Homily for the Solemnity of Pentecost
Sunday, 19 May 2013
Sunday, 19 May 2013
My
friends, have you ever noticed now germophobic we are as a society? We want
life to be clean, to be sterilized. Hundreds, even thousands of years has
taught us as a society – as a species – that the cleaner something is, the
better something is.
Think
about where you live and where you work. How upset do we become when we run out
of paper towels in the restroom, when the hand sanitizer in our purse or pocket
runs dry, when someone coughs, sneezes or yawns without covering their mouth?
We – and I include myself in this – become hesitant in our interpersonal
interactions, almost withdrawn from dealing with others. Not being germophobic
has become, in some ways, socially unacceptable.
Now,
let’s go back two thousand years to that first Easter Sunday. Jesus appears to
Mary and the Apostles, greets them, and then HE BREATHES ON THEM! Their
response wasn’t, “What the heck, Jesus? You know I’m getting over a cold!” No!
They waited to see what Jesus was doing, always learning from the Master.
Fast-forward
fifty days, and the fullness of the Holy Spirit is given to Mary and the
Apostles. Again, the “breath of the Lord” enlivened the hearts, minds and souls
of His creation, His people. My brothers and sisters, we need to continue to
allow the Spirit of God to breathe in us!
We,
as a society, cannot stand when we are breathed upon by others, especially when
someone else is “in my personal space”. We have sanitized and, in some ways,
quarantined our lives so much that we no longer allow others, including God, to
be a part of our life story. We wash away, both figuratively and literally,
everything that allows us to get dirty in life, to walk through the muck of
life.
But
we have to be careful. There are two ways that this can play out:
1.We
enter into the dirtiness of life on our own, soon and too quickly becoming
swallowed up by our pride, our ego, our selfishness. To get dirty in life in
this way is walking along the path of sin, because we fail to allow God’s
Spirit to work in and through us.
2.
We enter into the muck of life with the realization and goal that, with the
Lord’s help, we will get through it. And in the moments that life seems to
throw one clod of dirt after another, we come to recognize how the dirt,
through the action of the Holy Spirit, is helping to make us clean.
In
our first option, we believe that our own actions of sanitation will save us,
will keep us healthy. What we fail to realize in this option is that, as much
as we believe that we can do it on our own, the muck of the world overwhelms
us, and we quarantine ourselves from those relationships which will help us –
including our relationship with God. Our self-sanitation becomes that which
serves as the doom of humanity. We only need to look at the so-called “sexual
revolution” of the 1960s to see how we have isolated ourselves from all
intimate relationships, again including our relationship with God.
When
we look at our second option, we come to realize that life will throw clod
after clod of dirt, mud and muck at us, and it’s something that we can’t always
avoid. But we know that we can overcome these things when we rise above our “spiritual
germophobia”, and allow the Holy Spirit to be breathed upon us once again. It
is giving into a relationship with the Holy Spirit with a sense of reckless
abandon that we will come to know fully the life that God intended us to live.
This
doesn’t mean we won’t get dirty in life. It does mean that we know the best way
to become clean and to stay as clean as possible is through a life lived in the
Holy Spirit – through the Church and her Sacraments. This is the way God
continues to breathe on us – His Church – and gives us life.
My
brothers and sisters, we must avoid becoming “spiritual germophobes”. We must
allow our God to breathe His life-giving Spirit upon us. We must not be afraid
to get dirty by the muck of life, nor must we be afraid to be cleansed by the
Spirit and the Sacraments.
The
best way to rally against this “spiritual germophobia” is to pray to the Holy
Spirit and submit to His will. When we give ourselves over to the life of the
Spirit with reckless abandon, we open ourselves to the reality of joy found in
living the Christian life, even when the dirt and the mud are being thrown at
us.
And,
so, confident that our God will breathe into us His Spirit, and trusting that
the Holy Spirit guides us in all things, we pray:
Come, O Holy Spirit, beloved of my soul, I adore You. Enlighten me,
guide me, strengthen me, and console me. Tell me what I must do. Inspire me
with what I must say. Give me Your orders. I promise to submit myself to You in
all that You ask of me and to accept all that You permit to happen to me. Let
me only know Your will, and do Your will. Amen.
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Enjoy the journey . . .
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