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From Archbishop Donoghue
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Pentecost |
Dear Friends in Christ, Of the three Persons of the Holy Trinity, I think, and most would probably agree, that the most difficult to visualize is the Holy Spirit. The Father, and certainly the Son Jesus Christ, seem almost human to us in our thoughts. And when we address them in prayer, in our mind’s eye and our soul’s desire, it is a person we see – the benevolent yet strong Father, sitting on a throne of justice, yet pouring forth from His goodness, mercy and blessing – the almost-as-we-are Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, who has known everything that we must go through, and who is visible to our human natures, because He had one Himself - a brother and friend to us men and women, as well as our Savior. But when we consider the Holy Spirit, we have little to help our imaginations – there are the Scriptural references to the Spirit of God, liking Him to a dove, or to tongues of fire, or to a rushing wind. But exactly who is this Third Person, who is, as Christ calls Him, the Paraclete, the Teacher, the Comforter, and how can we effectively strengthen our prayers to this force of God, without whom we would be lost and abandoned? Three manifestations of the Holy Spirit came to my mind as I was preparing these words, and I would share with you now, just briefly, my own thoughts about who the Spirit is, and how to see Him. First, the oldest part of the record of salvation history, the book of Genesis, reveals to us the basic reality of the Spirit of God. For the Spirit was there at the very beginning – in the 1st and 2nd verses of the 1st chapter of Genesis, we read, with a profound sense of the mystery of our beginnings, these words recording the dawn of time and being: In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth – the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep – and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters. Ever how we conceive of all that went afterwards, we know from these words that it was the Holy Spirit of God that was sent out to create – to make the splendor and the immensity and the sheer wonder of what we see in the Universe, and what we call by the grand name of Nature. In all its practicality and chance, its beauty and its terrible-ness, its endless power to inspire men and women to search, to find, to become better – in all that “exists and moves beneath the firmament of heaven,” as Scripture says, in all nature, we recognize the Holy Spirit of God, moving vastly and slowly by our measure, but nevertheless, just as surely bringing about the culmination of all time and space – the fulfillment of God’s plan, and the end, which we shall live or rise to see. God is not nature, but He is the force which makes it live, which makes it procreate from generation to generation, and His Holy Spirit speaks from its power, and inspires us daily – for Nature is the medium in which we exist, in which we toil, in which we succeed or fail, and it is the beginning of all our understanding of what is true and what is beautiful and what is awesome. Grace, as the Fathers teach us, builds on nature. When God made His peace with men after the flood, it was not a contract on paper, or even a monument carved in stone that He gave to mark the end of His wrath, and the moment of a new beginning for mankind – it was the rainbow: God said, “I set my rainbow in the cloud, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth - between me and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the earth." And the Psalmist proclaims: The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Here then, begins our understanding of the Spirit of God – at the beginning of all things, and at the beginning of our appreciation for what enlivens and prolongs and fulfills all things. Nature, and its ineffable mystery, its endless capacity to defy, to elude, and to lead science and understanding forward – here is where we see the first face of the Holy Spirit of God. Second - and now we come into an area where the Spirit is visible only to those who believe, an area where sight does not suffice, but where the longing of the human heart must enter into the equation – second, the Holy Spirit appears most strongly to us, as He enters and makes fruitful the womb of Mary. For the Holy Spirit of God is the living Father of Jesus Christ, the heavenly seed planted in her body, so that God might Himself know and live, the experiences of conception, of gestation, of birth and growth and maturity, and of death. All that Jesus Christ means to us, as the God-man who walked the earth, as the teacher of ultimate truth, as the worker of miracles and signs of wondrous power, as One who could know the suffering of loneliness, betrayal, pain and death – all these so-human experiences, and all the so-tender mercies which flow from our Lord, and which He gave us for our comfort – they all generate from the power of the Holy Spirit, who made Christ the man, in the blessed womb of the Virgin. And so to the Holy Spirit of God, we must then ascribe so much of what is precious to us - the birth of salvation, the reconciliation of God and mankind – the inspiration of the revelation of the New Testament, and out of the thought and experience of the Lord Himself, the creation of the Sacraments, the founts of living grace, of knowledge and wisdom for the asking. The Holy Spirit of God is all that Christ has done for us – all that Christ has left us – He is the link between us, and the living, breathing human person, who lived the life we must live, who died the death we must die – and it is the Holy Spirit of God who makes us remember all these things, for without Him we would surely forget, and be lost. What did Christ say: These things I have spoken to you, while I am still with you. But the…Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send…he will teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. And finally, dear friends, we see the Holy Spirit in what did happen after Christ had ascended to the Father, had left the earth, and the living companionship of the Apostles and His mother. The Spirit came down from heaven, and entered into them, and with Him, all that Christ had been, and all that Christ would be – the Church, the teaching, the institutions of charity and learning, the stability given by the Sacraments to the relationships and occupations of human life – all that Christ had taught and desired His followers to be – all this became a part of them after the first Pentecost, and by their legacy and our inheritance, it now – Christ now, becomes and is a part of us. The Fathers of the Church, writing of the difference in the Apostles before and after Pentecost, would say: Before the descent of the Holy Spirit, Christ was in their sight - after Pentecost, Christ was in them. And because the Sacraments open the door by which we receive the Holy Spirit of God, then the same is true for us. For without the Spirit, we would worship a memory - a body, Christ’s body - yes - born, lived, and died, and even risen again - but gone nonetheless to a place we cannot see, to a home from which we are yet excluded. But with the Holy Spirit, it becomes possible for every man and woman to have Christ in them - sometimes seemingly buried and dead, at other times hard to see, to feel, to listen to - but there still - and at any moment, ready to rise in our souls and to remake us, renew us - just as God renews life in creation – just as salvation was renewed in the womb of the Virgin Mary. For as the love of God for man persists down the generations of mankind moving through nature and the universe – as the salvation He has prepared for mankind is reborn and redeemed in the Incarnation of Christ - now, by the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, the boundless energy of God’s love has become in and for each of us. Today, dear friends, is the birthday of the Church, because it is the birthday, the day to mark and to remember, when Christ ceased to be seen by the eyes of men, but became a part of their souls. And so, we may not understand His face, we may not circumscribe His person by a portrait, but we feel the power of the Holy Spirit of God in us, and we declare with all the saints and with Holy Scripture: It is no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me! + |