Did you receive the Holy Spirit: Homily for Monday, May 13, 2024

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We are preparing for Pentecost, where the fullness of the Trinity is revealed.

Did you receive the Holy Spirit?

Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers? If we are baptized, the obvious answer is yes. Yes, we did. But we were likely infants at our baptism, and so we probably were, not probably, we were clearly unaware as an infant of the reception of the Holy Spirit.

The challenge, of course, is that we might not have had it pointed out to us the power and the role of the Holy Spirit. Confirmation is one of those things that the Church has really struggled to define in some ways, even though its meaning is really pretty obvious. Its intention was to be sealed with the gift of the Holy Spirit, to confirm what was done in baptism, to confirm what this receiving of the Holy Spirit means for believers.

We don’t think much, I think, or at least I know I don’t, of the Holy Spirit. We all, I think, tend to focus either on God the Father or God the Son. But the reality is that just as God the Father and God the Son are divine, so too is the Holy Spirit. It’s sometimes been explained in this way, that the Father is the lover, the Son is the beloved, and the Spirit is the love between them.

What we celebrate at Pentecost is the fullness of the revelation of the Trinity. Everything was revealed in due time, at a time that was ready and fitting. As we take these days before the Pentecost, I’m reminded of what used to be clearer in celebrating the Ascension on Thursday, of which I am still a fan, because there were nine days between the Ascension and Pentecost which gave rise to the practice of a novena, a time of waiting and special prayer for a particular reason or intention.

Let us use these days, the days between the Ascension we celebrated yesterday and Pentecost, which we celebrate next Sunday, to ask the Lord to help us to become more aware of the role of the Holy Spirit in our own lives, so that we can come to believe more fully, through the grace of the Holy Spirit, all that the Spirit wishes to do for us.

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