Pentecost 2007

PENTECOST 2007

The presence and action of the Holy Spirit in our lives and the lives of the church are absolutely vital….. The Spirit makes effective all that the church and every one of its disciples do….

Every single one of the seven sacraments…  has a major point in  the rite, where the church ‘calls down the action of the Holy spirit upon what we are doing, to make it effective……..   this will be particularly noticeable next week…. when Bishop Finnigan, representing the wider universal church that we all belong to …….will pray a special pray with his hands outstretched… calling down the Holy Spirit upon the young people who are to receive Confirmation……..    (confirming their baptism and strengthening and affirming the many gifts of the the spirit within them)……..    and then at Eucharist… the bishop will place his handsover the gifts of bread and wine and do what we do at each and every mass….   ask God to send the holy spirit upon these gifts of bread and wine so that they may become the body and blood of Jesus Christ……

 

Without the action of the Holy spirit, our rituals would be mere commemorations… without the holy spirit alive and active within us, we would not be united with Jesus and participating in God’s diving life………

 

Because the spirit is present and active amongst us, it is sometimes hard to notice….  just as we take for granted the air around us..,… we would only notice it if it was not there………    sometimes we see it more  obviously in our lives…..  just as we notice the air around us when it gets stirred up into a powerful windstorm… however… the spirit is as muc present in the stillness as in the storm……

 

The famous german scholar, Karl Rahner…  speaks about the everyday action of the Holy Spirit

 

he talks about how the action of the spirit can become obvious in those occasions when we do an action that is not explainable from our own self-interest….   ijn occasions where we do an act of kindness and we don’t get anything out of it ourselves..not even a sense of satisfaction… he seems to be suggesting that in cases like this, it is clearly the spirit at work…  something bigger than ourselves…absolute, un-interested graciousness….. because there is nothing in it for ourselves….. 

(my apologies if I have quotes this before, but it goes to the heart of things.. and remains abidingly relevant)….

he writes:

 

Did you ever do a kindness to a person from whom you could not expect even so much as a shadow of gratitude of appreciation….(while, at the same time, we had not even the compensation of feeling that we had acted unselfishly or decently in doing so? )…  Let us look into our lives, then, and see if we can discover whether any such experience ever came our way. If we can find that it did, we may be sure that the spirit was at work within us then, and …eternity and ourselves had a brief encounter-  that the spirit means more than an ingredient in the make-up of a passing world……   That explains the lives of the saints…. they know well that God’s grace can also grace the dull round of daily tasks (done well)……and bring the ‘doers’ a step nearer to God…..   When  we Christians experience the action of the spirit, it means that we are (in point of fact) having contact with the supernatural, although the contact may be scarcely noticeable…… (Karl Rahner (1904-1984): “Belief Today” (Sheed and Ward. New York, 1967. pp 40-41).

 

 

what the church needs today more than ever, are mystics of the everyday…. whose charism is the darn ordinary………   whose field of mission is reflecting on, speaking about and praying about rh everyday and the ordinary….   for the Spirit, and therefore Jesus, is at work in this field………   and it goes unnoticed, yet it makes up a significant part of our everyday lives…

 

The Holy Spirit effects to major things in our lives:   The Spirit makes Jesus and his message present in a new and real way in our lives, here and now. and present in our hearts.

 

The Spirit unites us, conforms us, incorporates us INTO Christ… and once we are part of Christ, we are part of God’s inner life, through Jesus, to the Father, by the bond of the Holy Spirit…. we sit, as it were, at the table of God’s inner life…  

 

Thirdly.. the reception of the spirit is a commissioning …  a sending……   a sending out on mission into the world……  not only to spread the message of the good news… but also to live it and BE it…. to each other and to all…. and to recognize the presence and the action of the Spirit in the people and events around us…

 

Fifth Sunday in Easter – 5/5/07

 

Easter 5

 

Fifth Sunday in Easter – 5/5/07
 
If loving people was easy, Jesus would not have had to go around reminding everyone to do it. It is a radical love – a challenging love…..   not a wishy-washy love…..
We all know that this is not an easy task. It is fairly easy to love those who are loving to us at the moment. Loving those who are cranky to us, those who reject us, those who think we are fools, those who resent us, etc.—that is the real task. Jesus tells us that "This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another."

We can find so many ways to resist loving one another and we find ways to justify that resistance. Some times we must be pushed to become more open to others. This was also the experience of the early Church. At first, as we read in parts of the Acts of the Apostles, the followers of Christ would only preach to the Jewish people. They really had to be pushed by the Spirit in order to open up and accept non-Jewish people as followers of Jesus.

Today's first reading tells us that we must undergo hardships to enter the Kingdom of God. Yet almost everything about western culture speaks of trying to avoid any hardships. Our cultural values are about having more than enough of everything, about having everything that we want or desire, about having control over our own lives and the lives of others, etc. The follower of Jesus Christ must begin to work against these values, striving to have only that which really helps the inner life of prayer and the inner life of loving others. That will surely be hardship for most of us since our lives are fairly comfortable.

Is Jesus against having a comfortable life? Not at all! But Jesus wants us free to do the will of the Father and to have deep interior freedom means that we must always be able to give up comfort when it stands in the way of loving others—and that interior freedom can only grow if we practice an honest asceticism. That means that we must at times embrace an uncomfortable life so that our freedom can grow stronger.
But also, the word 'love' is highly misused…. Love does not mean saying 'yes' to everything and everyone….   'love' is not necessarily a synonym for 'niceness' .   Christian love does not mean being some kind of 'dormats for Christ' where everyone feels they can demand and act badly and because we are expected to 'love' we must put up with it….   Love can be tough-love….    Love can mean saying "no"   and refusing to cooperate with destructive things.

In the end, though, actions do speak louder than words……Those who do not believe can only begin to come to faith if they see that our lives have been changed by following the Lord. May the Holy Spirit come upon on in these Easter days and may we be strengthened in our capacity to love one another. If that happens, then surely we can know the new heaven and the new earth that the Second Reading today speaks about so clearly.

We want to see our earth with all tears wiped away. We want to see our earth renewed in the image of God. How we long to live without war and with the peace and joy of God in our hearts! Politics cannot ever bring this about, but faith can. May our faith be strengthened! God is making all things new.

(adapted from homily of the abbot, "Monastery of Christ in the Desert")