Pope at Pentecost: Holy Spirit
unites Christians as God’s children in self-giving
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| Pope Francis arrives in procession for the celebration of the Holy Mass for the Solemnity of Pentecost in Saint Peter's Basilica (Vatican Media) |
On the Solemnity of Pentecost, Pope Francis urges Christians
to ask the Holy Spirit to free them from the paralysis of selfishness and make
a gift of themselves by serving and doing good. Playback included.
By Robin Gomes
Pope Francis celebrated the Solemnity of Pentecost with a
Mass in St. Peter’s Basilica, with a limited number of the faithful in
attendance, as health protocols of the Covid-19 pandemic are still in place in
Italy and the Vatican.
During the May 31 Mass, he urged the Holy Spirit to make
Christians builders of unity. “Grant us the courage to go out of ourselves, to
love and help each other, in order to become one family,” he prayed.
Pentecost, which commemorates the descent of the Holy Spirit
upon the Virgin Mary and the Apostles in Jerusalem, as narrated in the Acts of
the Apostles (Acts 2:1-22), is regarded as the birth of the Church.
Unity in diversity
Pope Francis delivered a homily pointing out that despite
the diversity of backgrounds and ethnicities among Christ’s followers in the
early Church, the Holy Spirit brings about unity by making them realize that
they are primarily the children of God.
Saint Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians attests to
this fact when he says, “There are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the
same Spirit.”
Coming to our times, Pope Francis said that we too have our
differences, such as opinions, choices, sensibilities. But the temptation to
fiercely defend our ideas as good for everybody, the Pope warned, is “a faith
created in our own image”, “not what the Spirit wants”.
Unity as God’s beloved children
Much more than our beliefs and our morality, the Pope said,
the Spirit unites us as “God’s beloved children,” and “that we have one Lord –
Jesus – and one Father, and that for this reason we are brothers and
sisters!”
The Spirit loves us and knows everyone’s place in the grand
scheme of things, the Pope said. “We are not bits of confetti blown about by
the wind, rather we are irreplaceable fragments in His mosaic.”
Gift of self and proclamation
Taking a closer look at the day of Pentecost, Pope Francis
said that the first task of the Church is proclamation. The Spirit does not
want the Apostles to be locked in upper rooms where it is easy to “nest”.
Rather, He “opens doors and pushes us to press beyond what has already been
said and done, beyond the precincts of a timid and wary faith.”
After Pentecost, one thing that kept the Apostles going, the
Pope said, was “the desire to give what they received”. In the Church, the Pope
said, the Spirit guarantees unity to those who proclaim the
message.
The "secret of unity" of the Holy Spirit, the Pope
pointed out, is a gift, as He Himself is gift. Hence, it is important to
believe that "God is gift", that He acts not by taking away, but by
giving.
If we realize that what we are is due to His free and
unmerited gift, then “we too will want to make our lives a gift”. “By loving
humbly, serving freely and joyfully, we will offer to the world the true image
of God.”
Three enemies of self-giving
However, in this gift of self, the Pope noted there are
three enemies: narcissism, victimhood and pessimism.
Narcissism, the Pope said, makes us concerned only
with how we can profit from it. In this time of the pandemic, the Pope lamented
the tendency to think only of our own needs, to be indifferent to those of
others.
Victimhood, he said, is equally dangerous. Victims
complain every day about their neighbours – that no one understands them, no
one experiences what they experience and everyone is against them. In the
present crisis, he noted, we are experiencing how ugly victimhood
is.
Pessimism is an unending complaint that “nothing
is going well in society, politics, the Church…”. A pessimist gets
angry with the world, but sits back and does nothing. In the current crisis,
the Pope said it is damaging to “see everything in the worst light and to keep
saying that nothing will return as before”.
Famine of hope
“When someone thinks this way,” the Pope observed, “the one
thing that certainly does not return is hope.” “We are experiencing a famine of
hope,” he said, “and we need to appreciate the gift of life, the gift that each
of us is.” “We need the Holy Spirit, the gift of God who heals us of
narcissism, victimhood and pessimism.”
https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2020-05/pope-francis-pentecost-homily-unity-self-giving.html
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