Prayer is what God does: Homily for Pentecost, May 19, 2024

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When it comes to prayer, we can often think we need to pray in a certain way, or find the perfect method. But the truth is, prayer is what God does, and today we celebrate that in the Holy Spirit.

Prayer is what God does

I’m reading a book by a Carmelite nun, Ruth Burrows, called The Essence of Prayer. And it really has changed the way I think about prayer. She’s a true Carmelite, and what that means is that her focus is on what God does.

And she makes a bold claim at the beginning of this book. Prayer is not something we do, but rather something God does. Let me say that again. Prayer is not something we do, but rather something God does. And so she suggests, then, that we shouldn’t spend a lot of time worrying about getting the right method or the right means about prayer.

That simply what we need to do is to be dedicated to a specific time for prayer and to place ourselves in silence in the presence of God and to let God know what God is going to do for us. Our role is simply to discern.

Now, the New Testament speaks about this. It says that not every spirit that we might experience comes from God. We have to discern spirits. There can be a real temptation in our lives to rely only on our own gift of reason. And while reason is a great gift of God, it is not the only gift that we need to embrace in our lives.

For reason without faith, as we heard in the reading last night, causes bones to be dry and the spiritual life to be arid. Rather, what we celebrate today on this holy feast of Pentecost is the reality that faith and reason go hand in hand.

As St. Thomas put it, St. Thomas Aquinas, theology rather, is faith that seeks understanding. But that there are certain things, he claims, that no matter how smart we are, no matter how gifted we are in the gift of reason, we could never know them on our own. There are certain things, he says, that we can only know because God reveals them to us. The divinity of Jesus. The Trinity. The fact that Jesus is truly present in the Holy Eucharist, body and blood, soul and divinity.

Those aren’t things we figured out on our own. They were things that God informed us of through the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Moreover, St. Paul, in today’s second reading, reminds us that everything we do is because of the Holy Spirit. Again, St. Thomas Aquinas would say that there is nothing, no good work that we can do without the grace of God. That it is God who is the source of all things.

What that means for us is that there are certain things in our lives that we consecrate, that we set aside for a divine purpose. And that has profound implications for the way in which we view our spiritual life. It is not the community that baptizes a new member when they come into the church. It is the Lord Jesus Christ. It is not of more special and important mass if a thousand people attend than it would be if one person attends.

That is because Jesus is the one who makes himself present to us, body and blood, soul and divinity, in the Eucharist at Mass. And our primary task at Mass is to worship the Lord Jesus so that he may be able to transform us into his image, his likeness, his body. It is not that we forgive sins, but rather that our sins are forgiven through the power of Jesus and the grace of the Holy Spirit.

It leads us, though, to a question. Do we consecrate things, that is, to set aside things for a divine purpose? And what do we prioritize in that consecration, in our lives? Because that’s really what it means to receive the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. When the apostles received the Holy Spirit, the church was born, but it was also the birth of the church because they were changed.

They were completely transformed. The apostles we encounter after Pentecost bear little resemblance to the apostles before Pentecost. Peter is willing to speak boldly in the name of Jesus and to give his life for the faith, the very Peter who wasn’t able even to admit he knew Jesus before Pentecost.

It was the encounter on the road to Damascus that emboldened Paul to see that all of his hopes and dreams and his faith were fulfilled. And he spoke boldly about what it meant to be Jesus, particularly to the Gentiles, a radical change from the Jewish faith.

All of the apostles save John were martyrs. When their faith was tested and they were faced with the profound question of whether to acknowledge their faith or not, they chose to acknowledge Jesus, even at the price of their own life.

Lastly, this Feast of Pentecost reminds us that we are not merely passive recipients of the Spirit, but that we need to share our faith with everyone. The Spirit emboldened the apostles to speak in every language of the earth. People heard the Spirit in their own language. People heard the Spirit in a way they could understand.

And so too must we be vehicles of the Holy Spirit to share our faith. If we believe that Jesus is the Son of God, and if we believe that our faith has made all the difference in the world, then it’s incumbent upon us to cultivate that relationship with Jesus, but also to share that relationship with Jesus, to be willing to talk about our faith, to share with others the differences that God has made in our lives. Today, you are the profound recipients of the Holy Spirit. Ask the Lord in His grace to deepen your relationship with Him and to give you the courage to proclaim your faith in season and out of season.

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