Monday of the Seventh Week of Easter

“Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?”

This week between the feasts of the Ascension and Pentecost is dedicated to prayers that we might receive the Holy Spirit. In memory and spirit we gather with Jesus’ disciples in the Upper Room and wait for something mysterious and unpredictable to come upon us.

It will be something as natural as the rain, as lovely as a sunset, as troubling as an earthquake.

Let me recommend a clever advertisement for wind energy for your reflections upon the Holy Spirit. Click on Wind

The wind brings life to the earth and sea. It kills – as we saw in Joplin Missouri last month – and gives life. It catches waves off the seashore and sweeps the continent with moisture, salt and other life-nourishing chemicals. It sweeps seeds off the land and germinates islands newly raised from the ocean floor. Even the birds do its bidding as they soil the islands with their nests, eggs, droppings and moldering carcasses. The wind is change and without it the Earth stagnates and dies.

In today’s first reading Saint Paul asks some believers, ““Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” and they replied, “We have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit." Apparently they were Jews, for they had been caught up in the Baptist’s Jewish reform; they were keenly aware of their sins and the opportunity of grace. But they had little knowledge of Jesus, and less awareness of the dramatic new religion which he introduced.

No sooner did Paul lay hands on them – a traditional gesture of anointing in the Spirit which we use to this day – than they were caught up in the general excitement.

As we approach Pentecost, we ask the Lord to open our minds and hearts to his guidance. As political, demographic and technological changes continually sweep over us – so dramatically even our children suffer “future shock” – we must ask the Holy Spirit to direct our course. We really don’t know what will happen next or where we will be in five or ten or twenty years.

Jesus Spirit is both troubling and reassuring; but wherever we go, it will be there to guide comfort, heal, enrich, embolden and instruct us.