PENTECOST

                                           Πεντηκοστ

                                            PENTECOST 

                                  A CARMELITE REFLECTION 

     

"On the day of Pentecost, when the seven weeks of Easter had come to an end, Christ's Passover is fulfilled in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, manifested, given, and communicated as a Divine Person: of His fullness, Christ, the Lord, pours out the Spirit in abundance" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, 731).

The Holy Spirit of the Living God, the Third Person of the Divine Three. Where do we meet Him in Sacred Scripture? What does He reveal about Himself, this RUAH, the Holy One Who "brooded over the face of the waters" of our souls in our darkness? (Gen 1)

 

He is the Power of the Most High Who overshadowed Mary, filled her being, and she conceived the Lord God. 

His work reveals Himself. He is the Giver of Life, in abundance.

Mary, carrying the just-conceived three day old Saviour, greeted Elizabeth whose child in her womb leaped with holy joy when Spirit Lord released the soul of the unborn John the Baptist from original sin. 

At every Sacrament of Baptism, the Mighty Power of Spirit Lord, Giver of spiritual life cleanses the soul from original sin. We see the priestly vestments, the white Baptismal cloth, the holy water, we hear the child's cries. What we don't see is the rush of Spirit Lord pouring Himself into that soul, Self-giving Goodness, unseen, unheard, calling that child into Rebirth out of original sin.  Spirit Lord, Whose work reveals Himself. He is the Giver of spiritual life, in abundance. 

Throughout the Gospels, a limited profile of this Divine Person slowly emerges into our sin-restricted view. His Aroma reveals His Presence. He is Wonder Counselor and Consoler, the Revealer of our Salvation, the One Who endows God's people with glory, the Winnower of all souls destroying evil in His unquenchable Fire (Luke 1 to 3). He is the Dove Whose arrival at the Jordan River "tears open the heavens" (Mk 1:10) to descend upon the Lord, the One Who then propels Jesus with great force into the desert to confront and defeat and silence satan" (Mt 4:1-11). He is Holy Joy and He fills Jesus with that great joy and "anoints" Him to preach the Good News to the poor, to set souls free who are imprisoned and oppressed by sin in all its suffocating wiles, to give sight to the spiritually and physically blind, to raise the dead to life.

It's with awe and deep humility then that we read a reflection from Blessed Pere Marie Eugene of the Child Jesus OCD. His words help to open our spiritual eyes a little wider to grasp more about the Beauty of this Divine Person and His intimacy with and within our being:

"He penetrates us and envelops us. There is not a molecule of our being where He is not; there is no movement of our members nor of our faculties that He has not animated. He is around us and even in those regions more intimate and more profound than our soul itself. God is the soul of our soul, the life of our life, the great reality in which we are, as it were, immersed; He penetrates all that we have and all that we are by His active presence and His vivifying power....He is the Architect of our holiness, our supernatural beauty: 'In Him we live and move and have our being.' 

We are identified with Christ, that's true, but it happens through the action of the Holy Spirit present in all the pores of our soul, in all the molecules of our body, in all earthly and heavenly realities. 

It is not a matter of believing in the Holy Spirit in a vague sort of way. We must believe in Him as a living reality, a living, intelligent, all-powerful Person, a Person who knows what He wants, who does what He wills, and who knows where He is going" (Acts 17:28, Fr. Marie-Eugene OCD, I Want To See God).

A "Person, a Person who knows what He wants, who does what He wills, and who knows where He is going."

And Christ the Lord pours out this Spirit in abundance, this Divine Person whose deepest longing and joy is the sanctification of our souls, to rebirth us into friends of God.  

Pere Marie of the Child Jesus was one who knew well the Spirit of the Lord as his "friend": "This Spirit is our Guest, a living flame in us, a light. He is our friend."

Nevertheless, Pere Marie's disconcerting Friend pushed him, disturbed him and the soul of our Blessed Pere rejoiced in the discomfort:

  

"We need hardships, disappointments, we need to be thwarted in our thoughts and in our plans; we need God's breaking our framework in order to understand that there could be something different. And sometimes we don't want to break our framework, for we are prisoners of our thoughts, of our plans."

Through His grace, God communicates to the soul a participation in His Nature. We may therefore rejoice when our Friend disconcerts us with broken frameworks, thwarted plans, hardships. God's Jealous Hand is at work within us, rebirthing, reshaping, renewing our countenance to closely resemble that of the Second Person of the Divine Three. And when we meet Our Father, He will immediately recognize the Countenance of His Beloved Son, returning His Gaze with great joy.

"Spirit Lord is a Person Who does what He wills."

And He wills to transfigure all souls into His love, His beauty, His purity, His gentleness, His holiness, His understanding, His order in the design of God, His wisdom, His knowledge, His counsel, His fortitude, His gift of holy fear, His piety. 

The Catechism teaches us that the Saviour's "Passover is fulfilled in the outpouring of the Holy Spirit" (CCC 731).

We are all called to come sip at the ocean of the Spirit's love and power. Who are we, His apostles today? Our faces are many, but each one is unique, as unique as our service which He gifts to us to manifest Christ's Presence in His Church, His world: 

"It is especially in their common work that the Holy Spirit glorifies the instruments He has chosen. The Holy Spirit makes Himself lowly ... in order to glorify them. Inspirer of the work by His light, efficacious agent by His omnipotence, yet He hides Himself under the human traits of the apostle and in each of us, His works show forth His Gifts, His desires, His diverse genius. The Holy Spirit appears in this world under a thousand human faces that reflect the power and grace of His hidden presence. The Spirit never repeats Himself in the exterior forms He chooses". 

Mary, the Mother of God has been described as the Immaculata (St Maximilian Kolbe); "the fairest honor of our race" (Antiphon 2, The Liturgy Archive); "Beloved Daughter of the Eternal Father, Admirable Mother of the Son, Faithful spouse of the Holy Spirit" (St Louis de Montfort).

It therefore is fitting to conclude our thoughts by reflecting on the profound reflection of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross OCD as she seeks to discern the Spirit's Beauty through the eyes of Mary, Queen of Carmel, His faithful spouse:

                                             

POEM TO SPIRIT LORD.

"Are You the one who created the unclouded mirror

Next to the Almighty's throne,
Like a crystal sea,
In which Divinity lovingly looks at itself?
You bend over the fairest work of Your creation,
And radiantly Your own gaze
Is illumined in return.
And of all creatures the pure beauty
Is joined in one in the dear form
Of the Virgin, your Immaculate Bride:
Holy Spirit, Creator of All!"

COME, HOLY SPIRIT, FILL THE HEARTS OF YOUR FAITHFUL, ENKINDLE IN 

US THE FIRE OF YOUR LOVE, SEND FORTH YOUR SPIRIT, AND WE SHALL BE CREATED, AND THOU SHALT RENEW THE FACE OF THE EARTH.

--

Anna Rae-Kelly OCDS
www.annaprae.com

THE PASSION AND DEATH AND RESURRECTION OF THE LORD

                                                                     THE  GIFT OF SELF

"God is Love, and is therefore the Good, communicative of itself... to give of Himself is an essential movement of His Nature... His Free Will is captivated by the movement of His Love." 

Love is His Being. His Will is subject to the Self-emptying power of His Mighty Love. Wearing nothing but His cloak of Ignominy, we behold the Man of Sorrows Whose Passion reveals the depths of His Love: His Love pins Him to His Cross: In His Love He endures His loneliness, His abandonment, His isolation, and His tsunami of pain. 

                                  

                                                             LOVE IS HIS GIFT OF SELF.

                 "What power this gift has! ...It cannot fail to draw the Almighty to become one with our lowliness." 

                                                                  Our "lowliness". 

Our misery draws God... our "feeble love enslaves Him," captivates Him. 

When our free will is captivated by our desire to love Him, we begin to grow in self-knowledge.  And the awareness of our sins causes us to stumble on our own Via Dolorosa alongside our Beloved Savior this Good Friday,  When we skin our knees during our multiple falls under the weight of our pride, we are given to remember that it is Spirit Lord Who is endlessly inspiring a holy longing in our soul to pour ourselves, our will, our 'belongings', our security, into an ever-deeper self-abandonment into God's ocean of Love. 

                                                 In other words, to gift ourselves to God.

Maybe we may pause to wonder, during this Holy Week, are we too actually being invited to be so profoundly identified with our Savior, to love with His Love, to participate in His Redemptive Act of winning souls whom Jesus Lord can then give with great joy back to Our Father? To unite ourselves into Love, to give Him the total gift of 'myself'?

Could people whose lives are as ordinary as ours actually be called to such depths of holiness? Isn't that Way reserved for God's saints?

St Teresa of Avila answers our questions:

"... He didn't say, 'I will give drink to those whom I think fit for it'... He invites us all, without conditions..." 

Our great saint was teaching us that there is no two-tier holiness, that holiness is friendship with God and that He desires to call all of us His 'friend'.

 

And so we may further wonder... what measure of self should we give our Friend?

Once again, St Teresa of Jesus advises us:

"We think we are giving God everything, whereas what we are really offering Him is the revenue, or the fruits of our land while keeping the stock and the right of ownership of it in our own hands."

Perhaps these words of Teresa cause us to confront the reality that we have determinedly retained the right of ownership of everything God has given us. During our life-years, we have constructed illusions to avoid giving God the gift of self: illusions of self-importance, self-pride, self-opinion... these and many more 'selves'.  

We may have listened to and been imprisoned by the fears that the devil uses to paralyze our soul: if we give God ownership of our 'self', will He take our family, our bank account, our home, our loved ones? Our fears convince us that these losses will be the consequences of total self-surrender to Jesus Lord Whose own life and death encompassed all of these 'losses'. 

St Teresa speaks:

"He refuses to force our will. He takes what we give Him."

If all we can give Him is a mustard seed-measure of self, He grasps it with great joy because, "our feeble love enslaves Him". 

In Matthew 19, we hear Jesus Lord loving and reassuring response to our soul-destroying fears:

"...everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for 

my name's sake, will receive a hundredfold, and will inherit eternal life."

                                     Our God will never be outdone in generosity.

If we give Him ownership of family, He will grasp our gift and heal all the situations in our family that wound us deeply... the lost soul of a beloved brother, the illness of a grandmother, the daughter who has separated from us, the fear for a son bound over by addictions.

 

When we give over the rights of ownership to the "fruits of our land" as well as the "stock from the revenue," He will lovingly remind us that He is and always has been the CFO of our bank account and He will lead us to the purchase of a different "field" which, unlike our bank account, will not imprison our soul. It will transform our soul into the very likeness and beauty of our Savior Lord.

                           "...so that in eternal glory the Celestial Court shall marvel at the marked likeness of their features with my  Divine Countenance" (Our Lord Jesus Christ to St. Gertrude).

And while we are "still a great way off " (Luke 15:20), our Beloved Father will run all the way to meet us because He will behold in us the very Countenance of His own Son.

                   Our gift of self: the most perfect expression of love we can offer to God. 

                         

Quotations:

Blessed Marie Eugene of the Child Jesus. OCD

St. Teresa of Jesus OCD

St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face OCD

                                        

                                          

                            

--

Anna Rae-Kelly OCDS
www.annaprae.com