What Pentecost reveals about the Holy Spirit

Most of us who started learning religion from the penny catechism have taken for granted what we had to memorize from its pages. "There is but one God but in Him are three Persons – Father, Son and Holy Spirit. "Mind you, do not say there are three Gods or you will fail your religion subject. So our faith started by keeping to the penny catechism word for word. We were still the children who trusted, who believed in faith. But when we grew up thinking we were the wiser, we began to ask questions about things which were not readily explainable. And when we did, the very dogmatic teacher of the religion class sternly put us in our places by asking us to pipe down. "This is a mystery, meaning something which we cannot explain. You just have to believe it... in faith. Know what is faith? You believe even if you cannot understand; your little coconut simply cannot contain the mystery."

So we came to know the name of the fundamental mystery of Christianity that of God having only one nature (nature, meaning what one is) but having three Persons (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) in God. More advanced studies teach us that the nature of our eternal God is perfect knowledge and perfect love. The Father knowing Himself in one act of infinite knowledge and in Himself everything that can be known, and in Himself utters what He is; an equal only begotten Son, His WORD in one breath reaching out to Him as lover to the beloved. This perfect love between them is the Holy Spirit. Maybe, this is as far as our limited minds can reach.

Today is the feast of Pentecost; the feast of the third Person of the Trinity. When charismatics sing their song: "I got a Christian Spirit up in my head, I got it; up in my heart I got it; down on my feet I got it... all over me I got it." Does that song approximate all that the Holy Spirit should mean to us? What is revealed to us about the Holy Spirit?

He is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, proceeding from the Father and the Son by a single ‘breathing’. It is by Him that Mary conceived Jesus and even called the Father of Jesus; He is active in Jesus and in the Church. He is active in a special manner in the sacraments of Confirmation and of Holy Orders. On the procession of the Holy Spirit in the triune God the Holy Spirit possesses the fullness of one divine life because the Father and the Son are by nature lovers. He is also the Spirit of the Word, God’s communication.

Because God creates as God, He creates as Spirit everything in the world that is new and fresh. Free and vital, unexpected and mighty; at once tender and strong, the mystery of love which even in the natural is always the most intimate mystery. He is the mystery of grace; God within us as our anointing and sealing, our earnest of heaven, our comforter and advocate, our freedom and sonship, our life and peace, our holiness and unity. He causes the fruits to mature in us – love, joy, peace, chastity, the stern adversary of the flesh, of sin, of legalism, the secret power of transfiguration within us, pressing forward to the resurrection of the body and the transfiguration of the world. He is the Spirit of the Church, the unity of the mystical Body of Christ.

Pentecost reveals that this Spirit is not only to man, but that man’s acceptance of the Spirit is itself the Spirit‘s gift. In the Spirit, we come to have a consciousness of our sins, repentance, conversion. The sacrament of God’s grace in the Spirit not only promised but given, is the Church. In her He lives not only in prudent laws but in awakenings to new life. He is the Spirit of the individual who may possess Him or be guided by Him in a Christianity that is nameless and which does not yet understand the Church, which can be perceived wherever men refused by the grace of God to conform to legalistic mediocrity.

We cannot mistake the Spirit. He is presented to us in symbols like the dove symbolizing the creation of the new people of God, a gale or wind symbolizing strength (Act 2), tongues of fire symbolizing ecstasy of the witnesses (Acts 2). So we should pray to the Spirit without ceasing; "Come Holy Spirit, fill our hearts and enkindle in us the fire of your love."

Pentecost Sunday, John 20:19-21.