Pastor’s Notes

The problem with the Holy Spirit is that he just won’t stand still. You can’t pin the Spirit down.   There was a sports commercial on TV a few years back about a now famous someone who was too small to play football.   When he was told he didn’t have the size to play, he said, something inside said don’t take no for an answer.  He reached inside for the power. The Spirit is the source of power.  That brings us from where we are to where God would have us be.

St. Paul goes after a community of people in Corinth with factions and divided loyalties. They were a community tongue tied…like Babel in the Old Testament.  What God wants and has always wanted, is a human family united.   Not by looking the same, speaking the same language, wearing the same kind of skin…but united by the experience of the power of God’s favor- the experience of being beloved.  We Christians are called to make that happen.

50 Days after Passover for Hebrews was the celebration of the Feast of Week – the Harvest festival that celebrated the giving of the Law to Moses on Mt. Sinai. So…. on this 50th day after Easter, we celebrate the Harvest of the Spirit, gathered together by God’s breath breathed by Jesus. A great definition of Christian Spirituality – the state of having been breathed on.

John’s gospel places it when the resurrected Jesus first appears to the disciples in the locked upper room. Luke’s Acts of the Apostles places it on the Jewish harvest feast.  But the more important are the consequences of this event. The God who once gave the law now gives the divine “spirit, the very self of God, not just to a chosen few!  But a breath of fresh air was sent  to fill the ENTIRE WORLD.

On a rainy evening, a father had to deal with a power outage, brown out and a room full of kids. No TV, No video games, reading light or I pad.   Just as it was getting critical and the animals were getting very restless, he got an idea how to entertain his eight year old.  He found a map of the world in a magazine and tore it into bite-sized pieces…mixed it up in a shoebox and invited her to put it back together again, like a big jigsaw puzzle. To father’s surprise, the little girl completed the puzzle in just a few minutes.

How’d you do it? he asked her.   “It was easy,” she said. At first, I couldn’t fit all the lines and dots and colors together on the map.  Then I saw part of a man’s face on the back of one of the pieces…so i turned all the pieces over!  When I got the man on the back together, the world on the front took care of itself.

We honor that power that puts people together on Pentecost, that draws peoples together, then sends them out to heal and restore the earth. When one reaches inside “she” is there (I like calling the Spirit a ‘she.’) to make decisions in love, to forgive, to set free and to witness boldly. As we leave the Easter season, many thanks to the many staff, volunteers and St. Mary’s many friends who have animated this season for all of us. “The Lord give you peace.

A gentle week,
Fr. Michael Weldon, OFM