Homily for Sunday, 31 March 2024– The Resurrection of the Lord, Mass of Easter Sunday

Readings of the day: Acts 10:34a, 37-43; Psalm 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9

Sisters and brothers: Christ is risen, alleluia! He is truly risen, alleluia!

Within the Scripture readings we have just heard on this Easter Sunday morning, I am always profoundly drawn to the descriptions of Jesus’ first disciples, the diversity of their experiences of Jesus’ resurrection and the preaching of apostles like Peter about Jesus’ resurrection.

First, I invite us to focus our attention on Mary Magdalene. She, not any of the Twelve, is the first to see the empty tomb of Jesus, with the stone rolled away from its entrance. She runs to tell Simon Peter “and the other disciple, the one whom Jesus loved,” that the tomb is empty. But at this point, Mary Magdalene’s experience is not one of excitement and joy; it is one of confusion. “They have taken the Lord out of the tomb, and we do not know where they have laid him.”

In her anxiety and confusion, Mary Magdalene reaches for the first logical conclusion that comes to her mind: Somebody has stolen, has relocated Jesus’ body. Peter and the beloved disciple run together to the tomb to investigate Mary’s claim that the tomb is empty. I imagine that, when Mary Magdalene first tells Peter and the beloved disciple that the tomb is empty, they would have thought this was preposterous. But, to their credit, the two men go to the tomb. Mary Magdalene returns to the tomb, too, but remains in the garden outside it, weeping.

Simon Peter and then the beloved disciple enter the tomb. They see the stone rolled away, the burial cloths rolled up in separate places, the head cloth from the body cloth. And the next line in John’s Gospel always amazes me, every time I hear it: The beloved disciple (and we can presume Peter, too) “saw and believed, for as yet they did not understand the Scripture, that he must rise from the dead.”

The beloved disciple believed first. Only later would Jesus’ disciples understand this mystery of the resurrection: “He must rise from the dead.” In the Church, dating back to the eleventh century Benedictine monk St. Anselm of Canterbury, we have a neat little phrase to sum up the goal of the Christian intellectual tradition: It is “faith seeking understanding”—fides quærens intellectum.

Now, maybe this speaks to the smallness of my faith, or maybe it is a more widespread phenomenon of contemporary Western thought (I will leave this question to the philosophers), but I have real trouble believing in something if I cannot first begin to understand it intellectually. I have trouble believing something if it is not at least reasonable to me. Simon Peter and the beloved disciple believe before Jesus’ rising from the dead becomes something reasonable, understandable to them. This is very bold on their part!

And Mary Magdalene, lingering, weeping in the garden outside the tomb, is bold in her own right in John’s account of Easter morning that we have just heard. She does not understand why Jesus’ tomb is empty any better than Simon Peter and the beloved disciple do. She thinks that somebody has taken Jesus’ body and laid it elsewhere. But Mary Magdalene does not flee her complex set of emotions and thoughts, her experience of the present moment: Confusion, anxiety, sadness because, as far as she knows, Jesus is still dead. Mary Magdalene remains in the garden to encounter this experience head-on. And she is blessed, because of her boldness, with an encounter with the risen Lord. Jesus asks her, “Woman, whom are you looking for”?

At that moment, Mary Magdalene recognizes the voice of her Lord, our Lord, immediately: “Rabbouni”! But she is still caught up in trying first to understand before she can believe that he is truly risen, that nobody has taken Jesus’ body away. Jesus reminds her, and reminds us, that the greatest faith precedes understanding—having everything worked out intellectually. Faith seeks understanding, ideally, not the other way around.

“Do not hold onto me,” Jesus tells Mary Magdalene. “Do not hold onto” this very human desire to understand, to make rational sense, before we can believe. “But go to my brothers,” Jesus says, “And say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”

So Mary obeys Jesus. She goes and announces to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord.” And then they, too, come to believe that Jesus is truly risen from the dead. They become vocal preachers, witnesses by their way of life, to Jesus’ resurrection. Jesus’ disciples can at last begin to understand, once they have believed. And then they can act on their faith, their understanding, to found and grow the Church, this communion of “witnesses” to the risen Christ as Peter calls those who hear him preach in the Acts of the Apostles, our first reading this morning.

But this story all begins in a garden, with the encounter between Mary Magdalene and the risen Lord, and in the tomb, when Simon Peter and then the beloved disciple enter to find the tomb empty and the burial cloths displaced. That our first encounters, in John’s Gospel, with the risen Christ happen in a garden and inside an empty tomb is no accident.

It was in a garden where, Genesis says in its account of the creation of the first humans, God created Adam and Eve. It was in a garden where Adam and Eve fell for Satan’s lie that eating the forbidden fruit would make them wise, would make them their own god, able to understand everything as God does, without the need to believe and depend on God whose goodness had created them and sustained them and all things. Yet it was in a garden where, when Adam and Eve sinned, God’s Spirit first blew through Eden and whispered to them, “Where are you”: Where are you, not a wise and all-knowing God but naked and ashamed? And it was in a garden, still, before Adam and Eve were expelled from Eden, where God first promised to redeem us from, overcome, destroy sin and its effects.

This promise reaches its peak in the mystery we celebrate today: God has sent his only Son to redeem us, to overcome and destroy sin by his death and resurrection from the dead. And this promise will reach its fulfillment when the Christ returns in glory at the end of time, as we hear today from the Letter to the Colossians: “When Christ [our] life is revealed, then [we] will be revealed with him in glory.”

It is in a garden, just as it was in a garden “in the beginning,” in those first moments of our creation and fall into sin, where God once again calls out. God’s “Where are you” to Adam and Eve becomes Jesus’ question to Mary Magdalene, “Whom are you looking for”?

While this Easter encounter with the risen Christ is still a mystery, God’s Christ calls to us, invites us to enter the empty tomb, to acknowledge that he is risen and is present with and through us. God invites us to do all that, starting in a garden and an empty tomb on Easter morning, before we could ever fully understand this mystery. God invites us, as he did Simon Peter and the beloved disciple, to believe first. Only once we believe, might we understand. And then, as God called Mary Magdalene, Simon Peter, the beloved disciple, and all the other Christian disciples after them through the ages, God now calls us to be witnesses.

God calls us to “go and tell [our] brothers” and sisters: We believe. “We are witnesses to all that [Christ] did.” And now Jesus Christ, who died to redeem us, is risen. He is truly risen. Alleluia!

Homily for Sunday, 28 May 2023– Pentecost, Mass during the Day

Readings of the day: Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13; John 20:19-23

I invite us to think of how often we gather together in a place only to set out from that place. This is a very ordinary human experience. We might meet with one or several friends, and then set out for home happy and grateful that we have had that time with friends: The joy and the strength that we receive from friendship. If we work, many times we have regular meetings in our workplaces, to discuss individual and collaborative tasks in the workplace. And then we go forth to do the work. Some of us may gather for regular family or household meetings, or pray together at home.

In a religious sense, on Sundays (and, for many of us, on weekdays also) we gather in this place, in a church. We celebrate the Eucharist. And after we receive communion—a word that literally derives from gathering in one place as one, in union—we are sent forth to put into action in our world what we hear from the word of God: “Go, the Mass is ended”!

Pentecost is a special occasion of gathering together so that we may then be sent forth. Many of us may think of Pentecost as the birthday of the Church. The Acts of the Apostles recounts for us today the first time in Christian history that people of such astounding ethnic, linguistic, and geographical diversity—“Parthians, Medes, Elamites, and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome…Cretans and Arabs”—were all gathered into one place and heard Jesus’ apostles proclaim the word of God in their own language.

Acts’ account of the first Pentecost is truly an amazing story! Yet, if we have ever read Acts, Chapter 2, beyond the end of the reading we have just heard (and I encourage us to open our Bibles and do so at home, especially if you have rarely or never done so), we quickly notice that what we have heard from Acts today is only the beginning of the story. It is only the beginning of the first Pentecost event! The earliest Christians from all over the Roman Empire at the time stay in the one place long enough to hear a long speech from Peter, covering the earthly life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus. But then, at some point, all those people need to return to their homes. They take their Pentecost experience back home with them and tell of it to their friends, families, neighbours. And, by the end of this chapter, the Acts of the Apostles says, the number of believers—the number of “those who were being saved”—was growing astoundingly “day by day” in all those parts of the Roman Empire and beyond.

But that first Pentecost would not be the first time, nor the last, when God would gather great numbers of people together only to send them forth with something to nourish the whole world; to nourish their homes, their workplaces, their relationships. It is no accident that Pentecost, fifty days after Easter, coincides closely with the Jewish feast of the “weeks of weeks” (Shavuot) or of “seven times seven” days after Passover.

On that first Pentecost day, of which we hear in Acts, Jewish people scattered all over the Roman Empire and beyond are on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, the holy city that is the center of their faith. Shavuot is originally an agricultural holiday; it had been the day on which Jews gave thanks to God for the harvest and made a sacrifice of part of their harvest at the temple in Jerusalem. By Jesus’ time, Shavuot had developed into a feast of thanksgiving not only for the harvest but of thanksgiving to God for the gift of the Law, the Commandments on Sinai God gave the Jewish people through Moses. There are seven weeks of seven days between two great Jewish pilgrimage feasts: Passover—when God delivered the people of Israel from Egypt—and Shavuot, when God gave the same people of Israel the Law on Sinai.

Between Passover and the Festival of Weeks (Shavuot), the particular gift that God gives to God’s people, as a sign of God’s loving promise of salvation to us, changes. First, God gives freedom from slavery in Egypt. And then second, God gives the harvest—food from the earth to sustain our bodies—together with the Law to sustain our souls. But together with this second feast, God gives us yet another gift: God gives God’s own Holy Spirit. This divine gift of God’s Holy Spirit is the most universal yet. If the feasts of Passover, of the harvest, and of the receiving of the Law of Moses had been Jewish feasts, even if they were for all Jewish people living everywhere, God’s Holy Spirit would be for all people and all nations, starting with the Jewish people and then those who had come to believe in Jesus as the Messiah.

The Book of Acts is clear about this: God’s gifts to us keep escalating. God’s gifts to us keep becoming more and more universal. God’s gifts (and God’s ultimate gift of salvation that awaits us at the end of time) are not static; they keep becoming greater and more widespread. This is why God waits until all the pilgrims from all over the known world at the time were in Jerusalem to give them his Holy Spirit through the preaching of the apostles. The Holy Spirit descends on the apostles “like the rush of a violent wind” and as tongues of fire. But then God gives the Holy Spirit to everybody present as the sound of speech, each speaking—giving the Holy Spirit—to one another in their own languages.

God waited to give this astoundingly expanding, audible gift of the Holy Spirit to the nations until all those people were gathered together in pilgrimage to the Holy City, Jerusalem. But this gift was not for the people who received it to hold onto it for themselves. Those whom God had gathered together in Jerusalem, God now would send back to their homelands, to give God’s Holy Spirit to all the people there. And so the Church, those baptized, those being saved, would keep expanding, becoming more truly universal. Pentecost is the birthday of the Church. Yet it is only the beginning of the story of the birth and rebirth of the Church in God’s Spirit. The first Pentecost was only one of many times God has gathered God’s people together to receive a great gift, only so that God might send us forth to offer to all people the gift we have received.

God gathers together only to send forth. Every time we gather for Mass is a celebration of this reality. Every Mass is a little Pentecost!

But we can resist going forth with the gifts, with the Holy Spirit God offers us to give to all peoples and all nations. We are free to do this. And to resist or even try to impede God’s gift of the Holy Spirit in this way is easier for us than maybe we would like to think. Just ask Jesus’ apostles, huddled in the upper room after Jesus had died, for fear of the Jewish authorities who had had him crucified.

This is the setting as our reading today from John’s Gospel begins: Hardly an auspicious start for the apostles, to the history of our Church! Like the apostles, we may find ourselves afraid to emerge from where we are gathered, holding onto God’s gift of the Spirit for ourselves, sometimes not even realizing that we possess it. We might find ourselves afraid of, mired in, our own sin. We might find ourselves in a state of pessimism about the world, or our own relationships: What good will my going forth with the Holy Spirit, living my faith boldly yet lovingly and kindly, do amid all the problems and even evil of the world?

It is into this anxiety, this pessimism, our own sinful state, that Jesus breaks through and offers us, once again, God’s Holy Spirit. And once again, it is audible: Jesus’ voice proclaims, “Peace be with you (shalom)… Receive the Holy Spirit.” And, yet again, we whom God has gathered together are sent forth: “If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

That is some power God gives us, to forgive and retain sins! This was a power Jews of Jesus’ time—including Jesus’ own apostles—would have said that only God possesses, no human being. Now Jesus gives us the height of divine power, the power over sin, evil, and death itself! God’s gift of the Holy Spirit is not to be kept for ourselves. It is not static but living and dynamic. It is meant to be given away. It is meant to grow. It is meant for all peoples and all nations, this gift for which God continually (and here, yet again) gathers us together only to send us forth, to proclaim audibly, for the rest of the world to hear: “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

Homily for Tuesday, 13 April 2021– Tuesday of the Second Week of Easter

Readings of the day: Acts 4:32-37; Psalm 93:1ab, 1cd-2, 5; John 3:7b-15

The first part of the Acts of the Apostles refers, in at least a couple of significant instances, to how united the earliest communities of Jesus’ disciples were. Today we hear that these first disciples “were of one heart and soul”; that the unity of these earliest disciples of Jesus was connected with their strict common ownership of material possessions: “Everything they owned was held in common.”

This passage is one of the most frequently-cited Biblical references to uphold the vow or counsel of poverty. I think, in this respect, of a book I studied during my novitiate on the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, Francis Moloney’s A Life of Promise. Might this also make us think of the variety in practice of the vow of poverty, even within our own Basilian Congregation, let alone among different communities of vowed religious? I think, for instance, of the many gifts from different countries in which my great aunt Jeanne, a Sister of Holy Cross, ministered, that she gave to family members, because she was not allowed to keep these gifts for herself. Her order’s vow of poverty was and is, by my observation, lived much more strictly than ours.

But how closely is the insistence in Acts on how the earliest Christians held “everything they owned… in common” a reflection of historical reality, versus an ideal for life especially in Christian community? Scholars still debate over this question. Francis Moloney, in A Life of Promise, points out that, after the reading we hear today, the very next event in Acts is that of Ananias and Sapphira, who keep part of the proceeds from the sale of property for themselves instead of turning it over to their community of disciples. And then both Ananias and Sapphira drop dead on the spot!

So which was it: Did the earliest Christian communities truly hold “everything they owned… in common,” or was this an ideal that was not necessarily (or usually) followed to the letter? My thought is that it was a bit of both historical reality—that these earliest Christian communities strove to practice common ownership of goods—and an ideal, much as it is both-and today. There was and is still variety in how material goods were owned or shared communally. And maybe how individuals or communities practiced, we may say, a precursor to our vows of poverty was not in itself essential to one’s standing as a good and faithful Christian.

Yet I think Acts’ emphasis on this common ownership characteristic of these earliest Christian communities may lead us to ask ourselves questions like: What, if not strict common ownership of material goods, is essential to our Christian way of life, from the message we hear from Acts today? And is there something that the example of these earliest Christians calls us to hold in common, if not strictly or only material goods?

Especially as somebody who has taken a public vow of poverty, I interpret Acts as inviting and reminding us that we (as vowed religious, but this is true of all baptized Christians) hold in common a responsibility for one another’s whole-person well-being—spiritual, mental, physical, and so forth—in this earthly life and, ultimately, for one another’s salvation. We are not saved as individuals so much as together, in and by one God. Common ownership of earthly goods, or any expression or vow of poverty, chastity, and obedience, can be a sign of our universal call to holiness and ultimately to salvation.

Homily for Thursday, 25 July 2019‒ Feast of St. James, Apostle

Readings of the day: 2 Corinthians 4:7-15; Psalm 126:1bc-2ab, 2cd-3, 4-5, 6; Matthew 20:20-28

This homily was given at the Kateri House Women's Residence Chapel of St. Joseph's College, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, and Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada.

Lately I have been helping my brother and his fiancée to plan their wedding, which will take place in September. What, though, does planning a wedding have to do with our readings or our feast day today of St. James the Apostle?

I suppose many if not all of us know the (I think usually exaggerated and unfair, if not downright sexist) stereotypes about stressed-out brides or mothers of brides at weddings. I say, in jest, that these stereotypes are unfair also because they say nothing about the groom or the parents of grooms also finding preparation for their sons’ weddings to be an exciting but stressful time, and sometimes behaving accordingly. And, if mothers of brides are somehow stereotypically highly-stressed in preparing for their daughters’ weddings, they have nothing on mothers of apostles!

Essentially in today’s Gospel James’ and John’s mother tries to ensure a place of prestige for her sons in heaven, which we even speak of today as “the eternal wedding feast.” On this feast of St. James, we hear from Matthew how “the mother of the sons of Zebedee,” of the apostles James and John, approaches Jesus “with her sons” and asks Jesus to “declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom.” Even the other ten apostles become “angry at the two brothers” when they hear of James’ and John’s mother’s request to Jesus for her sons.

Much of what we know about St. James the Greater, as he is known because he is the first of two apostles named James listed among the names of the Twelve Jesus calls in the Gospels and, by tradition, imagined to be older than St. James the Lesser, is from texts written much later than the Biblical Gospels. Many of these later texts are more legend and popular devotion than historical fact. Devotions including the famously grueling Camino pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela in Spain are connected to St. James’ legendary success as a missionary. Many people and places are named for James (or the Spanish Santiago, Iago for short, in Spanish-speaking countries) for this same reason. Yet not only today’s Gospel but other events in our Gospels involving St. James do not view him especially kindly. In Mark’s Gospel, James and John are called Boanerges, “sons of thunder,” which may point to their quick temper or impulsiveness.

But I think we are invited on this Feast of St. James to understand that there had to be a reason why Jesus would have chosen James, or any of the Twelve, to be among his first apostles. Even within the Bible, the Acts of the Apostles places James in a leadership role among the other apostles in deciding to integrate formerly-pagan and Jewish Christians, each with their own customs that often clashed, into the one Church at the so-called “Council” or “Synod of Jerusalem.”

We know, then, that James had redeeming features; that Jesus chose him to be an apostle; that James is a revered saint and the first martyr among the Twelve Apostles. But I think it is as important that we recognize the same of us: That Jesus has chosen us, to redeem us, to make us saints with our cooperation; that even mothers, when insistent on our prestige like the mother of James and John is, will be no obstacle to our invitation to the eternal wedding feast of heaven.

Homily for Sunday, 9 June 2019‒ Pentecost

Mass during the Day

Readings of the day: Acts 2:1-11; Psalm 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34; 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13; Pentecost Sequence; John 14:15-16, 23b-26

This homily was given at St. Kateri Parish, St. Margaret Mary Church, Rochester, NY, USA.

A proverb I heard not long ago says this: “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” How might this proverb speak to our culture, including how we understand and live as Church? What might this kind of proverb have to do with Pentecost, which we celebrate today?

If I were to ask us when each of us thinks the Church began, historically or otherwise, how many of us would answer, “At Pentecost”? But then what is (or was) Pentecost? What is Church and why?

Might the readings we have heard today give us a clue toward the answers to these “brainstorm”-type questions? Fifty days after Jesus had risen from the dead (which is the meaning of the word “Pentecost,” fifty days), the Acts of the Apostles says to us that Jesus’ apostles, if not a larger group of Jesus’ disciples, those who had followed Jesus during his public ministry, passion, death, and resurrection, “were all in one place together.” It was at this point, when Jesus’ disciples “were all in one place together,” when the Holy Spirit descended upon them “like a strong driving wind” and in “tongues of fire.”

The rest of this account of Pentecost we hear from Acts also speaks of togetherness among the disciples of Jesus and an even larger group of “Jews from every nation under heaven” gathered in Jerusalem at the time. But this togetherness was not and could not be a too-simple and artificial uniformity. The group that witnessed to this first Pentecost, the birth of our Church, was too large and too diverse to be so uniform. All these different people from all over the world would witness together, but each “in their own tongues” to “the mighty acts of God”; to the power of God’s Holy Spirit; to the birth of a Church.

Does this not sound a lot like the Church today; like our reality here in Rochester and at St. Kateri? “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” I do not believe that proverbs like this are meant to be a criticism of those who “go alone” in our Church or civil society, or in our St. Kateri Parish for that matter, as if acting together is always better than acting alone; as if going far is always better than going fast.

The rightful diversity within the Church will forever welcome the faithful who view change in the Church—in decisions made at various levels of Church leadership, the people who lead, or sometimes even the teachings that guide and result from those in leadership—as more often good, and the faster the better. And the same rightful diversity within the Church will necessarily welcome those with usually the opposite view, who are wary of change or who stress caution or consensus before allowing change; who prefer going far to going fast; going together to going alone.

Instead of serving as an indictment of people with either view, I think our experience of Pentecost, in a similar way to that first Pentecost of which the Acts of the Apostles speaks to us today, has two effects on the Church and on us as the Church’s faithful. First, our experience of receiving the Holy Spirit, our experience of Pentecost, puts in right order these two complementary movements in the Church of going alone and therefore faster, and of going together and therefore farther. Second, our experience of Pentecost purifies our intentions behind preferring either to go alone and therefore fast, or together and therefore far, or a bit of each preference depending on our particular circumstances of life.

Our experience of Pentecost, like the very first experience Jesus’ disciples had of Pentecost, rightly orders the desire or movement in our same Church toward going together and therefore far, versus the desire or movement toward going alone and therefore fast. We hear of this right ordering in our readings today. The Holy Spirit first draws all this diversity of peoples together, so that they will be able to go far once they are sent out by the same Spirit, not in spite of but precisely because of their diversity. But the diversity of these earliest disciples of Jesus is a diversity whose unity is safeguarded by the grace of the Holy Spirit, and the same is true of the Church today. The same Holy Spirit who once drew together the diverse peoples of the earliest Church draws us into this “one place together” so that we may honor and celebrate together our diversity held in unity by the Holy Spirit. We may not be “Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs.” But we are from East Irondequoit, West Irondequoit, elsewhere in greater Rochester, New York State, or beyond; rich, poor, and middle class; ideologically left, right, and center; people who prefer more pre-Vatican II liturgy or post-Vatican II liturgy, and so on, all called to this “one place together.” We might only want to be wary of letting in certain Canadians who study in France; they may be a little suspect…

Only once we have been drawn together by the Holy Spirit into the unity of “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church” in this one celebration will we be able to set out, each in the particular ways in which we are called, to proclaim the Gospel, “glorifying [the one] God by our lives.” Only by learning by celebrating here and now our “going together,” our being “in one place together,” will we then be effective, if not sometimes surprisingly fast, if and when the Holy Spirit calls us to “go alone,” each putting our individual or unique gifts to the service of the same Gospel, remaining faithful to our unity as Church.

In John’s Gospel today, Jesus reinforces this point: To learn by celebrating our “going together” is necessary if and when the Holy Spirit, who keeps us together as one Church, calls us within this Church to “go alone”; to exercise our more particular or unique gifts at the service of the Gospel. In the same discourse as when Jesus promises his disciples the Holy Spirit, “another advocate to be with [us] always,” Jesus says to his disciples, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments… Whoever loves me will keep my word.” My sisters and brothers, love; keeping the commandments of Jesus, first among which is to love one another as Jesus has loved us; keeping Jesus’ word: These are not individual actions that we accomplish without any grounding in community; as one Church that gathers together to hear and celebrate God’s word in our Eucharist, together. To keep Jesus’ commandments, to love, presupposes our gathering “in one place together.” In fact, God himself is a communion, a “togetherness” of three distinct persons (more on this next Sunday, when we will celebrate more specifically the Most Holy Trinity).

Yet togetherness, unity, communion does not stifle diversity, individuality, uniqueness of spiritual and other gifts. In fact, our unity reinforces and honors our diversity, individuality, uniqueness of gifts. Our Pentecost experience of the Holy Spirit not only puts in right order the complementary movements in the Church of going together and therefore farther so that we may be able to, if necessary, go alone and therefore maybe faster, but also our Pentecost experience of the Holy Spirit purifies these two seemingly opposite movements, so that indeed they are complementary and will never stifle each other. As 1 Corinthians says to us today, we remain “one body though [with] many parts. We receive “different spiritual gifts” by “the same Spirit.” We perform “different forms of service” by the grace of our “one Lord” and God.

By “going together,” we gain the strength and unity we need for when we are called to “go alone.” As Church, we breathe with two lungs. Our unity and then our diversity are inspired by the same Spirit. Insofar we gather “in one place together” to celebrate this, we will both “go far” and “go fast,” because our Pentecost experience empowers us to do both.