You may have noticed a large and dramatic photograph in the New York Times last week during the Pope’s visit. It was not a story about the Pope, but about the more than one million Catholics in the U.S. who have left to join Pentecostal churches, and in the photo, there are three members of one such church in New York, along with their pastor. They have their arms raised dramatically in the air, eyes closed, intense feeling on their faces. One man is clutching at the shoulders of another, and seems like he is about ready to fall down to the floor in tears.
A picture like that is still what most of us think of when we hear the words “receiving the Holy Spirit.” So we’re a little puzzled and maybe even a little put off when we notice in the Scriptures that “receiving the Holy Spirit” is not just mentioned there in passing, but in fact was completely central to what Jesus promised to the disciples, and central to the life of the church as it started to grow. In the gospel, Jesus says “I will send you an advocate to be with you always.” meaning the Holy Spirit, and in that first reading from the Acts of the Apostles, the disciples decide that even baptism is apparently not complete unless there has been a laying on of hands that will call that Spirit down.
Catholics like us often don’t know what to make of this. We assume that someone who says they’ve received the Spirit might act irrationally or even fanatically, like those people in the photograph seem to us. All this talk about the Spirit seems like it’s all about emotion and loss of control. We know from what we were taught that our sacraments are all about the action of the Spirit. But we also know that many people who receive the Spirit at baptism and confirmation often don’t look or act much different the day after than the day before. So we’re caught between two extremes, thinking on the one hand that the Spirit is too “out there” and over the top for the likes of us, and on the other, feeling like the Spirit’s work is so silent and under the surface that we have a hard time pointing to it at all.
So what does “receiving the Spirit” mean? We have three clues today from the scriptures, and we find out quickly that both these pictures we have of the Spirit, the wildly emotional on the one hand, and the almost invisible on the other, aren’t what the Spirit is up to at all.
First today’s gospel. Jesus tells us that the Holy Spirit is not some faceless, anonymous power that comes and goes unpredictably. The Holy Spirit is the presence of Jesus, alive and active and with us always. Jesus tells his disciples that he will not leave them, because this Holy Spirit will be there, and they should be led and taught by it in the same way they were by him. So if we think the Spirit is hard to picture, the wind, a bird, some intermittent power that we are not sure we can see, we have to remember that the Spirit is the presence of Jesus, here not just to teach us and change us, but to love us and protect us. We don’t have any reason to be afraid.
Then, in that second reading, the Paul tells us that people who are filled with the Spirit are not crazy fanatics, off by themselves in a separate world, or angrily trying to argue people around. He tells Christians to always be ready to talk about and explain what they believe, and to talk about it in a way that people can understand, to be filled with gentleness and reverence. So we shouldn’t be deceived or led astray by people who say they have been spoken to by the Spirit, but who don’t look very much as if it is love that motivates them. The Spirit isn’t the Spirit if it is driving people from Jesus.
But the third and perhaps most important lesson about the Spirit from these readings is that while the Spirit might be gentle and reverent, it also is here to turn us upside down. Today in that first reading we heard about Philip, who was the one who went to preach the good news to Samaria. He is one of my favorite figures in the New Testament, but you have to think back to last week’s readings to see why. Last week we heard that he was appointed one of the seven assistants to the 12 apostles. These seven were supposed to take care of all the administrative work so that the apostles could spend more time out preaching. But now, just one week after being assigned what might seem like a desk job, here Philip is preaching himself, way off in the countryside. What happened to him?
Maybe you have seen people like this, people who suddenly decided they saw something that needed to be done, not work that was going to make them more money or make their lives easier in the long run, or even work they felt particularly well trained to do. Somehow in people like Philip, a desire to do something for God and for other people just overwhelms all their defense mechanisms.
You don’t need to look in the Bible to find these people, you see them in Dorothy Day and Mother Teresa, in doctors who decide to do their work for the poor, in students who decide that service isn’t just an assigned project but maybe a way to live. The Spirit overcame those people, too, not dramatically in front of a church full of people, but just as powerfully. Invisible as the Spirit might be, we can see it, because people who are touched by it lead a different life, gentle and reasonable and generous and somehow on a different path than most of our lives take.
We all have a lot of ways we talk ourselves out of feeling as if it’s us the Spirit wants to be with. We see the picture of the Pentecostals and we think that’s not us, we hear about people whose lives change dramatically and we think that’s not us either. The Spirit is powerful, but it does not possess us if we don’t want it near. The real question about the Spirit that always needs answering is, do I want that Spirit near me? If the answer is yes, the signs of it in your life will be all around you.