A poor European family was migrating to the US a century ago. On the ship, they had bread and cheese they had purchased prior to sailing. After many days of cheese sandwiches, the son came to his father, “Papa, if I have to eat cheese sandwiches all the way across the Atlantic, I won’t make it.” The sympathetic father gave him his last nickel for ice cream. Hours later the child returned. The father noticed his wide smile. He asked what he had eaten. “Several plates of ice cream, papa, and then a steak dinner.” “For a nickel?” “No, papa, the food is free. It’s part of the passage ticket.” He returned the coin to his father.
The filet mignon of the Holy Spirit came to us with the ticket of our Baptism and Confirmation. No one has to continue eating only “cheese sandwiches” everyday. No doubt cheese will nourish and sustain us. However, we will die of boredom before the cholesterol kills us.
Why were the apostles, many of them illiterate, able to win a world for Christ? What empowered them to leave behind the Upper Room and boldly proclaim the Good News to anyone who would listen? And why are a billion Christians unable to repeat the same feat today? The answer is this: the Apostles used the Holy Spirit’s gifts to the fullest while many Catholics today seem oblivious to all that the Holy Spirit has to offer them. Consequently, they ignore the presence of the Holy Spirit in their lives so their faith diminishes in due time. Instead of sharing the good news, they abandon their faith and the gift of the Eucharist.
We heard Jesus’ command, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Each of us did so at Baptism and Confirmation. The Spirit’s seven gifts are awesome. Listen to them: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord. We must learn to use them if we are to nurture our faith. The Holy Spirit, says Fr. Daniel Durken, a monk whom I knew in the seminary, came to dispel the A,B,C, and Ds of our humdrum lives – apathy, boredom, coldness, and dullness.
The Spirit’s gifts can function in our ordinary lives under extraordinary conditions. You could say that they kick in as “unruly house guests” when we least expect. With the Holy Spirit, people can blossom to levels of wisdom or fortitude they never imagined. During the French Revolution, the Mother Superior of a Carmelite convent learned that she and her sisters would be guillotined the next day. She told them that the convent gate would be left open if anyone wished to flee but none did. The next morning, from the youngest to the oldest, one by one, they were executed and as each nun took her last steps, she sang psalms, praising God. What enabled them to do this was the gift of fortitude from the Holy Spirit. Ten days later the reign of terror finally ended.
A college student was asked by a friend who knew he was a devout Catholic at home, “Why don’t I see you at Sunday Mass?” The teen replied, “Would you want me to be the only one in my dorm to go?” The student had received the gift of fortitude from the Holy Spirit, but he was afraid to use it.
The gifts of the Spirit were sewn into us like seeds. They remain in the desert of our souls waiting to be nourished and given life. The driest desert in the world is in Chile. One time that desert had not seen rain for sixteen years. When the rains came, the desert was marked with tiny flowers. The seeds were there all the time just waiting for the proper growth conditions to occur. As it was in that Chilean desert, so it is with each of us. The gifts of the Spirit are there for us to nurture them. So what will it be for us—filet mignon steaks or cheese sandwiches? A faith set on fire by the Holy Spirit or one that remains lukewarm?
Napoleon Bonaparte said, “There are two forces on this earth, the force of arms and the force of the Spirit. The force of the Spirit is stronger.” Every time we say, “I believe in the Holy Spirit,” we mean that we believe there is a living God able and willing to enter human personality and change it.
You can choose to believe or not believe in the presence of the Holy Spirit. If you choose not to believe, you can then checklist the church’s problems and walk away as many have in recent years for any number of reasons. But if you choose to believe, then you must look not only for signs of church failures, but also for signs of the life saving Spirit.
Then you will notice with great regularity, even in the worst of times and in the depth of misery, how God tends, out of nowhere, to raise up holy ones who advertise the presence of the Holy Spirit: a Therese of Lisieux in the garden, a Charles de Foucauld in the desert, a Damien in the leper colony, an Oscar Romero in the chapel, a Mother Teresa in the slums, a Thomas Merton in the village, a reformed alcoholic priest in the debris of 9/11.
The Spirit fell on us at baptism to witness to God in our daily lives but many of us resist the notion that we are church. Instead, we think that holiness is found elsewhere, not in our homes, school or workplace. But God has loving eyes on us, and has given us blessed hands to be church where we are, right here and now, not somewhere else or sometime else. The church is you and I, called to live decent, moral lives and more importantly, bear witness to the gospel. We are called to do this right here, in the trenches of everyday living, loving, hurting, struggling, and dying just as the apostles did.
Pentecost celebrates the abiding presence and surprises of the Spirit that gives us many reasons to truly live and celebrate our Catholic faith.