May 17, 2020

6^th Sunday of Easter (A)  

The Holy Spirit—an Enabler…to Love!

Msgr. Thomas Gervasio

As we were in last week’s Gospel, we find ourselves in the Upper Room, at the Last Supper, listening to Our Lord’s farewell discourse. He would be leaving, and pointing his anxious apostles and us to the future, speaks of keeping the commandments.
 
Lately we have had a lot of practice observing rules. They may be inconvenient and annoying but we observe them to safeguard our own health and that of others. We Americans cherish our freedoms and so we tend resist rules. We view them with a certain cynicism.
 
Today Our Lord says, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” I saw a couple cartoons about the commandments. One had Moses on Mt. Sinai holding the tablets of the law, saying to God, “I posted them on Face Book but didn’t get any ‘likes!’” Another had two Israelites looking at the tablets and one says, ‘I don’t know about you, but I’ve only found two that work for me.”
 
The commandments can be burdensome or annoying when we see them merely as obligations. But they are not a set of arbitrary ‘do’s and don’t’s devised by God to make the going hard for us. God is not capricious, setting up an obstacle course to be cleared for heaven.
 
In essence, keeping the commandments is a matter of love, a requirement of the heart. This is why St. John would write, “For the love of God is this, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome…” (1 Jn 5:3)
 
The commandments are an expression of God’s infinite love and wisdom. God, who created us, knows what is best for us and what will contribute to our happiness. Discipleship is not a matter of jumping through a series of hoops to get to heaven. Discipleship is animated by love.
 
Parents do not count the cost of the sacrifices they make for their children. Caregivers do not gauge their fatigue at the bedside a loved one. Love animates them.
 
When Jesus spoke of love at the Last Supper and modeled it by washing the feet of his disciples, he promised that he would ask the Father to send them another Advocate to be with them and with us always—the Holy Spirit.
 
We received the Holy Spirit at our Baptism, and at Confirmation his life within us was deepened and strengthened. The Holy Spirit is often called “the Font of Love” for God is love. He enables us to love. Fr. Dave Pivonka, who not long ago directed our Cohort Mission, says: “The Holy Spirit helps us to live life the way Jesus meant it to be lived.” Fr. Pivonka added, “I remember a priest saying that he continually asks the Holy Spirit to fill him. When I asked why, Father responded, ‘Because I leak.’
 
Many of us “leak” spiritually when our love for God and the ‘things of God’ weakens, and when we fail to love others, particularly those who hurt us or whom we brand as “unloveable.” And so we need to call again and again upon the Spirit whom we received in Baptism and Confirmation.
 
St. Robert Bellarmine wrote a moving prayer but being a good Jesuit, it was also a long and involved prayer. Here are just a few lines:

O Divine Fire, when you begin to inflame man’s heart, his passions diminish and the human heart may come to feel itself so light as to fly like a dove. You are a fire that purifies me with true wisdom; a fire that transforms the coldness of laziness, selfishness and negligence into the heat of love. It is a fire that will not let my heart grow hardened, whose warmth makes it flexible, obedient, devoted, & nourishes and increases my charity.

A powerful prayer to be sure…Or we might simply pray in words of Fr. Pivonka’s friend: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill me…because I leak!”