Tucker: The continuing movement of the Holy Spirit

The Christian churches celebrate the Feast of Pentecost or 50 days after Easter, of the coming of the Holy Spirit, the third Person of the Blessed Trinity on the early church disciples and followers.

The continued movement of the Holy Spirit is celebrated in a special way this day. From the Acts of the Apostles, we read that the Holy Spirit came with the sound of a strong, driving wind. The wind is an appropriate image as we cannot see the wind, but we can feel it and its effects. Similarly, we cannot see the Holy Spirit, but we feel the effect — whether a gentle nudge to reach out or speak out when we are reluctant, or a push to act when we want to sit and relax.

John’s Gospel gives us the coming of the Spirit as the breath of Jesus. Such a gentle image! It recalls the breath of life that God breathed into the first humans in the Book of Genesis. It is a very intimate and creative action that gives life. It gave life to the small band of disciples, driving them from a locked room where they hid in fear, to their mission of witnessing and baptizing to the ends of the earth. These early followers and we are challenged to the mission of fulfilling the Responsorial Psalm, “Lord, send out your spirit and renew the face of the earth.”

The message of the Holy Spirit is the same as Jesus gave continuously after the Resurrection, “PEACE BE WITH YOU.”

That peace and love is offered to all equally and invites all to do the same. Jesus came to bring every race, gender, nationality or social status home to heaven. This is now the role of the church, as it lives and uses the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit breathes where it wills and it looks to each one of us as Confirmed Christians to do the same in the name of faith, hope and love.

There is a story of a young girl who bumped into the words, “courage, honor and integrity.” She realized that these words were words used by men, not women. Her heroines never spoke these words in fairy tales or in love stories she was now reading. They were words her brother’s toy soldiers used and men talked about to each other in war stories.

She decided to use them and added them to her vocabulary. She rolled them around on her tongue, and they tasted delicious. She infused them into her world. She then, in fairness, thought of words that boys and men did not use like “compassion, nurture, love, warmth, sweetness.”

She would introduce these girl and women words to every boy and man she met. She would have them at least taste these words and maybe they would like and use them. She began to teach the missing words to the opposite sex. She hoped that now she would not find the opposite sex so opposite after all. She realized that perhaps the best words were never meant to be gender specific.

Let’s take the best words from the fruits of the Holy Spirit and make them real in word and deed; charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control and chastity.