We live this liturgical week preparing for the great feast of Pentecost. What we as Christians celebrate and anticipate in these days symbolizes the truth of our journey in this world. We are called to live our whole lives trusting the promise of Jesus, following Him, listening to the Holy Spirit whom the Father has sent to “teach us all things,” opening our minds and hearts to grow toward the fullness of our vocation in union with the Risen and Glorified Jesus, as children of the Father and heirs to His Kingdom.
God pours out His love, freely creating each one of us, giving us to ourselves. Then, in an immeasurably greater gift, He chooses to give Himself to us in His Son, who took our human nature so that we might be raised up to share in the glory of His eternal life. Jesus seeks us out, finds us, carries us back to the road of God’s beautiful plan. Through our sin, death entered the world, but Jesus bore our sins on the Cross and conquered sin and death, revealing the immensity of God’s love for us — for each one of us and for every human person.
The Holy Spirit is at work in every human heart, in hidden and mysterious ways. The deepest truth about any person’s life is in the depths of this mystery, where the Spirit stirs the heart, summons the conscience, and empowers human freedom to turn to Jesus and His presence in His Church. Countless people are united to the Church by their fidelity to the “desire” the Holy Spirit places within their hearts even if they don’t know the Gospel “explicitly” or are honestly mistaken in their conscious minds about its meaning. In the secret realm of their hearts they say “Yes” to Christ’s love. Or perhaps they resist and wrestle with the God who continues to love them, offer them forgiveness, and may indeed win over their freedom in the end.
We Christians have been chosen to be instruments of the Lord, to bring the whole world to Him in our worship and to witness to His tremendous love given through Jesus Christ for everyone — even those who are ignorant about Him but seek Him with the Spirit-inspired, holy desire that mysteriously shapes them beyond the limits of their thoughts, and even those who run from His hidden calling but then return with renewed desire.
We don’t know the "hidden history" of the countless human hearts are thus “touched” by the Lord. They are drawn, prompted, and stirred to seek His merciful love through the mysterious working of the Holy Spirit who draws every person to take up the road that leads to Jesus Christ.
And those of us who are sustained by the fullness of the Risen Lord's enduring presence in His Church are empowered and equipped by the Holy Spirit to bear witness to Jesus and His redeeming love. He is center of the cosmos and of history. He is the meaning and destiny of every human person. He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.
Come Holy Spirit, increase our love for Jesus and our confidence in you who work — in mysterious ways — to make Jesus known and loved by everyone. Work miracles of grace in our poor, suffering world.
