Practical implications of Pentecost

PENTECOST Sunday ends the Easter Season and leads us back to what we call as Ordinary Time in our liturgical calendar, the timepiece that enables us to live sacramentally with Christ as he continues with his redemptive work through the Holy Spirit.

It reminds us that the spirit of Pentecost, which is the Spirit of Christ, be lived in the ordinary things of our daily life, since everything ought to be lived always with Christ in the Spirit. In effect, we have to realize that Christ is always with us. He has not abandoned us. He continues to live with us, giving us the proper direction in our life.

Pentecost Sunday commemorates the fulfillment of what Christ promised his apostles about the coming of the Holy Spirit that would bring them to all the truth that Christ taught them and continues to do so.

It commemorates that day when the apostles who, together with Our Lady, were so filled with the Holy Spirit that they suddenly became bold in their apostolic work, even to the extent of speaking in tongues if only to reach out to all kinds of people.

It assures us that we should feel confident in all our apostolic undertakings despite the many trials, challenges and difficulties we can encounter, because it would be the Holy Spirit who would do things for and with us, if we would just allow him to.

We should have this abiding consciousness of this truth of our faith. We should make it form the conviction that whatever happens in our life, God in the Spirit will always be with us. We have to reinforce this conviction constantly both in good times and especially in bad times. We are never alone! God is always around!

We have to feel very much at home with this very wonderful reality and start to correspond to it as we ought. We have to go beyond our earthly dimensions and enter into the more fascinating world of the spiritual and the supernatural.

This does not mean that we escape from our earthly reality to be in the spiritual and supernatural reality. No. It means that while being deeply immersed in our mundane conditions, we also have to learn to go beyond them to be with God. This is what the word ‘transcendence’ means.

To be sure, we are enabled to do that, because of our intelligence and will. These are powerful faculties that would enable us to know and to love, and eventually to enter in the lives of others and ultimately to be with God.

And one secret that we can use to develop this life in the Spirit is precisely to give some spiritual and religious consideration or meaning to every act we do and to every situation, condition and circumstance we can find ourselves in.

We need to develop the proper attitude, skill and habit of giving spiritual and supernatural considerations to everything that we think about, say and do, so that we can really say that we would always be with God. That is the ideal that we should try to actualize.

One way among many other ways of doing this is to make use of the psalms which are inspired words that express the proper spiritual and supernatural attitude and reaction we ought to have to anything that occurs in our life.

Of course, we have to study and meditate on the psalms well so that we can internalize their real meaning and imbibe the spirit behind the words. We have to know the psalms that are relevant to every act we do and to every situation we can find ourselves in.