Pentecost 2010

Homily for Pentecost 23 May 2010 (Yr c)
Preached at Our Lady Immaculate, Chelmsford

When I spoke in this dear church last it was on your patronal festival and we reflected together on the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady. If I begin by referring to the homily I gave then it is not because I think my words were so memorable that they may be still in your minds but because you may have read it more recently in your parish magazine. I spoke then of there being in the mind of God an ideal version of each one of us- a “form” of each one of us to use Plato’s term- and how of us all only Our Lady has succeeded, by her perfect identification of herself with the Will of God, by the “fiat” that was her constant response to every prompting of the Holy Spirit, in achieving that ideal, being completely and exactly what God had always in mind for her to be.
This ties in very well with our theme for today’s great feast of Pentecost, when we consider the Holy Spirit at work in our individual lives and at work in the Church as a whole. We have already used the word “prompt” and that is a good way of thinking about the Holy Spirit, the great prompter of the Church. Jesus explains to his disciples in today’s Gospel that they are not to be anxious about how they are going to manage after he has returned to heaven (they were great worriers weren’t they!) because “the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all I have said to you”. The Holy Spirit comes to those first Christians today at Pentecost as we heard in our reading from the Acts, and only now do they really understand the full implications of everything that has been happening since the crucifixion- as John has Jesus say elsewhere in this Gospel (Jn 16:15) “It is from me that he will derive all that he makes plain to you” (Knox tr) and as the priest will say at this Mass in the prayer over the gifts “may the Spirit you promised….reveal to us the full meaning of this sacrifice”. That is one of the titles of the Holy Spirit, isn’t it- the Revealer.
Now the Holy Spirit is like a prompt in that respect- he reminds us of the teachings of Our Lord and helps us understand something of what the Passion and Resurrection of Our Lord mean. But he is also a prompt in other ways too. I don’t know if amateur dramatics flourish in this parish, if any of you tread the boards, but if you do you will know that when people act and go on stage, one of the things they most dread is forgetting their lines, and so there is a prompt, someone sitting just offstage in the half light with the script, who can put them right when they dry up or lose- literally- the plot. Well of course that is exactly what the Holy Spirit does in our lives. Archbishop Fulton Sheen says “the great business of the Holy Spirit is to stand behind the scenes to make Christ more real”, to make Christ more real to us and to make us get our lines right. We have it on good authority that “all the world’s a stage” and in recent years there’s a saying that one hears all the time- “life’s not a rehearsal”. Life is not a rehearsal, and we have only one go at it. We are shoved on stage when we pop out of the womb and we have to act our part as best we can from then on, to whatever audience we’ve got here below, whether appreciative or not, throwing tomatoes at us or bouquets. It doesn’t matter in a way, because watching us and willing us on is God himself and his holy Mother, and because whispering to us the next line and the next move is that great prompt, the Holy Spirit. All we have to do is have the confidence to walk out on the stage and look the audience in the eye, and to listen out for those prompts! The prompts may be quite simple, quite straightforward, like “Don’t forget to say your prayers tonight”, “Why not pop into that church on your way to the shops and have a few minutes before the Bl Sacrament?” , they may be nagging away at us, reminding us that we should be beginning to put a few ideas together for our next Confession (“because it’s been a while and we don’t want to get slack do we?”) The prompts may be about how we show that we are people of love, which our Lord said was to be our defining characteristic as his followers (see how they love one another), saying to us “why not smile at that person who’s on their own this morning? “; “ Shall I call in on Mrs so-and-so and see if she needs anything?” You know the sort of thing, those little signs of caring and affectionate interest that can mean so much. And they may be bigger, more urgent, more demanding prompts too- “couldn’t we give more in the Giftaid scheme?”, “ Should I really be involved with this person?”, “Is this the right kind of work for a Catholic?” “ Do I have a vocation and how much longer can I smother it?”
In all these ways what the Holy Spirit is doing is – in another wonderful phrase of Fulton Sheen’s – “wooing the soul”, drawing us ever closer to Our Lord, bringing us into an ever more intimate union with him, in an embrace that is ever tighter. We must let the Holy Spirit do his work, we must allow this ever closer intimacy to come about. Pope Leo XIII of happy memory devoted an encyclical “Divinum Illud Munus” in 1897 to the Holy Spirit and describes this divine intimacy in this way: “that union of affection by which the soul adheres more closely to God, more so than the friend is united to his most loving and beloved friend, and enjoys God in all fullness and sweetness….attributed in a peculiar manner to the Holy Spirit”. (sec 9)
I close with a little story about a builder I used to have. He was Turkish Cypriot and his name was Easy. Now Easy’s private life was a source of as much amazement to me as his bills were, and at the time he was working for me he was living with the third Mrs Easy. One day I met the third Mrs Easy in the street, walking with their little son who was about three years old. I did what was expected of me and went ooh and aah and I said “He’s just like his father!”, whereupon Mrs Easy said rather grimly “I know, but I’m knocking it out of him!” Now that illustrates what I mean about the Holy Spirit and his role in our lives. We need to have our egoism knocked out of us and our likeness to God be made more apparent. One of the great theologians of Alexandria in the 4th century, Didymus the Blind, says “the Holy Spirit brings us back from a state of deformity to our pristine beauty and so fills us with his grace that we can no longer make room for anything that is unworthy of our love”. The Holy Spirit exists to knock us into shape, to offer us all the prompts we need to follow God’s holy will for our lives, to turn us bit by bit into that ideal version of us that God has in his heart for each one of us, our eternal destiny as one of his beloved sons and daughters, with no room in our lives for anything unworthy. It is up to us to react to the Holy Spirit, to respond to his promptings. Can we be like that French Carmelite, near contemporary of Ste Thérèse, Bl Elisabeth of the Trinity, who prayed “I wish to spend my life in listening to you, I wish to make myself wholly teachable, so as to learn everything from you”? We have before us always the supreme example of Our Lady. As God’s plan for her began to dawn upon her, she asked Gabriel “How shall this be?” and received the response “The Holy Spirit will come upon you”. Let us ask the Holy Spirit to come upon us at this Mass, to come and in St Paul’s words “make his home in us”, come and whisper to us ever more clearly the words of the script we need to bring off our greatest role, the Child of God that God wants us to be, and may each of us find at the end of our lives in the applause of the angels and saints that what we given is the performance of a lifetime. Amen.