Tag: #pentecost

Posted on

Pentecost, 2025 – The Power of Relationship

The Power of Relationship

      Think of your best friend, soulmate, BFF, bestie, or whoever you consider the one who knows you better than anyone. Now think of the quality of that relationship. How did it start? How did it develop. Were there any particular moments, trials, achievements, that took it to the next level? When you describe the relationship itself, what words do you use? How do you explain such a relationship? At a certain point, words will fail, but you can at least describe such a relationship gives you life. 

       In a nutshell, this is exactly what the Church does when we try to describe the Holy Spirit. Words will ultimately fail, but that does not mean we should not try.

       The key to pondering the reality of the Holy Spirit is to understand that we are talking about relationship. Specifically, we are referring to the relationship between the Father and the Son. Like all loving relationships, such as the one between a husband and wife, it includes the two principle parties; but like a good marriage, such a love cannot be contained to just those two. This is manifested in several ways.

       Love by its very nature is creative and life-giving. For example, in the total self-giving spiritual and physical union of husband and wife, body and soul, we are talking about love so intense in its expression that nine months later you may have to give it a name! Such a love literally begets a life of its own. In a similar, but perfect and eternal way, all creation including you and me is begotten of the loving,  creative love between the Father and the Son. 

       This power of the love of God we  call the Holy Spirit also sustains and sanctifies. We Catholics are not ‘deists.’  We do not believe that God set the world in motion and then walked away. Maybe checking on it from time to time as one will check the soup. No, Divine Love cares for what it begets. As Catholics we believe that God is present to all creation, sustains us, continues to redeem us and sanctify us.

       It is this last bit about sanctification which is the kicker. It is a very heady thing to realize that each of us, by our baptism and by the other sacraments of the Church, are invited to participate in the very relationship that is God. This “Holy Spirit,” which is the power of the love of God between the Father and the Son, this relationship of sanctifying grace is what enables us to be what God has intended for each of us when he loved us into being.

       May we welcome such grace and let it transform us to reflections of such a perfect love.

Posted on

Holy Spirit 101

A truck loaded with thousands of copies of Roget’s Thesaurus crashed yesterday, losing its entire load.  Witnesses were stunned, startled, aghast, taken aback, stupefied, confused, shocked, rattled, paralyzed, dazed, bewildered, mixed up, surprised, awed, dumbfounded, nonplussed, flabbergasted, astounded, amazed, confounded, astonished, overwhelmed, horrified, numbed, speechless, and perplexed.

     Each year the Church commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Mary and the Apostles in the Upper Room. Pentecost is celebrated as the “birthday of the Church. We dress in red vestments to call to mind the tongues as of fire that rested on the heads of the disciples. We chant, “Come, Holy Spirit!” But who is the Holy Spirit and what’s it all about?

       The first thing we see from the sacred text is that the Holy Spirit is POWER, specifically the power of the love of God active in the life of the Church and in every Christian. Theologically, we understand the Holy Spirit as the love between the Father and the Son. By its very nature, love is procreating animating, and recreating. It is procreative in the act of creation itself. God does not need the universe and everyone in it, but God is love and love creates. So here we are, created in love for love.

       The Holy Spirit is also animating, that is it gives the “anima” or soul that enables the universe, the Church, each one of us to become what we are created to be in the first place. It was the power of the Spirit that breathed over the waters and gave life to all things. It was the power of the Spirit by which the Word took flesh of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It was the power of the Spirit that breathed life and courage into the disciples in the Upper Room so that they ceased to be frightened and went forth boldly proclaiming the resurrection and the forgiveness of sins.

       The Holy Spirit is also recreating. Most profoundly, this happens in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Again, love by its nature leads to ever-deepening communion (unity at the very level of being).  However, because the world and everyone in it has limits, those limits will manifest themselves, sometimes in very hurtful and divisive ways.  It is here that the power of the Spirit enables us to seek forgiveness from those whom we have sinned against and to forgive those who have sinned against us. Forgiveness is the power of the Spirit overcoming our limitations and allowing us to transcend the offense and open the way for reconciliation. There is no sin greater than the power of God’s love to forgive. By the same token, because the same spirit dwells in us, there is no sin greater than our power to forgive.

       In sum, the Holy Spirit is the power of God’s love active in the world and the life of the Church. This love is at one procreating, animating and recreating. It is the power of the God’s love that enables us to love as God loves and so help the world become what he has created it to be.