Pentecost (B)
It was Thanksgiving morning. While eight-year-old Sarah and her siblings were watching the Macy’s parade, their parents were preparing Thanksgiving dinner. When dinner was over, Sarah’s mother told the children, “Now that Christmas is only a month away, be sure to make a list of what you want Santa to give you.”
And so it happened! Sarah’s siblings made their lists, but Sarah didn’t. A week later, her mother asked her why she hadn’t made a list for Santa. Sarah replied, “But, Mom, if I tell Santa what I want, I’ll never know what he wanted to give me!”
Our story may be drawn from a different time of year, but its punch line is very appropriate for the feast we celebrate today. It reminds us of a certain truth about us as individuals and, even more importantly, us as Church that we may unwittingly forget. We are the Lord’s. The Church is the Lord’s. It is the Lord who takes the initiative. God calls; we listen and follow.
We know this and believe it. We try to live this out. In doing so, however, we can run into an unexpected difficulty. It may happen in a way like this. As individuals or families, we seek to discern, with all the insight and other resources at our disposal, what the Lord is asking of us. We seek to discern what gifts we need in order to be faithful to this calling. We then ask the Holy Spirit for these gifts. As our lives unfold, we notice that the Holy Spirit has indeed given us at least some of the gifts we asked for. All well and good.
However, we may also notice that the Spirit has given us some gifts we have not asked for; gifts we did not know we needed. What then? Do we reject them? Do we try to make them fit into our own little plan? No. We remember that even our best efforts to discern the Lord’s will are limited, because we are limited. We cannot see the whole picture. The Lord alone knows all that we truly need. Therefore, rather than be content with asking the Holy Spirit for what we want or think we need, we are also open to what the Holy Spirit may want to give us, whether (at the time) we think we need it or not.
It works the same way on a parish or diocesan level. Planning groups, on various levels, will try to discern what a parish or diocese needs at the time to be faithful to its mission. They will come up with many responses to this: outreach to the young, to the fallen-away, to the unchurched; more vocations to the diocesan priesthood and diaconate; more lay volunteers and staff; increased income; and so on. All of these are good and are part of the overall picture. Indeed, any such planning group will find that the Holy Spirit will indeed call people to meet these various needs which they have discerned. But these plans are incomplete, because all our strivings are incomplete. Only the Holy Spirit can know fully what our situation is, where we need to go, and what we need in order to get there. Therefore, we should expect that the Spirit will, at times, give people in our communities gifts that don’t fit our carefully worked-out strategies; gifts we didn’t know we needed; gifts that may even seem counterintuitive to us. But the Church is the Lord’s, not ours. The Lord builds up the Church. If we have enough sense, we get with the Lord’s program and welcome the gifts the Lord gives us through the Spirit.
We see this throughout the Acts of the Apostles. Pentecost was merely the beginning. The Holy Spirit is constantly leading people to go where they would not have gone on their own, and to welcome people they would not have sought out on their own: Philip is sent to an Ethiopian eunuch; Christians fleeing persecution preach to Samaritans and Greeks; Saul is knocked off his horse on the road to Damascus; Peter gets a triple-vision to prepare him to go to the house of the Roman Cornelius; and so forth. Paul finds that his travel plans are being constantly “updated” by the promptings of the Holy Spirit.
This has continues throughout the history of the Church. The Holy Spirit has always called people to all the expected ministries. However, the Spirit often called people in ways that did not fit the existing mold: Anthony of the Desert, Francis and Dominic, Catherine of Siena, or Dorothy Day – to name but a few. Besides such people through whom the Spirit has given great graces to His Church, there are the more ordinary people of every generation who are called in ways that may seem “impractical” or even “useless” to others in their time, but who, nevertheless, are also graced with gifts of the Spirit for the benefit of the Church and the world. A child with Down’s Syndrome can remind us in a powerful way of the joy and humility of being a Christian. An elderly person confined to a home can witness to the power of prayer and can offer the wisdom of many decades of life to anyone who is willing to seek it. Someone called to a contemplative religious order, or to live as a hermit in the Church, reminds us all that God alone is enough, and that we all need a spirit of watching and listening in order to ground our activities in the Lord’s will.
Even when we do accept, not merely in theory but also in practice, that the Holy Spirit is in charge – not us – and that it is for us to welcome all the gifts he gives us, another challenge remains: how do these gifts relate to one another? From the very beginnings of the Church, there has been a temptation to see a certain gift (usually, one’s own) as the best or greatest gift. The community at Corinth became divided when those who had the gift of speaking in tongues considered this as the highest gift and, therefore, that they were the most spiritually mature. Within a few decades, groups who would be called Gnostic claimed that they, and they alone, had been given some “inside information” that other Christians (poor souls) did not possess, and therefore were more spiritually advanced than all the others. Gnostic tendencies remain to this day, and can be spotted in some well-known spiritual authors of our own time, as well as their followers. Later on, the gift of contemplative life was seen as more “perfect” than that of the active life, and celibacy as a superior gift to that of marriage. I recently saw a quote where a hermit described himself as part of the spiritual “Green Berets” or “Navy SEALS”. On the other hand, most people in our society tend to exalt action over contemplation. The temptation to exalt one’s own gift, usually at the expense of someone else’s, is very difficult to resist.
The solution? Quite simple – embarrassingly simple. We remind ourselves that these are all gifts from the same Giver. It is the Holy Spirit, as Paul insists, who gives various gifts to various people for the building up of the body of Christ. Paul goes on to say that the head cannot say to the foot, “I do not need you”, nor can the eye say to the ear, “I do not need you”. This is another way of saying that each gift is valuable and necessary for the Church, and that we are in no position to rank them. Only God could do that. Accordingly, we can update Paul’s statement to the Corinthians. The Carthusian cannot say to the social worker, “I do not need you” – and vice versa. The financier cannot say to the Catholic Worker volunteer “I do not need you” – and vice versa. The bishop cannot say to the hermit, “I do not need you” – and vice versa. Every gift of the Spirit is good, valuable and necessary, as the Spirit knows what we need in order to become who we are called to be. The more gifts of the Spirit we have in any community, the more blessed we are. This is especially so when we can see the value in gifts that have no “practical” use. Then, we can be sure that we are valuing them because they come from the Spirit – and for no other reason.
And so, my friends, by all means – pray for what you believe you need. Trust that the Spirit will give you all you need. But remember – you may also receive gifts you have not asked for. These will reveal to you what the Spirit wanted to give you all along. Welcome these gifts with as much gratitude as the ones you did ask for. All come from the same Spirit. Each one bears within it a unique blessing.