Remember your Galilee (Pope Francis)

   Remember your own Galilee and walk towards it, for it is the “place” where you came to know Jesus personally, where he stopped being just another personage from a distant past, but a living person: not some distant God but the God who is at your side, who more than anyone else knows you and loves you. 

   Brother, sister, remember Galilee, your Galilee, and your call. Remember the Word of God who at a precise moment spoke directly to you. Remember that powerful experience of the Spirit; that great joy of forgiveness experienced after that one confession; that intense and unforgettable moment of prayer; that light that was kindled within you and changed your life; that encounter, that pilgrimage... 

   Each of us knows where our Galilee is located. Each of us knows the place of his or her interior resurrection, that beginning and foundation, the place where things changed. We cannot leave this in the past; the Risen Lord invites us to return there to celebrate Easter. Remember your Galilee. Remind yourself. 

--Pope Francis 

To hear Renaissance composer Jean Richafort’s beautiful 1510 motet, Quem dicunt hómines, which offers us Peter’s responses to Jesus’ questions, “Who do people say that I am?” and “Peter, do you love me?” as performed by the Ingenium Ensemble, click on the video below: 

Image source: St. Peter Catholic Church, Huron, OH, https://www.stpetershuron.org/home-church
Quotation source
Video source

The path to follow (Pope Leo XIV)

    “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt 16:16). In these words, Peter, asked by the Master, together with the other disciples, about his faith in him, expressed the patrimony that the Church, through the apostolic succession, has preserved, deepened and handed on for two thousand years. 

    Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God: the one Saviour, who alone reveals the face of the Father. 

    In him, God, in order to make himself close and accessible to men and women, revealed himself to us in the trusting eyes of a child, in the lively mind of a young person and in the mature features of a man (cf. Gaudium et Spes, 22), finally appearing to his disciples after the resurrection with his glorious body. He thus showed us a model of human holiness that we can all imitate, together with the promise of an eternal destiny that transcends all our limits and abilities. 

    Peter, in his response, understands both of these things: the gift of God and the path to follow in order to allow himself to be changed by that gift. They are two inseparable aspects of salvation entrusted to the Church to be proclaimed for the good of the human race. Indeed, they are entrusted to us, who were chosen by him before we were formed in our mothers’ wombs (cf. Jer 1:5), reborn in the waters of Baptism and, surpassing our limitations and with no merit of our own, brought here and sent forth from here, so that the Gospel might be proclaimed to every creature (cf. Mk 16:15). 

--Pope Leo XIV,
Homily, May 8, 2025,
the day of his election as Pope

Image source: El Greco, Saint Peter and Saint Paul (1590-1600), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Peter_and_Saint_Paul_(El_Greco,_Barcelona)#/media/File:El_Greco_-_Saint_Peter_and_Saint_Paul_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg 
Quotation source

Poured out for God (Shawn Thomas)

    The truth is that Paul’s life was not only “poured out” at the very end, when his life on earth came to a conclusion. In a real sense, his life was being “poured out” the whole time he lived, as he gave up all that was important to him; in a real sense he “poured out” his life all along as he served God. Instead of spending life in ways that might have pleased him — his own pleasures, family, career, etc. — he “poured it out” for God instead. His whole life, after he met Christ, was in a sense a “drink offering” to the Lord. 

--Shawn Thomas 

Image source: The Conversion of St. Paul, St. Paul Cathedral, Tirana, Albania, https://www.facebook.com/groups/1785622648381496
Quotation source

We will be poured out like a libation (Fr. Patrick Michaels)

     Each of us needs to come before the Lord and be present to God. In a conversation, sometimes we begin by talking and sometimes by listening, depending on who called for it. It is up to us to sit and listen to what God has in store for us. What is he calling us to? What encounters will he send us into, to send others toward his love, for us and for whomever we are encountering? How will God guide us this day?

     Like Peter and Paul, we need to keep him close, by our side, we need to listen, we need to pay attention, and we need participate in the unfolding in his love. Peter and Paul did so and we celebrate them for their deaths and for the generations after them, who showed us the way to resurrection and new life, showed us that our lives in Christ Jesus are not empty, but are as full as they possibly can be. 

     Paul’s libation vessel has a hole in the bottom. If we stay open to the Lord and accept his grace, we then become a channel through which that grace can be shared with others. We will be poured out like a libation. God will continue to pour, so long as we have life in us, so that the world might be flooded with the power of his love. 

--Fr. Patrick Michaels,
Homily, June 29, 2024 

Image source: Pietro Lorenzetti, Christ between Saints Paul and Peter (c.1320), https://diocesan.com/peter-paul-pillars-church/

Sunday Gospel Reflection, June 29, 2025: Their message goes out to all the earth!

Their message goes out to all the earth!
Are we ready to do our part to ensure that this is so? 

   The lives of Saints Peter and Paul are so important that, even when the solemnity dedicated to them falls on a Sunday, it is still celebrated with two sets of readings (one for the vigil and one for the solemnity itself). In an important way, this celebration is not just about who these two men are – the very foundation of the early Church!— it is also about what they started and why, about how the Church continues to care for its people, and, finally, how we must continue their work still today. 

   In Matthew’s Gospel, Simon Peter, the Rock on whom Jesus will build his church, will not wield the authority he is entrusted with lightly. Because Simon Peter trusted the revelation God made to him – You are the Christ, the Son of the living God! – he is given the keys to the Kingdom of heaven, keys made for those particular locks that are people’s hearts. The keys are the very power of God’s love at work in the world; through Simon Peter, God will bind the hearts of the people to his own heart, loosening the chains that keep them from residing there. Simon Peter's journey will not be without issues. After all, it is Simon Peter who denies Jesus three times, and who thus must, in John’s Gospel, reaffirm his love for the Lord three times: Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these? Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. Once he has done so, as we see in Acts, Peter can begin to share the Word, serving as a conduit for the power of Christ still at work among them as he takes the hand of a man crippled from birth and raises him up, making the man both physically and spiritually whole. Simon Peter will be taken into custody and put into prison repeatedly throughout the early chapters of Acts, but, as Psalm 34 reminds us, The angel of the Lord rescues those who fear him, and so God's work through Simon Peter continues. He will hold the early Church of Jews and Gentiles together in Rome until his martyrdom circa 64 AD. 

   Paul’s journey will be equally difficult. Having, as he tells the Galatians, renounced his former way of life in Judaism, in which he persecuted the Church of God beyond measure and tried to destroy it, Paul will experience his own moment of revelation, when God is pleased to reveal his Son to Paul on the road to Damascus. Even as his death approaches, Paul remains faithful to the good news he has preached. Having been rescued from the lion’s mouth, Paul knows that, whatever the authorities might do to him, nothing can change what God can do and has done with him and through him. As with Simon Peter, salvation is at work in Paul throughout his ministry. He does not hold onto the grace he has been given for himself, but rather, as the Second Letter to Timothy reminds us, pours that grace out like a libation, letting it flow out to his world. 

   For both Simon Peter and Paul it can indeed be said, echoing Psalm 19, that their message went out to all the earth. Like Paul, we are meant to welcome the grace that is poured out for us as God works in our lives, not holding onto it but allowing it to flow from us to our world. Like Simon Peter, we may be led where we do not want to go. And yet no matter the challenges, we are called to share the Word of God with all, so that through all the earth their voice resounds, and to the ends of the world, their message!

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

In the Eucharist fragility is strength (Pope Francis)

    Jesus becomes fragile like the bread that is broken and crumbled. But his strength lies precisely therein, in his fragility. In the Eucharist fragility is strength: the strength of the love that becomes small so it can be welcomed and not feared; the strength of the love that is broken and shared so as to nourish and give life; the strength of the love that is split apart so as to join all of us in unity. 

 --Pope Francis 

Source of images: Notre-Dame Basilica, Montréal, Québec.  On the left, we see the priest-king of Salem, Melchizedek, bringing out bread and wine, while a right we see the sacrifice of Isaac.  In the center is Jesus' sacrifice on the cross.  https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g155032-d186126-Reviews-Notre_Dame_Basilica-Montreal_Quebec.html
Quotation source

Hunger for Christ (Rachel Bulman)

   Christ in the Eucharist provides us with a “here but not yet” encounter. We receive who we desire to imitate, and we pray to become more and more like that which we receive. We run to the altar with pain and longing, receive the Host, and then enter back into the longing and pain with redemption pumping through our veins. 

    [I still pray today]: "May my hunger for you far exceed my reach." So, too, with the Eucharist—that this Bread may satiate for a moment, but inevitably it awakens within me a longing to be closer, an eternal closeness that the saints called beatitude. And when you receive the Host at the next Mass that you attend, may your entire person be renewed beneath the weight of his glory. We all know that there are many among us who do not believe in the Real Presence, my brothers and sisters, that burden is ours to bear. For if we are not transformed by the reception of him who we profess to be present under the appearance of bread, then how does one become convinced of the renewal offered therein? 

   Hunger for Christ. Reach for Christ. And may our collective hunger far exceed our reach so much so that all of our lives will be leaning toward eternity with him so that we may finally be filled with the food that we long for. 

--Rachel Bulman 

Source of images: Akili Ron Anderson, Last Supper, https://www.washingtonian.com/2019/10/11/a-massive-sculpture-of-an-african-american-last-supper-hidden-for-years-has-been-discovered-in-columbia-heights/
Quotation source

Be what you see, and receive what you are (Fr. Ron Rolheiser)

     In a homily to neophytes who were about to receive communion, St. Augustine said, Be what you see, and receive what you are. That is the real imperative within the Eucharist. What Jesus wanted to give us at the last supper was not just his presence and God’s forgiveness under the species of bread and wine, but that same reality in the faces, hands, and bodies of those who partake of that bread and wine. At a Eucharist, we, not just the bread and wine, are meant to change. 

--Fr. Ron Rolheiser,
April 16, 2025 

Image source: Eucharist love feast, Petrus and Marcellinus Catacomb (end of 3rd century), https://allthegifts.org/2021/08/07/part-5-the-eucharist-and-the-early-church/
Quotation source

Aren't we changed too? (Fr. Michael Newman, O.S.F.S)

It is true, Lord, that I held you in my hands when I spoke the words:
'This is my Body.’ Yes, I believe it, I feel it, and I see it.
Yes, it is you: the charm of the child in the crib,
the all embracing wisdom of the Messiah,
the total submission of the Lord on the cross,
the splendor of the Son at the right hand of the Father;
it is all that, that I find before my eyes,
in my hands and very close to my heart.
Jesus, be to me a Savior! 

--Fr. Louis Brisson 

    Today on Holy Thursday, we remember Jesus’s great gift of the Eucharist, His Body and Blood for our salvation. My favorite Eucharist story happened here at Holy Family Parish last summer.

   Each summer our parish hosts “Mass on the Grass” where I go around and say Mass at various parishioner’s homes. Many people (usually between 60-80) gather for Mass and then a meal after. 

    Last summer I was going over to Juanita and Alfredo's house for Mass. And, as I was setting up for Mass, I realized that I had forgotten my chalice. There were so many people that my car got boxed in and I couldn’t get out. So I went up to Juanita and told that I needed a huge favor. I needed a cup from her kitchen to stand in as the chalice for this Mass. I also explained to her that once this cup held the Blood of Christ, it could never be used for anything else again; in fact, I would be taking the cup with me to preserve it and eventually bury it after the Mass. 

   Juanita nodded and I followed her into her kitchen. She opened the cupboard and in the back was one wine glass. She said that her family shared this one wineglass when they celebrated important milestones in their lives: like the engagement of their daughter, her son graduating from college. She said to me, “This is the nicest cup we have. Use this,” and she pressed it into my hands. 

   I felt awkward, but I took the glass with me. A half hour later, that glass became a chalice when it held the Blood of Christ which was then distributed to everyone at Mass on the Grass. As I held the chalice up, I looked over at Juanita and Alfredo. They were kneeling in the grass, smiling because their glass, the most precious glass they ever owned, now held the Blood of Christ. I started to tear up as we distributed the Eucharist to everyone gathered there. 

   This was my close moment — when God’s presence was palpable and I understood the Eucharist in a new way. 

Because when that ordinary glass cup
received the Blood of Christ,
it was changed,
transformed into a new thing, a chalice,
and it can never go back to being an ordinary “cup” again. 

If the Eucharist is so powerful that it changes ordinary vessels
into sacred vessels that can only be used
to hold Christ’s Body and Blood,
shouldn’t that same thing happen to us 

each time we receive the Eucharist?

When we receive the Body and Blood of Christ,
aren’t we changed into a new thing too? 

   I still have that glass chalice in my office in a sacred place and I plan to bury it soon.  But for now it stands there as a reminder of the power of Jesus: that Alfredo and Juanita gave me the most precious cup they owned and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, that cup held the Blood of Christ. In like manner, when we receive the Body and Blood of Christ we are changed, and like the vessels themselves we ought not remain the same; instead may we become what we receive: Christ’s Body and Blood in communion with Him and each other for the salvation of the world. 

   May God be praised! 

 --Fr. Michael Newman, O.S.F.S.,

Holy Family Parish, Adrian, Michigan

Facebook, April 17, 2025

Source of story and images: https://www.facebook.com/michael.newman.7902564

This is my body (Fr. James Martin)

    Corpus Christi Sunday reminds us that Jesus, fully divine and fully human, had a body. And he offered that body for us not only in the Eucharist, and not only on the Cross, but by taking his body all over Galilee and Judea, and offering himself physically in that way to people. 

    Jesus's public ministry was tiring and even grueling ("The Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head," he said) but Jesus "gave his body" for us by going to where we were and offering himself for us. 

    Often when I celebrate Mass and say the words, "This is my body," I think of this aspect of Jesus's "offering" of himself. 

--Fr. James Martin,
Facebook, June 19, 2022 

Image source: Balavendra Elias, Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, carving, St George Church, Hangleton, UK, https://loandbeholdbible.com/2017/11/19/the-multiplication-of-the-loaves-john-61-15/

He breaks himself apart (Pope Francis / Juan de Lianes)

Coenantibus autem illis
 accepit Jesus panem
Benedixit ac fregit
 deditque discipulis suis:
Accipite et manducate
 hoc est enim corpus meum. 

 And as they were eating,
 Jesus took bread
 And blessed it, and broke it,
 and gave it to his disciples, saying,
 Take, eat; for this is my body.

 Matthew 26:26 

    And thus, with simplicity, Jesus gives us the greatest sacrament. His is a humble gesture of giving, a gesture of sharing. At the culmination of his life, he does not distribute an abundance of bread to feed the multitudes, but breaks himself apart at the Passover supper with the disciples. In this way Jesus shows us that the aim of life lies in self-giving, that the greatest thing is to serve. 

--Pope Francis 

To hear 17th-century composer Juan de Lianes's beautiful piece Coenantibus autem illis, click on the video below. 

Image source: Jorge Cocco Santángelo, Last Supper, https://jorgecocco.com/?product-page=4
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Video source

Sunday Gospel Reflection, June 22, 2025: Do this in remembrance of me...

Do this in remembrance of me…
Are we ready to give flesh to the Body of Christ with our lives? 

   Church tradition tells us that the institution of the Eucharist took place at the Last Supper, at which Jesus said to his disciples, This is my body that is for you – all of you! Do this in remembrance of me. Paul reminds the Corinthian community of these words of institution because they are not celebrating Eucharist appropriately and inclusively, as Jesus taught his disciples to do. The Corinthians seem to have forgotten the very point of Jesus’ sacrifice: as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes. Jesus came to save humankind, becoming flesh, one with us, to save us from our sins; we enter into the sacrifice of the Mass to participate in his death and rising, that we might proclaim his death until he comes again. 

   We find echoes of Jesus’ sacrifice in a variety of biblical texts, in both the Old and New Testaments. When, in the Book of Genesis, Abraham intervenes in a war to save his nephew Lot and Lot’s family, Melchizedek, the priest-king of Salem, brings out bread and wine and blesses Abraham. Psalm 110 will remind us of the lineage that results: You are a priest for ever, in the line of Melchizedek. Similarly, Jesus, in Luke’s Gospel, will take five loaves and two fish, bless them, break them, and distribute them to the crowd. It is not, strictly speaking, a Eucharistic miracle, but the loaves and the fishes prefigures the institution of the Eucharist that will come with Jesus’ passion, death and rising. 

   

   Do this in remembrance of me, Jesus tells his disciples at the Last Supper. In other words, remember me into the present, make me present in the world! Having ascended to the Father, Jesus leaves behind no tangible body to walk the earth; we his Christian followers are called to remember what the sacrifice of Jesus was all about – charity and mercy for all – and to embody that love and mercy as we embrace our communal identity as the Body of Christ. Do this in remembrance of me! Are we ready? 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

A magnetic field of love (Vanessa Lopez)

    God has revealed his mysterious inner life to be that of the Blessed Trinity. From all eternity, God the Father begets and loves God the Son. God the Son honors and loves God the Father. Their love is so substantial that it is another person: God the Holy Spirit. As one pole of a magnet is irresistibly attracted to the opposite pole, generating a magnetic field, the Father and Son are forever drawn to each other, generating the magnetic field of love, which is the Holy Spirit. 

    As we form our consciences in the light of Christ and his Church, the domains of our lives gradually become properly aligned in accordance with God’s will. As we become re-magnetized, we can help draw others into God’s magnetic field, the way magnetized iron can itself act as a magnet—an evangelization of magnetization. Finding peace means ceasing to struggle against God’s magnetic field. Once we are fully aligned in his will, the needle of the compass of our souls will draw us to our true home in heaven, that we “may all be one” (John 17:20) as the Blessed Trinity is one—“a community of love, a unity in difference”—like a magnet. 

--Vanessa Lopez 

Image source: https://eos.org/research-spotlights/new-insights-into-currents-in-earths-magnetic-field
Quotation source

When God kisses the soul (Abel de Miguel Sáenz)

I want to imagine that the Holy Trinity is the closest thing to a kiss:

The Father would be the purest lips from which that feeling would be born.
The Son would be that moment when those divine lips leave their mark on the mortal creature.
The Holy Spirit would be the one to instill in the chosen one that feeling born of God when he kisses. 

But the Three would be a single Kiss in which the soul feels that Someone watches over it (Father), that Someone has taken it into his arms (Son) and that Someone has made it feel loved (Holy Spirit); that is, One God and Three.

The Holy Trinity is a mystery that encompasses and gives meaning to all those mysteries we palpate in the middle of our life: death, pain, our destiny... 

In Trinitarian immensity, God reveals Himself in pure state and offers mortals the infinite Mercy of a Father, the eternal Commitment of the Son and the immortal Love of the Holy Spirit. 

Is it not enough, between lovers, a silence or a look to express everything that encompasses your heart? ; for this is how a soul feels when God kisses it, that is, when the Father creates it, the Son embraces it and the Spirit comforts it. 

The Holy Trinity is that: the three and inseparable ways of love that God has; three ways, but ONE LOVE. 

--Abel de Miguel Sáenz 

Image source: https://www.english.op.org/godzdogz/gospel-reflection/the-kiss-of-god/
Quotation source

Lover, beloved, and shared love (Bishop Robert Barron)

   The Trinity is just another way of saying that God is love. But this has to imply that there is a play, within the unity of God, of lover, beloved, and shared love. This is precisely what we mean when we speak of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. 

   This love is so white-hot, so intense, that it spills over into creation. In the case of human beings, this communication in love was interrupted by sin. What did the triune God do in order to address this problem? John famously says, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. 

   The Father so burned with the love of the Holy Spirit, that he sent his own Son into the world so that a sinful humanity might be drawn back into community. The Trinity opened up so as to include a sinful and wandering humanity. The Trinity is far from an abstract doctrine. It names the very dynamics of salvation. 

--Bishop Robert Barron,
Gospel Reflection, May 6, 2020 

Image source 1: https://catholicstand.com/divine-love-supra-rational/
Image source 2: Michelangelo, Separation of Light from Darkness, Sistine Chapel (1511), https://artandicon.com/tag/hope/
Quotation source

For fathers young and old (Fr. Bernard Healey)

God our Father,
we give you thanks and praise
for fathers young and old. 

We pray for young fathers,
newly embracing their vocations;
May they find the courage and
perseverance to balance work, family,
and faith in joy and sacrifice. 

We pray for our own fathers
who have supported and challenged us;
May they continue to lead in strong and
gentle ways. 

We remember our fathers around the world
whose children are lost or suffering;
May they know that the God of compassion
walks with them in their sorrow. 

We pray for men who are not fathers
but still mentor and guide us
with fatherly love and advice. 

We pray for our spiritual fathers, our priests,
who lead us in faith and draw us to you;
May their own faith remain strong
and their love abundant. 

We remember fathers, grandfathers, and
great-grandfathers who are no longer with us
but who live forever in our memory
and nourish us with their love.

Amen. 

—Fr. Bernard Healey 

Happy Fathers Day
from Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Mill Valley!

Image source: Joseph holds Jesus, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Mill Valley, https://www.facebook.com/mountcarmelmv
Quotation source

Relationships and bonds (For a Synodal Church)

     Relationships and bonds are the means by which God the Father has revealed Himself in Jesus and the Spirit. When our relationships, even in their fragility, allow the grace of Christ, the love of the Father, and the communion of the Spirit to shine through, we confess with our lives our faith in God the Trinity. 

--For a Synodal Church:
Communion, Participation, Mission

Image source: https://nickcady.org/2023/02/03/the-trinity-ontological-economic/
Quotation source

A God of communion (Pope Francis)

   Father and Son. It is a familiar image which, if we think about it, disrupts our images of God. Indeed, the very word “God” suggests to us a singular, majestic and distant reality, whereas hearing about a Father and a Son brings us back home. Yes, we can think of God in this way, through the image of a family gathered around the table, where life is shared. After all, the table, which, at the same time is an altar, is a symbol with which certain icons depict the Trinity. It is an image that speaks to us of a God of communion. 

 --Pope Francis, June 4, 2023 

Image source: Ivanka Demchuk, Trinity, https://www.dominicanajournal.org/what-do-you-see-2/
Quotation source

Sunday Gospel Reflection, June 15, 2025: How wonderful your name in all the earth!

How wonderful your name in all the earth!
How do we understand a God in Three Persons? 

   We struggle to get our human logic around the concept of the Trinity, but logic only gets you so far when you’re talking about the perfection of love. For that is the Trinity: a perfect and intimate union of three Persons bound together by love. This concept was unknown to authors of the Old Testament, although the Book of Proverbs offers us a portrait of a personified Wisdom that is at the root of our concept of the Trinity. Proverbs tells us that the Wisdom of God was present at creation itself: When the Lord established the heavens, I was there; when he fixed fast the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him as his craftsman, and I was his delight day by day. God created us out of the intimacy of this absolute and perfect love, an act echoed in Psalm 8: You have made man little less than the angels, the psalmist sings. O Lord, our God, how wonderful your name in all the earth! 

   In John’s Gospel, Jesus hints at the complexity of the Trinity during his Last Supper Discourse, in which he states that what humankind will receive from the Spirit is the same truth Jesus himself received from the Father and handed on to his disciples. In his Letter to the Romans, Paul offers an early Trinitarian statement: we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Moreover, the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us. Father, Son and Spirit are all active in the love that save us; faith gives us access to and awareness of God’s love present in our lives. Ultimately, we are called to ever greater union with God and closeness to God, because of the love that connects us to the Father, Son and Spirit, and to each other. We can’t find our way there by logical thinking, only through our access by faith to this grace in which we stand. 

   Faith leads us to a paradox and asks us to step one step beyond it. Will you let God’s love take you beyond your own human boundaries, so that your faith journey may continue its glorious trajectory of expansion? 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

The great gift of God (Henri Nouwen)

  The Holy Spirit, whom Jesus promised to his followers, is the great gift of God. Without the Spirit of Jesus we can do nothing, but in and through his Spirit we can live free, joyful, and courageous lives. We cannot pray, but the Spirit of Christ can pray in us. We cannot create peace and joy, but the Spirit of Christ can fill us with a peace and joy that is not of this world. We cannot break through the many barriers that divide races, sexes, and nations, but the Spirit of Christ unites all people in the all-embracing love of God. The Spirit of Christ burns away our many fears and anxieties and sets us free to move wherever we are sent. That is the great liberation of Pentecost. 

--Henri Nouwen

Image source: Jesus Mafa (Cameroon), Pentecost, https://robbijames.com/2020/05/29/burst-of-joy/
Quotation source

Confusion and harmony (Pope Francis)

   Those who allow themselves to be drawn by the love of Christ, thus becoming his disciples, also experience the desire to bring to everyone the mercy and compassion flowing from his heart. Missionary work does not come naturally, for we always tend to prefer life to be comfortable, with everything in order. 

   It was necessary, then, for the Holy Spirit to come and make the tremendous “disorder” that was the day of Pentecost. This is because, in order to initiate missionary outreach, to create the life of the Church, the Spirit is first the creator of confusion and then draws out harmony. Both are of the Holy Spirit. 

--Pope Francis,
June 25, 2023 

Image source 1: https://anglicancompass.com/preaching-pentecost-the-person-and-work-of-the-spirit/
Image source 2: P. Solomon Raj, Pentecost, batik (1980s), https://dailytheology.org/2020/10/14/the-duty-of-remembering-pentecost/
Quotation source

Paradoxical, elusive, uncontrollable, absolutely free (M. Shawn Copeland)

   In Hebrew, ruah denotes spirit, breath, wind and is almost always connected with the life-giving attribute of God. Spirit-ruah is and remains paradoxical, elusive, uncontrollable, absolutely free. The Spirit, like the wind, blows where and when and how the Spirit so chooses (after John 3:8). 

   The French theologian Louis-Marie Chauvet suggests that, “The Spirit is God Different…. [A]t the same time, [the Spirit] is God closest to humankind, to the point of inscribing God’s very self into our corporality in order to divinize it.” If Spirit God Different inscribes the Divine Self into (or divinizes) our human bodies, integrates and embraces all God’s human creatures, then affirmation and embrace of embodied or fleshly human difference is the mission of Spirit God Different. Indeed, from the beginning, Spirit God Different moves among all God’s human creatures––drawing us together, inspiring, prompting, prodding, exhorting, reproving, animating, empowering us to defy disunity and division, rupture and separation. 

   At Pentecost, Spirit God Different publicly performs and ratifies the Triune God’s respect and love of our embodied, fleshly human differences. At Pentecost, Spirit God Different missions us to live out the command of Jesus to ‘love one another.’ Spirit God Different opens us, teaches us to live in and live out active compassionate, loving solidarity with those whom our society chooses to oppress––those whom our society exploits and alienates, marginalizes and dominates, rejects and denies, attacks and assaults, represses and crushes, murders and destroys.

   By creating these blessed fleshly differences, Spirit God Different nudges us to reach out to one another, to communicate, to meet one another, to enjoy one another, to act in love for and with one another. Spirit God Different urges us to defend and protect one another from oppression and violence of body and soul, mind and heart; to respect and honor, welcome and embrace one another in all our fleshly difference––for our shining and beautiful fleshly differing bodies are dwelling places of Spirit God Different. 

--M. Shawn Copeland 

Image source: https://worthilymagnify.com/2011/10/18/the-holy-spirit-the-very-breath-of-god-in-our-very-midst/
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Contradictions and tensions and ambiguities (Maureen O'Connell)

Jesus sent us the Advocate, who we need more than ever. I hear the words of the 500-year old Veni Creator Spiritus with fresh ears this year this Pentecost:

· When things get uncomfortable… You of comforters the best

· When our work exhausts us… rest most sweet

· When friction rises or tempers flare… Grateful coolness in the heat 

· When our skepticism makes us afraid to hope… Solace in the midst of woe

· When past traumas make the future impossible to imagine… heal our wounds, our strength renew

· Past wrongdoing paralyzes us… wash the stains of guilt away

· When we head in the wrong direction… guide the steps that go astray

· When we are convinced of our own righteousness… bend the stubborn heart and will 

The prayer doesn’t pull punches – it names the contradictions and tensions and ambiguities of becoming a people and assures us that the Holy Spirit will send us what we need to stay in the cacophony long enough to create harmonies. We need the Spirit more than ever. Come, Holy Spirit. Make us Your people. 

--Maureen O’Connell 

Image source (with a recording of the piece Veni Creator Spiritus): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPOdfPNF6Bs
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The Holy Spirit's primary purpose (Fr. Patrick Michaels)

       The Holy Spirit’s primary purpose is to make us church, bringing us together, that we might recognize in that union the presence of Christ. 

--Fr. Patrick Michaels,
Scripture Class, January 13, 2022

Image source: O’Brien Hall, Our Lady of Mount Carmel Mill Valley, Pentecost Sunday 2024, https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=870510531781029&set=a.870511931780889

Intimate communion in the Spirit (Isaac Hecker / Henri Nouwen)

The Holy Spirit is to guide us in the work of God,
and not we the Holy Spirit.

--Servant of God Isaac Hecker 

   The intimate relationship between the Father and the Son has a name. It is Spirit. Holy Spirit. “I want you to have my Spirit.” “Spirit” means “breath.” It comes from the ancient Greek word pneuma. “I want you to have my breathing. I want you to have that most intimate part of me so that the relationship that is between you and God is the same as between me and God, which is a divine relationship.” What you need to hear with your heart is that you are invited to dwell in the family of God. You are invited to be part of that intimate communion right now. 

--Henri Nouwen

Image source: Holy Spirit Window, St. Clare's Retreat, Soquel, CA. https://alignable.com/soquel-ca/st-clares-retreat-center
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Sunday Gospel Reflection, June 8, 2025: For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body...

For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body…
How do we proclaim that Jesus is Lord? 

   Whenever we forget that we are dependent on the Lord, we are bound to run into trouble. Psalm 104 reminds us that everything we need comes from God, who gives us not only breath but food in due time, and fills us with good things. But the residents of the city of Babel (or Babylon) failed to remember this essential truth, and so, the Book of Genesis tells us, they decide to build themselves a city and a tower with its top in the sky. Their sin is one of arrogance; by striving to make a name for themselves, they are setting themselves above the divinity, and so God confuses their language, scattering them all over the earth. Not until Pentecost will this confusion of language be reversed. 

   The Holy Spirit is Jesus’ gift to the world, a way for him to remain present with us after his Ascension. In fact, well before Jesus’ death and resurrection, he promises that rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me. This is, in John’s Gospel, a reference to the Spirit that will come upon his disciples at a later date. Later in John’s Gospel, after Jesus is raised from the dead but while the disciples are still behind locked doors on the evening of the first day of the week, Jesus breathes on them, saying Receive the Holy Spirit. In the Acts of the Apostles, Luke will place this gift later in the disciples’ journey, fifty days after Jesus’ resurrection, when a strong, driving wind – the Spirit itself – drives them from the house in which they were and into the street, enabling them to proclaim the good news in different tongues to devout Jews from every nation under heaven. The confusion of Babel ends with the proclamation of Jesus Christ, the revelation of God the Father. 

   Like the disciples after Jesus’ Ascension, like the Romans to whom Paul wrote, we too long for the Lord’s divine presence and groan within ourselves as we wait for the redemption of our bodies. We too long for the fulfillment of all that God has promised, and that longing itself is a gift! But the Spirit is with us always, even in our struggles, connecting us with the Lord and helping us to be aware that the Lord is present with us in different ways, as Paul told the Corinthians: the same Spirit, the same Lord, the same God who is at work in us wherever we gather as the Body of Christ. We were all given to drink of one Spirit, that we might reveal that Jesus is Lord to all we meet! 

This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com

The world is in transition (St. Ignatius of Loyola / Valarie Kaur)

He who goes about to reform the world
must begin with himself,
or he loses his labor.

 --St. Ignatius of Loyola 

    For anyone who feels breathless. Maybe moving through this world, in your body, is enough to make you feel constriction in your chest. Maybe you’re holding someone close to you who is struggling and suffering. Maybe you are reeling from the latest mass shooting, or the refugee crisis at the border, or the looming threat of climate change, or the blistering pace of a global pandemic. Maybe, like me, you are breathless from all of the above. I thought my breathlessness was a sign of my weakness, until a wise friend told me what I wish to tell you: Your breathlessness is a sign of your bravery. It means you are awake to what’s happening right now. The world is in transition. 

--Valarie Kaur,
See No Stranger

Image source: Sieger Köder, Mary Magdalene at the Tomb, https://sophiawakens.com/2018/04/10/mary-magdalene-go-to-my-brothers/
Image source 2: Niccolò Dell’Arca, Lamentation over the Dead Christ (15th c.), https://leavingbethany.com/2023/05/01/mary-magdalene-in-art-fallen-woman-or-redeemed-saint/
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Jesus has gone (Bishop Robert Barron)

The ascended Christ can be closer to us
than he ever was when he walked the hills of Galilee.

    We tend to read the Ascension along essentially Enlightenment lines, rather than biblical lines—and that causes a good deal of mischief. Enlightenment thinkers introduced a two-tier understanding of heaven and earth. They held that God exists, but that he lives in a distant realm called heaven, where he looks at the human project moving along, pretty much on its own steam, on earth. 

   On this Enlightenment reading, the Ascension means that Jesus goes up, up, and away, off to a distant and finally irrelevant place. But the biblical point is this: Jesus has gone to heaven so as to direct operations more fully here on earth. That’s why we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” 

   Jesus has not gone up, up, and away, but rather—if I can put it this way—more deeply into our world. He has gone to a dimension that transcends but impinges upon our universe. 

--Bishop Robert Barron,
Gospel Reflection, May 9, 2024

Image source: https://www.thoughtco.com/birth-of-the-earth-1441042
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Eternal glory is even now a possibility (Karl Rahner)

   Since it is in our humanity, in our flesh and blood, that he has risen, been glorified and taken up into the glory of his Father, that fundamental doctrine of Christianity proclaims from the start, that eternal glory is even now a possibility in the history of this world, this humanity and this flesh; already a possibility because in the flesh of Christ, which is a part of this world, it is already a reality.

--Karl Rahner, Mary, Mother of God

Image source: Vitale da Bologna and workshop, The Ascension (15th c.), https://www.christianiconography.info/Edited%20in%202013/Italy/pomposaNewTestament.ascension.html
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If they continue to raise their eyes up to heaven (Gretchen Crowder)

   The disciples post-resurrection have something very important to realize about their friend Jesus… and perhaps this realization is difficult to wrap their minds around - their old friend has passed away. Jesus as they knew Him has died and He will never be the same again. He is not less special, He not less their friend, not less in love with each one of them... but He is something completely new. 

   And at this moment, if the disciples fail to recognize this newness, if they dwell on what has passed they might miss so much ahead that is truly special. If they continue to raise their eyes up to Heaven instead of looking forward to the Christ in their midst, they will miss the point. 

--Gretchen Crowder 

Image source: Icon, Ascension of Christ, Greek School and Southern Italian School, http://artuk.org/discover/stories/what-is-the-ascension-jesus-heavenward-journey-in-art
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