Spirit

There's a dynamic shift that occurs over the fifty days of Easter, as we move from a celebration of the first resurrection appearances to the presence of the Risen Lord with us now. This process culminates in the novena of Pentecost that began with the Lord's Ascension last week.

It is the Spirit who prays in us, it is the Spirit that is the soul of the Church as the Body of Christ. And yet it is hard to proclaim the Holy Spirit in our world, because it has ceased to believe in the spiritual.

To me it doesn't make any sense. People routinely die for spiritual things like "god" or "truth" or "freedom." Folks everywhere make life decisions upon the basis of "love." All of these are spiritual realities. Two teenagers can proclaim their love in a graffito that says, "together for ever," even though neither of them has any sense of eternity or final commitment. Something about their very experience of being in love touches a transcendent eternity, a spiritual level.

And yet all these things that have such a profound effect on us, we say that they're not really real, or are only abstractions, or are just ideas. And yet to me, anything that makes us a person dispose of their freedom with finality, up to and including risking death, that seems pretty real to me.

Today is also the feast of the dedication of the basilica of St. Francis in Assisi. I put up a post about it last year, which you can check out here.