Last weekend, we celebrated the great Feast of Pentecost as we concluded our Easter season. Over the next 2 weeks we’ll celebrate the Most Holy Trinity & the Body & Blood of Christ as we prepare to enter back into Ordinary Time.

  The story of Pentecost is not just a story of the past, it is vary much a story of the present. We don’t just celebrate that the Holy Spirit fell upon the apostles back then, we pray too that the Holy Spirit falls upon us today. Like those first apostles, we find ourselves hidden in our faith behind locked doors of fear. Our culture and society today are, in so many ways, very antagonistic towards people of faith. We live in a society & culture that tries to shape the truth as they want to shape it. A society that seeks to redefine pretty much everything from the meaning of life to the meaning of sexuality & gender, what it means to be a man or a woman. A society that very much belittles & condemns people of faith & anyone who holds a viewpoint & a truth other than the one that the larger society wants them & us to hold.

   We need that Pentecost today, that fresh outpouring of the Holy Spirit, so that we might be a Church who, in the midst of hostility & unopened ears, goes out and continues to proclaim the language of God, the language of love & truth with boldness & conviction. The Spirit enables us to trust that God is with us as we go out into a society of darkness, confusion, & discord. The Spirit enables us to trust that the love of our God who is Father, Son, & Spirit who we celebrate today, is a God whose love & truth very much need to be heard today. It may be easier to stay behind our locked doors. It may be easier to allow fear to control us & to keep our faith to ourselves. But, as much as many might like it to be, our faith is not a private affair, our faith is a faith that is meant to be proclaimed & shared. Pray that the Spirit may inspire us, & you, to proclaim in your works & actions the truth of God, the truth of God’s love. That message, the message of God, is a message that very much needs to be heard today!