Dear Friends,
Today is the Solemnity of Pentecost. We celebrate the birth of the Church. For nine days, we have been praying our novena to the Holy Spirit. Every day we meditated on a gift we asked for. At the end of this journey, as we celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit, time has come to embark on a new adventure with the Lord.
In today’s gospel, the Risen Lord comes to reassure us. He gives us his peace and commissions us to storm the world with courage. Today, there is need to remember the message of pope Francis to the youth at the 2016 World Youth Day: “Today’s world demands that you be a protagonist of history, because life is always beautiful when we choose to live it fully, when we choose to leave a mark.” This message is for all of us today. The Holy Spirit gives us the opportunity the leave that mark in the world in so many ways.
For one, we are called to speak a new language. This means for us that being one family in Christ, and sharing in his Body and blood, we are meant to speak the language of love that binds us together. No matter how different we can be from one another and exactly in spite of it, and precisely because of it since we members of one body, love and unity should characterize us. Secondly, we have received the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Now is the time to bear its fruits. In a world that hungers for true love, we are girded with the Holy Spirit to bear fruits which will transform the world we live in.
In his priestly prayer we read throughout this past week, Christ insists on the fact that we “are not of the world” but “in the world.” This means that we have a mission and purpose to fulfill as “salt” and “light” of the world. We cannot make this happen unless we strive to bear the fruits of the Holy Spirit about we are reminded in today’s second reading. But because no one can give what they do not have, we are invited to make sure that these fruits we have to share with the world are truly rooted in our hearts and lives and nurtured buy our strong relationship with Christ.
The Holy Spirit nurtures and sustains the life of the Church. This happens through the openness that Church members show to the power and the actions of the Holy Spirit upon them. Today is the time for us to meditate upon our openness to the call and to rediscover the place of the Holy Spirit in our personal life. It is only when the let the Holy Spirit guide us that we can be the difference God meant us to be in the world. The questions for us today are, to what extend am I keeping the Church alive by sharing the gifts the Holy Spirit has imparted to me? After the coming of the Holy Spirit, the Apostles undertook the missionary journey. How am I participating to that missionary activity of the Church both within and outside of the Church? Would other people understand my language today, even when they do not share my worldview, and in what language do I address those around me?
Let us continue to pray for one another and for our parish family, asking that the gifts we received from the Holy Spirit may give the strong impulse to bear its fruits in the world for the advent of the kingdom of love and unity.
Fr. Emery