THEME OF THE READINGS
The risen Christ gives all his followers in superabundance the gift of the Spirit he had promised them before his death (First Reading and Gospel). Everything Christian comes alive only thanks to the work of the Holy Spirit in each one, which has as its purpose to build up the one Body of Christ (Second Reading and Sequence). This is his Church, gathered from every nation and made one by the indwelling of the Spirit in each one of its members, being as it were the common ‘soul’ that gives cohesion to the many parts and sustains a common faith that speaks to each one ‘in his own language’ (First Reading).

DOCTRINAL MESSAGE
“We have never even heard that there is a holy Spirit,” some disciples in Ephesus told St Paul (Acts 19:2), and even if most Christians today are not quite so oblivious to his existence and his workings, the Spirit remains necessarily mysterious. He is the Love between the Father and the Son; and who can quite begin to imagine what subsistent Love is like? He is the Spirit of Christ, and he reveals Christ to us, not himself (John 15:26; 16:14). He has been “poured into our hearts” where as the “gentle guest of our souls” (Sequence) he transforms our ability to know and love God. Without him none of us would be able to grasp that God is love, or believe in Christ; we could not say “Jesus is Lord” or “Abba, Father”. He is the unequalled artisan who fashions the image of Christ in all things, at all times. He it is who formed the physical body of Christ in a virgin’s womb, and his mystical body from that ‘motley crew’ of apostles, and now forms his image and likeness in the fragile clay of each Christian believer.

The Holy Spirit is the one who leads us to Christian maturity and commitment. For a graphic illustration of this, we only have to look at Peter before, and immediately after, Pentecost. He is a different man. Keeping it simple, it is true to say that, as far as living as Christians and as apostles of God’s grace goes, “without him, nothing; with him, everything”. The tongues of fire that touched each of the disciples not only signify the divine nature of the Spirit (fire is a symbol of this in Scripture), but also the profoundly transforming energy of his actions (cf. CCC 696).

With the Spirit’s coming upon the apostles, the Church is born. He is the soul of the Church; and at the same time the Church is founded on the apostles, and is made one by the presence of the Spirit. Which makes one realize that it is more than mildly contradictory for those who create divisions, and set themselves over and against the hierarchical Church, to see themselves, as they invariably do, as acting under the influence of that same Spirit. The Church is the home of the Spirit, or, in the words of St Hippolytus (3^rd century), the place “where the Spirit flourishes” (cf. CCC 749). Even when the Church’s failings are most obvious, this does not change.

Catechesis: Our faith in the Holy Spirit as a divine Person and the ways in which we perceive his action through his animation of the life of the Church (CCC 683-91)

PASTORAL APPLICATIONS
If we were attentive to the Holy Spirit’s work within us, it would certainly not be inconsistent with the action of uncreated Love.

Remembering that this mystery is “actualized” or made present to us today, we all need to open wide the doors of our soul, and of the Church, to the powerful, rushing wind of Spirit, allowing him to blow through the house and sweep away the accumulated toxic fumes of pettiness, self-centeredness, worldliness, resentment, cowardice, discouragement, distrust, lack of confidence or whatever else may have dampened the vigor, hope and evangelical zeal so apparent on that first Pentecost. Because all these are gifts of the Spirit to the Church; they belong to her as a birthright, and we can and must lay claim to them in our time when they are more urgently needed than ever.

It does require our cooperation. The greatest Christians are necessarily those who facilitate the work of the Holy Spirit. Mary has sometimes been described as “the harp of the Spirit”: the chords of her soul were so exquisitely fine-tuned, so extraordinarily sensitive, that the mere “breath” of the Spirit caressing them were sufficient to produce the most beautiful and only flawless melody. And of course Mary is the ‘type’ or model of the Church, its most faithful embodiment: what we all need and long for the Church to be today (not forgetting that the Church is each one of us, and her holiness has to exist in our lives). While we are pilgrims on the way, she will always be walking ahead of us, showing us what we must still strive for. Not on our own, but by cooperating as she did with the Holy Spirit.

The Sequence is an ancient hymn that describes the action of the Spirit within us in terms that can ‘clue us in’, however inadequately, to how he works, and consequently to how we might cooperate with him, not oppose what he is doing, and invite him insistently: “Come, Holy Spirit, come”. To “heal our wounds… wash the stains of guilt away… bend the stubborn heart and will”. After all, who would not want the therapy without equal that the hymn suggests the Holy Spirit provides to those who lend themselves to his action? Anyone who tries it will be able to testify that he really does!