RECEIVING  DAILY  PENTECOST

V/​ I will turn to you O God, 

R/​ to God who gives joy to my youth

V/​ Give me the Wisdom that sits by your throne; 

R/ that I may be counted among your children

Lord, in your all-providential plan, you have led me to this moment to rediscover me in your Word and Wisdom. Aid me to make this time of meditation and prayer enriching, transforming, and liberating for my well-being and others. Amen!

RECEIVING  DAILY  PENTECOST

By John Dalla Costa

PENTECOST SUNDAY, YR C

Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104(103): 1,24,29-34; Romans 8:8-17; John 14:15-16, 23-26

8th June 2025

As significant as is the feast of Pentecost, we cannot forget that the momentous event we celebrate was a beginning and not a completion. Pentecost is ceaseless. It is, in fact, an everyday experience, animating our personal spirituality and discipleship, as well as our shared efforts in making Christ’s Church.

Indeed, anything that we do for the sake of faith is animated by this daily Pentecost. While writing The Interior Castle, St. Teresa of Avila confronted her (perceived) inadequacies as a writer by repeatedly drawing on the Holy Spirit to guide the expression of her thoughts and mystical insights. This attentiveness to the Holy Spirit rooted her work and ministry in God’s love, while at the same time allowing her talents to be agitated for that spontaneous and creative burst which broke new ground for personal prayer and the Church.

Reading about the tongues of fire signifying the Holy Spirit’s profusion of gifts upon the gathered disciples of Jesus is wondrous. After Christ’s Ascension, the absence of the One they had been following was acute. With Pentecost, the soul of each disciple, with his or her own gifts, was transfused by the Holy Spirit to participate intimately in the life and mission of Jesus. As Acts reports, they emerged from the Cenacle with an overflowing energy that transmitted the holiness of the Gospel to even those who spoke different languages. The Pentecost event launched the Church. And every day since, Pentecost enlivens, provokes, challenges, reforms, and uplifts the Church as a whole, and each of us as its constitutive members.

This persisting and pervasive presence of Pentecost touches us on three levels.

As children of God baptised in Jesus Christ, Pentecost brings us to personal fullness, instigating the growth through life’s flourishing and setbacks by which we actualise our capacity for holiness. Carmelite theologian, Constance FitzGerald, noted that the Spirit comes “not only in speech, but in silence,” especially in those moments of desolation when our “defences collapse.” Pentecost accompanies us in the undoing and unlearning of breakdowns, as well as in energising leaps of breakthroughs.

Another level of Pentecost is as Church. The synodal pilgrimage begun by Pope Francis, and now affirmed by Pope Leo XIV, inherited structures and rituals, inspired by the Spirit for previous centuries and cultures, need to be reimagined, again with the Holy Spirit, to speak with urgency and compassion to the spiritual needs of this time. It is now our turn to leave the Cenacle; our turn to dare to speak in fresh ways the truth and hope of Christ.

The third outpouring of the Holy Spirit prepares each of us to heal our culture. Both Popes Francis and Leo XIV have identified the malady besetting global society as “polycrisis.” Polycrisis admits that reality is now defined by a complex interconnection of problems, which compound each other. Pentecost is the antidote to polycrisis: a source of hope in a situation of despair; an illumination from wisdom when so much information has let us down; a gift that enriches without cost or exclusion; and a light that beckons us to follow Christ and pay the price of love which alone builds and secures peace.