A reflection on the readings for Pentecost Sunday
It was around this time back in 2013 that I was in the home stretch on the years-long path to my ordination as a deacon. The priests and deacons I spoke with told me that receiving the Sacrament of Holy Orders would be an amazing experience; that every man might have a different experience, but that for each it would be life changing.
Prior to the ordination Mass, I had been selected to serve as the deacon who would assist our cardinal archbishop at the altar during the Liturgy of the Eucharist immediately after the ordination rite. I was honored, but also more than a little terrified – I got so focused on wanting to do my part well that all I could think of was the ways I might go wrong in front of the cardinal and hundreds of people.
With all that swirling in my mind, I found myself face-down on the cool marble beside my brothers as we prostrated ourselves before the altar during the Mass of Ordination. My heart was pounding so hard that I was sure the guys on either side of me could feel the vibrations. Shortly after we rose, we went one by one up the steps to kneel before the cardinal for the laying on of hands.
When it was my turn, I knelt before him, my heart still pounding. He placed his hands on my head and silently prayed over me, calling down the Holy Spirit. I slowly began to feel calmer, but as he concluded his silent prayer, he pressed down gently on my head. I later described it as “He hit my spiritual reset button.” The moment he pressed his hands down as kind of an exclamation point to his invocation of the Holy Spirit, I felt all my anxiety disappear in an instant, replaced by a sense of peace, an amazing peace that remained with me through the rest of the Mass and that has stayed with me since.
That small little personal Pentecost of mine didn’t mark the end of my formation as much as it was the beginning of a whole new life for me, a moment that was followed after the Mass by the Cardinal handing me an envelope containing my parish assignment that brought me into a community where I’ve learned so much about what it means to love and serve our Lord and his people.
The experience that my brother deacons and I had that day is an echo down the ages of what the Apostles and our Blessed Mother experienced that first Pentecost. Each of them experienced the coming of the Holy Spirit that day in a different way. Indeed, each of them had already had an experience of the Holy Spirit, again in different ways. Mary had been overshadowed by the Holy Spirit at the moment Jesus was conceived in her womb. Fifty days before the first Pentecost, Jesus had breathed on the Apostles in the upper room and said “Receive the Holy Spirit.”
Ten days before at his Ascension, Jesus had told the Apostles “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them all that I have commanded you.” They had received the Great Commission, yet on Pentecost, they were still beset with uncertainty, still back in Jerusalem in that familiar upper room.
It was through the outpouring of Holy Spirit that everything changed for the Apostles. Not only were they made new, but scripture tells us that three thousand people were converted that very day by Peter’s bold proclamation of the Good News. For the Apostles, it wasn’t that the Holy Spirit wasn’t always at work in their lives — because he was — it was that their hearts finally recognized that working and were transformed by it.
Like Mary and the Apostles, each of us here has had an experience of the Holy Spirit, especially through our Baptism and Confirmation. But, like the Apostles, we so often tend to hang back in the upper rooms of our own making, unsure of how – or even if – we can take the Spirit we have received down the stairs and out the door into the world outside.
The challenge for us, like the Apostles, is twofold: to recognize the Holy Spirit in our lives and to allow ourselves to be transformed – emboldened, even – by his presence. In his homily for Pentecost last year, Pope Francis suggested three ways we can recognize the Holy Spirit: in the world God created, in the Church, and in our hearts.
The world was created by the Father through the Son, and it is the Holy Spirit, the love of the Father and the Son, that brings harmony to the created world. Pope Francis quotes St. Basil to make the point “if you attempt to remove the Spirit from creation, all things become confused and their life appears unruly and lacking order.” This is so evident in our increasingly secularized world, where the efforts of the so-called enlightened to root out and marginalize the role of God and faith in the lives of people has borne only the fruits of bitterness and division.
The Church is also where we can recognize the action of the Holy Spirit. We see him in the faces of the parents who bring their baby for Baptism, we hear him in the voices of a children’s choir, we touch and taste him in the miracle of the Eucharist. As Pope Benedict once said, “The Eucharist is a ‘perpetual Pentecost’ since every time we celebrate Mass we receive the Holy Spirit who unites us more deeply with Christ and transforms us into Him.”
If we can let our hearts be moved by Holy Spirit through the beauty and wonder of creation and enlarged by the Holy Spirit through our participation in the sacramental life of the Church, then we’re able to recognize him in the closest, yet so often the hardest place to find him: our very hearts. He’s there, he’s been there all along, but his power will never be realized in our lives until we recognize him, name him, embrace him, and abandon our will in favor of his. There’s a freedom, a joy, that comes with that unlike anything we could strive to contrive by our own devices.
When we don’t see the Holy Spirit in creation, there’s no order or purpose; it’s just a world where we try to navigate the randomness without getting hurt. When we don’t see the Holy Spirit in the Church, we’re left with human opinions, polemics, and either entrenchment or abandonment. When we don’t see the Holy Spirit in our hearts, we’re left in our upper room, insulated perhaps, but inert, unable to descend the stairs and step out to where we can encounter others and bring them a message of hope.
What that recognition and embrace of the Holy Spirit looks like is going to be different for each of us. As St. Paul says today, “There are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit; there are different forms of service but the same Lord; there are different workings but the same God who produces all of them in everyone. To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit.”
That benefit is not a personal benefit; it never accrues in isolation. Those three thousand people on the streets of Jerusalem never would’ve heard of Jesus if the Apostles stayed inside on that first Pentecost. There are people in each of our lives right now who need us. We can’t help them if we stay inside ourselves.
Let us not hold back or be timid in sharing the particular gifts each of us has received. There is nobody else in the world who can share your gifts with the people in your life the way that you can. Nobody. The way you share the wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord you have been given is unique, and there’s a someone (or perhaps many someones) out there who need your cooperation with the Holy Spirit. The gifts have been bestowed. Don’t stay in your upper room.
Image: The icon depicts the descending of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. This icon is the part of the iconostasis of the Greek Catholic Cathedral of Hajdúdorog, Hungary. The icon was painted around 1810. This icon is the last one in the row of the Great Feasts of the iconostasis. By Jojojoe – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9470243
Deacon Steve O’Neill was ordained for service to the Archdiocese of Washington in June 2013 and serves at St. Andrew Apostle in suburban Maryland. After four years in the Marine Corps and three years at the University of Maryland (where met Traci, now his wife of 30+ years, and earned a degree in English), he has worked as an analyst with the Federal government. Deacon Steve and Traci have two sons and two daughters and three grandchildren.
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