Reflection
The Spirit is simply God’s self-communication in grace, present and active everywhere, pervading the world. This basic but profound reality bears repeating today, because so many do not experience God’s nearness but think of God as distant or even unreal.
This is most unfortunate. Through the Spirit, the risen Christ is universally present in the world everywhere and in every moment, as pervasive as the air we breathe, as the sun or the rain that comes down on us, as the wind that blows around us, as the life that flows with our every breath.
Elizabeth Johnson
Prayer
Come Holy Spirit
Action
Reflect on the fact that God is near. Consider what your life would be like if “everywhere you look, there is the face of God.” Try to keep this in your awareness as you see the divisions and violence being played out in the present time.
Suggested Reading
All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit enabled them.
Acts 2:4
The Holy Spirit is an inexhaustible well of the life of God in us.
Pope Francis
Without the Spirit we can neither love God nor keep God’s commandments.
Saint Augustine
Those in whom the Spirit comes to live are God’s new Temple. They are, individually and corporately, places where heaven and earth meet.
N.T. Wright
Without the Spirit of God, we can do nothing. We are as ships without wind. We are useless.
C.H. Spurgeon
The Holy Spirit illuminates the minds of people, makes us yearn for God, and takes spiritual truth and makes it understandable to us.
Billy Graham
The church becomes irrelevant when it becomes purely a human creation. We are not all we were made to be when everything in our lives and churches can be explained apart from the work and presence of the Spirit of God.
Francis Chan
Believers are never told to become one; we already are one and are expected to act like it.
Joni Eareckson Tada
Finding one’s own voice, however, haltingly, imparts the power of the Spirit crying out. The boldness to hear the claim of conscience and follow its deep impulses even in the face of loss; the courage to taste righteous anger and allow it to motivate critical resistance to evil; the willingness to utter the prophetic word compassion into the ambiguity of the world.
Elizabeth Johnson, CSJ
Pentecost is an invitation to dream. For when a community of faith quits dreaming dreams, it has little to offer either its members or the wider world. These dreams involve adopting a new perspective on what’s possible, rousing our creativity to free us from conventional expectations. They help us see that maybe what we thought was outlandish actually lies within reach.
Matthew L. Skinner