So the ecstatic, uncreated energy of love, we experience in the gifts of the Holy Spirit, is the same gift we are to bring to the world. In deed, this is our baptismal mission, one we share in unity with others in the Church. We are all one body whose head is Christ.
Our mission is affirmed in the Gospel when Jesus breathed on the disciples and gave them the gift of the Holy Spirit to remove all that divides us from God and one another. A sign of this Spirit is it’s affecting, a great peace into the depths of our being.
Summing things up, we can say we are all called to live in the Spirit of God. In sharing God’s Spirit, we become his children and his divinity in us, becomes our deepest desire and calling. So it is right we pray for the gifts of the Holy Spirit and consent to God’s work in us, that all creation might be transformed and share in the Transfiguration of Christ shown in the marvelous light on the mount.
This week, let our prayer mantra be that of the psalmist, “Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth!”