Come Holy Sprirt...Enkindle in Us the Fire of His Love

When you're awake, the things you think
Come from the dream you dream
Thought has wings, and lots of things
Are seldom what they seem

Sometimes you think you've lived before
All that you live to day
Things you do come back to you
As though they knew the way (Lorenz Hart)

 

Pentecost was God’s coming to strengthen the fidelity of a community to the memory of Jesus…The memory of Jesus is now preserved in the Spirit and through a community’s faith, with all the attendant mysteries of bread and wine, revelation and tradition. (John 15:26-27;16:12-15)

David Steindl-Rast writes in Deeper than Words that “The Holy Spirit is the awe-inspiring power of life and love; loving energy within us is a reality with which every human being is familiar. We differ only by the degree to which we open ourselves to this power. if we patiently cultivate courage and openness, we will become more and more aware of the Spirit which allows us to know God.

In our Creed when we proclaim our belief in the Holy Spirit, we acknowledge God as the ‘Father,’ the ultimate mystery from whom we come and to whom we are on our way; the ‘Son,’ in whom we find our true Self; the ‘Spirit,’ the divine aliveness within our innermost life, Here we touch upon the very core of faith.”

We are charged with remembering all that Jesus lived while he was with us. The Spirit is the ultimate power of the Gospel through which the Word becomes flesh in us and are no longer merely words…we become those words and they define who and what we are, and we remember, we remember not as if it were yesterday but as today because it is today; we live the memory now and again and again.

“When we remember, we leave the present for the past. To say it better, we bring the past into the present and give it life alongside the tangible realities we are compelled to consider. Not physical presence but love leads us to live with this remembered person even in his/her absence. When love is strong, the memory of this may be more dearer and more real than the reality of those who are present. Our memory of another confers the present upon him, gives him further life in our life, and keeps a moment of the past from drifting away or fading into death.

We are fed and nourished by communion of life in which lives intersect in memory and merge into common experience. No lover forgets. No beloved is forgotten. The memory of love is life; the memory of another becomes ourselves. So when the communion of believers remembers Jesus, when the bride is alive with the thought of her Spouse, Christ is present. Jesus is brought into the present with his grace by the force of memory in the power of the Spirit…The gift of the Spirit is fidelity to the memory of life’s mystery and confidence in the mystery of its future.” (Anthony Padovano, Dawn without Darkness)