Pentecost Sunday
May 28, 2023
Today’s Readings:
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/052823-Day.cfm
(This is a reflection I wrote for the Sisters of Mercy Communications Office.)
Come, Holy Spirit! It is a prayerful invitation we have offered innumerable times in our lives. How many Pentecosts have we lived through? How many sacred events have begun with this heartfelt plea?
But have we really thought about what we are requesting?
Picture the assembled disciples fifty days after Easter. They have just experienced the profound spiritual upheaval of Christ’s Passion, Death and Resurrection. In the aftermath, there are imprisonments, angelic deliveries, crippled people suddenly walking, dead people coming back to life. Their comfortable lives have been turned upside down!
Jesus has made a few appearances to help root their topsy-turvy world in the memory of his promises. But he is no longer physically present to them, having ascended into heaven just a few days past, in itself a bit of an astounding event!
Slowly but surely the disciples begin to realize that the work of ongoing salvation has fallen on them. So they pray continuously, just as we might when we are a little overwhelmed by our reality.
On this particular day, the small community likely gathered for the Jewish holiday of Shavuot, or Feast of Weeks, which celebrates the wheat harvest. Jewish tradition also holds this date as the one on which Moses received the Law on Mount Sinai. Shavout is determined by the date of Passover, occurring about seven weeks after.
Wrapped in this treasured religious legacy, the little band joins in prayer. Still honoring their Jewish heritage, they open their hearts to the God Who is writing a new covenant of love over all Creation. They are not unlike Moses as he walked to the top of Sinai, clueless to what the Fire might ask of him.
And suddenly there came from the sky
Acts 2: 2-3
a noise like a strong driving wind,
and it filled the entire house in which they were.
Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire,
which parted and came to rest on each one of them.
The Holy Spirit arrives in chaos – bolting from the sky, shaking the walls, and threatening to set their hair on fire. It was an amazing gift from heaven, but it had to be scary! It taught the disciples, and it teaches us, a critical lesson.
“Come, Holy Spirit” is a dangerous prayer! Don’t say it if you don’t want to be shaken out of your routine, blown off course, and ignited with a grace that refuses half-heartedness.
“Pour out your Spirit” is a prayer of continual conversion:
• It resists expectations, normalization, definition, and institutionalization.
• It demands that we are always ready to hope, to be surprised, to change.
• It asks us to see possibility everywhere because God has drenched the world in love and mercy.
• It asks us to find a new language of peace where the old words have failed.
• It calls us to be agents of its fierce generosity by sharing the gifts of Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, and Fear of the Lord wherever these are needed.
After the tornado settled and the rafters fell back in place, the disciples were changed people. We will be too if our prayer is open and poised on the edge of hope. Through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit, we become the means by which Christ lives in our own time. It is a wildly unsettling blessing offered by this breath-giving prayer, “Come, Holy Spirit.”
As Henry Nouwen writes:
Without Pentecost the Christ-event – the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus – remains imprisoned in history as something to remember, think about and reflect on. The Spirit of Jesus comes to dwell within us, so that we can become living Christs here and now.
May we, and our whole Church which celebrates its birth today, have the courage to pray this prayer and to live its answer.
Music: Veni Creator Spiritus
English version:
Come, Holy Spirit, Creator blest,
and in our souls take up Thy rest;
come with Thy grace and heavenly aid
to fill the hearts which Thou hast made.
O comforter, to Thee we cry,
O heavenly gift of God Most High,
O fount of life and fire of love,
and sweet anointing from above.
Thou in Thy sevenfold gifts are known;
Thou, finger of God’s hand we own;
Thou, promise of the Father,
Thou Who dost the tongue with power imbue.
Kindle our sense from above,
and make our hearts o’erflow with love;
with patience firm and virtue high
the weakness of our flesh supply.
Far from us drive the foe we dread,
and grant us Thy peace instead;
so shall we not, with Thee for guide,
turn from the path of life aside.
Oh, may Thy grace on us bestow
the Father and the Son to know;
and Thee, through endless times confessed,
of both the eternal Spirit blest.
Now to the Father and the Son,
Who rose from death, be glory given,
with Thou, O Holy Comforter,
henceforth by all in earth and heaven. Amen.
Latin version:
Veni, Creator Spiritus, mentes tuorum visita,
imple superna gratia quae tu creasti pectora.
Qui diceris Paraclitus, altissimi donum Dei,
fons vivus, ignis, caritas, et spiritalis unctio.
Tu, septiformis munere, digitus paternae dexterae,
Tu rite promissum Patris, sermone ditans guttura.
Accende lumen sensibus: infunde amorem cordibus:
infirma nostri corporis virtute firmans perpeti.
Hostem repellas longius, pacemque dones protinus:
ductore sic te praevio
vitemus omne noxium.
Per te sciamus da Patrem, noscamus atque Filium;
Teque utriusque Spiritum credamus omni tempore.
Deo Patri sit gloria,
et Filio, qui a mortuis surrexit, ac Paraclito,
in saeculorum saecula. Amen.
Lavish Mercy 