PENTECOST - LORD, SEND OUT YOUR SPIRIT

"The Spirit prepares men and goes out to them with His grace, in order to draw them to Christ. The Spirit manifests the risen Lord to them, recalls His word to them and opens their minds to the understanding of His Death and Resurrection. He makes present the mystery of Christ, supremely in the Eucharist, in order to reconcile them, to bring them into communion with God, that they may 'bear much fruit.' " (Catechism of the Catholic Church, article 737)

"The Spirit prepares men and goes out to them with His Grace, in order to draw them to Christ."

Have our minds ever been brought to a full stop when reading Sacred Scripture? One word, or one complete sentence may suddenly grasp our faculties: our intellect, our memory, our emotions. Perhaps the Holy Spirit may have animated every molecule, every pore in our body to the very 'tip of our fingers, to the tip of our toes' and a 'holy shiver' rushes through our being as He gives Light to our seeking mind.

This Pentecost Sunday, when Spirit Lord inflamed Christ's frightened apostles huddling together in that upper room around Mary, the Spirit's Immaculate spouse, we too are present, because wherever God is, we, born or yet to be born, are held in His Loving Mind.

Do we too look on the Flames of His Love as He hovers over us, over every soul in whom He moves in all times and places? And in each one of us, He animates our thoughts and we experience that Living, rushing Flame as He enlivens our minds and we are drawn into unknown depths of Sacred Scripture. Holy words that we may have read or heard so often throughout our lived years, suddenly flood into our minds and our spiritual awareness is set on Fire.

This may have happened when, after decades of praying the Psalms, one word, one line may reveal an astonishing depth of a life-changing meaning. 

When we proclaim Psalm 139 aloud and substitute our own voice for that of King David's, using his words to address our Creator, Spirit Lord may inspire our own magnificat in our souls, and give us His Power to explain and unite our prayer with the psalmist: 

“May the spoken words of our mouth and the hidden thoughts of our heart win favour with you, O Lord our God” ... so that You may see and love in us what You saw and loved in Your Son, Jesus Christ.

When Spirit Lord animates our thoughts and our words, it is He Who prays through us in glorious praise of God's indescribable love for each soul whom He has created. It is Spirit Lord Who inflames our soul and our prayer soars to new heights of awe and gratitude.

Spirit Lord has prepared us, has now come to us, and is drawing us to Christ by empowering us to sing our magnificent prayer of praise as we sit to meet Him in silent solitude in our candle-lit room.

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

you discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down

and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue,

O Lord, you know it completely.

You hem me in, behind and before,

and lay your hand upon me.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me;

it is so high that I cannot attain it.

Where can I go from your spirit?

Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning

and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

even there your hand shall lead me,

and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,

and night wraps itself around me,"

even the darkness is not dark to you;

the night is as bright as the day,

for darkness is as light to you.

                   (from Psalm 139)

Psalm 139 reveals God's deeply loving, intimate crafting and infinite knowledge of each human being, uniquely and wonderfully made by Him.

God's intimate touch and knowledge of our soul is further detailed in the mystery of verse 16 which reads "... your eyes saw me unformed, in your book all are written down."

Some have translated these words of King David to describe the time when God will open that "book" and have interpreted it to means that God will see all of our actions which will justify His condemnation of us. This understanding of Verse 16 is also at times supported by the verse from St Luke 12:2:

"Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known."    

But in prayer, perhaps Spirit Lord might draw us into a deeper discernment of "your book."

Edith Stein guides us.

She speaks of the "BOOK OF THE CROSS ..."

To open that Book, we must sit humbly available, before a Crucifix.

And we look on the One Whom we have pierced as He lovingly returns our gaze. 

In His Sacred Body, Jesus Lord let flow unquenchable oceans of mercy. All sins were absorbed and consumed into His Suffering Sacred Humanity and the Cross, holding and giving witness to His ocean of suffering, is where the pages of our lives reveal the story of our "actions."

The Cross that pins Him is where we can't run from His spirit, or flee from His face, or climb the mountains of our wrongdoings. The Cross is where He will never stop longing for us to give Him our broken selves, wounded and scourged by our own sins. Even if we lie in the grave, He is there, where His right hand holds us fast (Psalm 139).

The Book of the Cross is the story of our lives, our life-sufferings and death. 

The Book of the Cross is Christ's Book and our book.

In every page of this sacred Book the profound and hidden meanings of every incident, suffering, joy, of our lives are best read under the guidance and inspirations of the Holy Spirit. Wherever in our lives we travel, whatever we become, we are ever under the Gaze of God, a Gaze of utter love, never condemning, ever redeeming.

The glorious Spirit of God has "made present ... the mystery of Christ" and has "opened our minds" through Sacred Scripture to further grasp an "understanding of His Death and Resurrection." 

"FATHER OF LIGHT, FROM WHOM EVERY GOOD GIFT COMES,

SEND YOUR SPIRIT INTO OUR LIVES

WITH THE POWER OF A MIGHTY WIND,

AND BY THE FLAME OF YOUR WISDOM

OPEN THE HORIZONS OF OUR MINDS.

LOOSEN OUR TONGUES TO SING YOUR PRAISE

IN WORDS BEYOND THE POWER OF SPEECH

FOR WITHOUT YOUR SPIRIT

MAN COULD NEVER RAISE HIS VOICE IN WORDS OF PEACE

OR ANNOUNCE THE TRUTH THAT JESUS IS LORD,

WHO LIVES AND REIGNS WITH YOU AND THE HOLY SPIRIT."

                             (Liturgy of the Hours, PENTECOST SUNDAY )

RISEN WOUNDS

"He is risen from the dead and He is Lord"

(Matt 28:6, Confession from Romans 10:9)

                                              "Put your finger here and see my hands,

                                             and bring your hand and put it into my side, 

                                                 and do not be unbelieving, but believe."    

                                                                        (John 20:27)  

                                                                                  

It is Easter Sunday morning. 

On this glorious, astonishing day of miraculous and eternal moments, a day filled with holy joy,

our Savior, Lord, God, directs our inner eye to look on the miracles held in His Sacred Risen Body, to meditate on the five deep canyons where we hide when we are in our darkness and pain and fear and sinfulness. His Sacred Risen Body is the Same Sacred Body that will rush to embrace us when we are finally called Home, His arms open wide, utter joy on His Face. 

                                                      He is our Promised Land.

                                          "Put your finger here and see my hands,

                                           and bring your hand and put it into my side, 

                                               and do not be unbelieving, but believe." 

Pope Benedict XVI described that moment of encounter between Christ Jesus and His apostles... us ... in the barricaded room when our "wounded God " stands among us and His Wounds are laid bare. His "wounds of love," the wounds He longed for when He took on "the passion of man," made evident in the Shroud of Turin, in the "Icon written in blood." 

These Wounds make visible the unquenchable love of God for each of us. These "Risen Wounds" reveal the essence of God, His Divine Vulnerability, that will be made present on His Sacred Body for all time. 

We may continue to ponder for the rest of our lives how and why our souls are so deeply moved by the fathomless depths in the Pope's description: His "Risen Wounds."

On this day of the Risen Lord, when the torrents of God's Mercy are flooding into souls of all time, perhaps we may be inspired to take that phrase to prayer : Risen Wounds. 

Spirit Lord may grace us with a question ... why would the Savior retain the Wounds from the nails on His Sacred Body if His Flesh, after 3 days, had otherwise completely healed from lashings, thorns, punches, blows, bruises. 

In the words, "Risen Wounds", Pope Benedict was drawing on the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas who had helped us to begin to understand that the Savior's Wounds, retained in His Glorified Body, are Wounds that would remain visible until the end of time and beyond.

St. Thomas described them as wounds of dignity, not deformity, beacons of hope, signs of victory won through humility and self-surrender, evidence of a love filled with mercy, gifted to His Father in self-emptying obedience (Summa Theologiae).

Christ Jesus will never not have these Sacred Wounds, visible to all souls for all eternity.

And St. John of the Cross draws us deeply into each wound to locate our souls in those places of healing, redemption: St. John helps us to locate our broken selves, our 'violated ' soul, our fragile and finite humanity  as we hide in the 'clefts' of these Sacred Risen Wounds. There, with our permission, Spirit Lord begins to purify us, consumes our egoism, and we find mercy, restoration, healing, redemption, always encloaked in Love.

“O my dove, in the clefts of the rock, in the secret places of the cliff, 

let me see your face, 

let me hear your voice” 

(Song of Songs 2:14).

Our Divine Saviour, the Rock, pleads with us in a great longing, to enter into His Risen Wounds, especially the 'secret place ' of the Wound in His Side where He yearns to 'see our face, hear our voice.' 

At the Last Supper, Jesus pronounced,

"This is my body ... This is my blood."

St. John Paul II teaches us that in the Lord's use of the present tense, "IS",  He brought about a "mysterious 'oneness in time' between the Triduum , the Last Supper, Passion, and Resurrection, and the passage of the centuries".

The Pope is teaching us that at every Holy Communion, every Holy Eucharist for all time when a priest consecrates the bread and wine, Jesus Lord becomes Present, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity.

We step forward, in awe and trembling, to receive His Sacred Body. This is the same Sacred Body that holds the Risen Wounds. All time meets in Him, Divine Time and God's human time. And hosts of Angelic Beings bow low before us because we now carry on our tongue or in our hand the Lord of Hosts : because we have become His living Tabernacle, His enfleshed Ark of the Covenant. If we manage to navigate our way back to our pews, we may be graced to realize that God's Divine Vulnerability is now subject to ourselves. We now hold in our being the One Who bears the Wounds of Love, our Wounded God who is the Icon written in Blood, Who now "sees our face and hears our voice."  

The One Whose wounds of love, Whose Sacred Body holds the "clefts" where we hide, is now hidden within us, truly Present with Father and Holy Spirit, humbly asking for us to gaze on Him with our "feeble love that enthralls" Him.

                                                 "Put your finger here and see my hands,

                                                  and bring your hand and put it into my side, 

                                                    and do not be unbelieving, but believe." 

Our glorious, Risen Lord, ever-loving, ever-present, ever-pleading, ever-longing, ever-waiting, ever-forgiving, ever-redeeming, ever-imprisoned in our being ...

"To live by love is closely to enfold 

the Uncreated Word  - Voice of my Lord!

And with Thee, in my heart of hearts, to hold

the Spirit sending forth His flame adored.

Thus, loving Thee, the Father too is mine :

My feeble heart hath drawn Him from above,

O Trinity, the Prisoner Divine!

           Oh, my poor love."

(St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face)

   HE IS ALIVE.