Homily: Pentecost Sunday: 2007

I remember hearing once about an Asian catechumen asking a priest one day: "I understand praying to Venerable Father and Venerable Son, but, please, I do not understand praying to Venerable Bird." :)

The Holy Spirit descended in only the form of a dove (at the Baptism in the Jordan), and only the form of a flame (on Pentecost). He is a spirit and so has no physical body. As the priest on EWTN said the other day (in a daily Mass homily), "The Father is over us, the Son is beside us, but the Holy Spirit is within us." Thus we say He guides us and inspires us. And from the beginning He has guided and inspired the Church, who is in some mystical way God the Son's body . . . in a similar way to that in which a man and a woman who marry become "one flesh." They are mystically united so that a slight of one is a slight of the other; a glory of one is a glory of the other.

We were privileged to have a Franciscan friar give us the homily this weekend at Mass. He came to our town for the wedding of his cousin to a Vietnamese Buddhist girl. He said there he was at the pre-wedding ceremony at the Buddhist temple, face-to-face with a Vietnamese monk in a grey robe, almost a mirror-image of his own grey habit! (It made me think forward to June 1st and the feast of another set of Japanese martyrs. Jesuits, Augustinians, and Franciscans evangelized Japan in the 17th century and a great untold footnote in this story is the number of Buddhist monks who embraced Catholicism, even at the cost of their own lives.) As Father told us, a thousand years before Christ the founder of Buddhism, Gautama Buddha, taught his followers to pray to the Spirit of God. This is the same God, although it is not, of course, from the church Christ founded.

He also asked us if we had ever experienced God being close to us . . . if we had ever had a real experience where we knew God was with us. I have had some in my own life, of course (usually related to a really trying time of suffering), but I thought of something an old priest had told me long ago. One time (also in a time of deep suffering for him) he was praying to the Holy Spirit, and he actually heard and felt a great rush of movement near his ear, like the rushing of a wind or the flight of a bird. He is reasonably sure it was a manifestation of the Holy Spirit, and yes, it did bring him peace and resolution.

Father asked us if any of us were charismatics and three brave souls raised their hands. He told us that if we really want to experience joy in our faith and in our liturgy, we should consider becoming charismatic Catholics. Many of us old people equate church services with something stately, staid and boring. Believe me, he said, charismatics are going to have a great time today on this feast of Pentecost!

And finally, Father asked us if we have anyone in our family we worry about; specifically, anyone who doesn't go to church, or who disappoints us, or who engages in questionable behavior. Then he changed the question and asked us if we don't have anyone like that in our family. We all laughed. Then he followed that right up with this advice: "Pray to the Holy Spirit for them."

I realize this is all his homily and not mine . . . but if you have something great already, why change it? Happy Pentecost, people.