Lots of people tell us that the Church is passing through a period of bleak winter. In some parts of the world the statistics point to a decline in religious practice, in vocations to the priesthood and religious life, in the conviction with which people see Christ as the meaning of life.  For many people, the word ‘Catholic’ has become a turn off or at best it is seen as referring to something strange and outdated.  There has been serious and lasting harm done to people and to their faith by child abuse, especially when it was done by clergy. Others have been hurt by a failure to listen or by bullying; they have been disillusioned by a lack of courage and vision, or by a lack of real living of the Gospel on the part of clergy and other people in whom they expect to see a model of the Christian life,

Our group gathering to pray under Sydney Harbour Bridge

(Maybe people who think that the Church is dying should come here to Sydney – they might be a startled to see young Catholics from all over the world gathered here in such numbers and with such enthusiasm.)

But pain and disillusionment have a very important lesson.  When things seem to be going well we can become complacent and not really search for big enough reasons to have hope.  When things are going badly, we cannot easily remain complacent! The question of hope brings us to the heart of the Good News. We can have hope because the eternal Son of God died for us and rose to a new life.  That life is beyond death and pain and fear and disillusionment – and we are all called to be part of that life.  They are familiar words, but if we really believed them with all our heart and soul, it would change our life – it would change the world!

It is important to understand the nature of the hope and joy the Gospel brings. It’s not just about being optimistic – hoping that things will turn out OK even though the prospects look terrible. That is just as irrational as pessimism, thinking that things will go wrong even though the prospects look great.

Our group at the tomb of Blessed Mary McKillop

Our hope means realising that however things turn out, we can have joy in our hearts because we believe in a new life that is stronger than death.  Even if, or maybe especially if, things look bleak – we have hope in the love of God that was stronger even than the horror of Christ’s crucifixion.

Negative and tragic and devastating experiences can point us to the source of new life that is never extinguished. A poem by George Herbert sums it up:

Who would have thought my shrivell’d heart
Could have recovered greenness? It was gone
Quite underground, as flowers depart
To feed their mother root when they have blown;
Where they together,
All the hard weather,
Dead to the world, keep house unknown.

The first followers of Jesus were overcome by pain and disillusionment when he died that appalling, unjust and cruel death. Their hearts were shrivelled and their hopes seemed to have been buried with Jesus in the tomb. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus were asking themselves where they could now find life and hope.  They were speaking about “Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God  and all the people, and how our chief priests and rulers delivered him up to be condemned to death, and crucified him. But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24: 19-21).  Those two disciples learned that what happened opened up a far greater hope than they could have imagined.

They learned that there was another way of seeing the death of Christ. Jesus had told his disciples that “when I am lifted up from the earth I will draw all people to myself” (Jn 12: 32). St John expresses it another way when he describes the last moment of the earthly life of Jesus, ‘lifted up’ on the cross: “Then he bowed his head and gave up his spirit” (Jn 19: 30). This doesn’t just mean that gave up his life. St John is telling us that the death and glorification of Christ “released the Spirit into the world” .

That is where the theme of these days begins: “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses”.

In his encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedictcommented on that Gospel passage:

This was to fulfil the promise of “rivers of living water” that would flow out of the hearts of believers, through the outpouring of the Spirit. The Spirit, in fact, is that interior power which harmonizes their hearts with Christ's heart and moves them to love their brethren as Christ loved them, when… he gave his life for us .

In other words, it was in that precise moment of the deepest desolation that the new life began.  The mother root began to stir and grow because the Holy Spirit was released into the world. In the Creed we say “We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life”.

In wintertime when all the plants have ‘gone quite underground’, the worst possible reaction would be to dig everything up because we think it is dead. When it seems in many of our countries that faith is weak or dying, we should remember the mother root doing its work so that the shrivelled plants can “recover greenness”.  In other words the Holy Spirit is at work.  The challenges we face are very real, but we should not doubt that the Giver of Life has already been poured on to the thirsty ground of our earth.

As the Great Jubilee of the year 2000 was approaching, Pope John Paul wrote a letter to the whole Church. He expressed enormous confidence that this new life is already growing and indeed that it has been growing through all the turmoil and violence of the last century which saw genocides, two World Wars, concentration camps and horrors of all kinds.  But through all of that the plan of God is preparing “a new springtime of Christian life which will be revealed… if Christians are docile to the action of the Holy Spirit” . 

That confidence is inspiring, and yet, when we look at our world, it may sound unrealistic.  The problems and questions seem overwhelming. In the Western world many people seem to drift away from involvement with religion except perhaps occasionally and in a rather individual way.  Our way of life is threatened by economic collapse, energy shortages and climate change. We in the developed world have an uneasy realisation that our wastefulness could not be extended to the great majority of the world’s population because the resources do not exist.

The passage about the Last Judgement in St Matthew’s Gospel tells us we are to respond to Jesus in the needs of all of his brothers and sisters.

Millions of his brothers and sisters spend their lives and raise their children without the most basic necessities, hungry and thirsty, without education or even the most rudimentary health care and sanitation.  From the safe distance of Australia or Western Europe or the U.S.A. it may sound reasonable to say that we are doing our best – but if we were face to face with a mother whose child was dying, would we feel happy to say “I’m afraid we are not in a position to do much for you or your child just at the moment, but perhaps we may be able to improve things for your grandchildren”? Yet, even if we spent twenty-four hours of every day trying to respond, there would still be an uncountable number of people who would be able to say to us, “I was hungry and you did not give me to eat.” 

It is good, therefore, to stop for a moment to reflect on something the Pope said in his encyclical on the Holy Spirit.  He described “what is deepest and most essential in the human being, namely, human life in God, which, because it comes from God’s self-giving to us, “can develop and flourish only by the Spirit’s action” .

That brings us to the very heart of what we are reflecting on this morning – The Holy Spirit, the principal agent of mission. To put it another way, the most important thing we can and must bring to other people is an awareness of God’s life in them and in us. The first and most basic need of every human being, rich or poor, sick or healthy is to know that they are loved by God; that their life is not absurd; that they are in the hands of a love that is stronger than death or hunger or injustice or anything they fear.

Where does that inner life, that sense of hope and meaning come from in the people we serve or in ourselves?  It is the Spirit who gives those gifts.  And the Spirit’s action is the life of the infinite God. Everything that exists depends totally on the creative action of God. In the face of the powerful life of the Spirit the signs of winter and of death do not have the last word.  We can and do feel helpless and discouraged, but nothing can conquer the love of God poured into human hearts; nothing is stronger than the Holy Spirit. Even when we can see no solution, God’s love is never defeated.

That is the foundation for our hope. “We who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we are groaning within ourselves as we wait for adoption as sons, and for our bodies to be set free.  For in this hope we are saved” (Rom 8: 23,24).

Of course when that sense grows in us, it makes us more, not less, appalled at the suffering of the brothers and sisters whom Christ loves so much that he died for them, his brothers and sisters in whose  name he will judge us. It makes us even more anguished at our inability to meet their needs.  It makes us grieve that some people live lives of such deprivation and pain and hopelessness that they can scarcely glimpse their dignity and the destiny that awaits them. Pope John Paul spoke of our world living “against the background of the gigantic remorse caused by the fact that, side by side with wealthy… people and societies living in plenty… the same human family contains individuals and groups that are suffering from hunger”

We do not reflect enough on the truth because, as Pope John Paul put it once, we are afraid of meeting ourselves and afraid of “feeling the emptiness that asks itself about meaning” . Yet what is deepest within us is not emptiness and meaninglessness but the unconquerable life and the loving purpose of God: the life and love which are more powerful than death:  “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead has his home in you; then he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will give life to your own mortal bodies through his Spirit living in you” (Col 8:11).

The love that we share with our brothers and sisters is not a weak, helpless love.  It is the love we have received from the Holy Spirit who is renewing the face of the earth; it is a love which will bring fulfilment even to those millions of people we could never help because they have already died in violence or in poverty or in neglect.

That all-powerful Holy Spirit is within us.  The trouble is that all our rushing around may mean that we are never there within ourselves to meet him and to be strengthened. God is within us, St. Augustine says, “but we are outside of ourselves” .

We try to recognise the presence of the Holy Spirit within us and within our community when we celebrate the Eucharist. Twice in each Eucharistic Prayer we call on the Spirit so that the bread and wine may become the Body and Blood of Christ and so that we who share that Body and Blood may be brought together in unity by the Holy Spirit.  But it should not end there. The Holy Spirit within us is transforming the face of the earth:

The substantial conversion of bread and wine into his body and blood introduces within creation the principle of a radical change, a sort of "nuclear fission," to use an image familiar to us today, which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world, to the point where God will be all in all (cf. 1 Cor 15:28) .

In other words, the Holy Spirit gathers us together into one body, the Body of Christ, and makes us missionaries. At the end of each Mass, we are sent to bring Christ and the Spirit to our own community and to the world. Both Pope John Paul and Pope Benedict have written about that final moment of being sent out and the need for it to be better understood

The Holy Spirit is at work, not only in the sacraments but “in the variety of gifts and charisms, roles and ministries which he inspires for the good of the Church” .  The drama that was performed for us here this morning reminded us of those gifts that give us courage and wisdom to fulfil our mission.

The powerful, unconquerable life of the Spirit is at work in many ways, and above all when people pray.

“… wherever people are praying in the world, there the Holy Spirit is, the living breath of prayer…

The Holy Spirit is present in us.  But how visible is that to other people?  That is where mission begins.  St Francis is said to have told his followers, “Preach always; if necessary use words”.  The first step in mission is what people see in the lives of believers.  Pope Paul VI pointed out that people listen more easily to witnesses that to teachers.  If they listen to teachers it is because they are also witnesses .

We are all missionaries because as the drama said: “We can’t keep what we know to ourselves; we have to spread what we know”. The whole Church and every member of the Church is missionary.  My father came from a little village where people would rarely have travelled to Dublin, the capital city, still less to another country.   But that village was the home place of a great missionary, Bishop Joseph Shanahan who preached the Gospel in Southern Nigeria.  I am told that when he was home on holidays, he would celebrate Mass in the parish church and, looking at those people who had rarely left their home place, he would begin his sermon with the words, “My dear fellow missionaries.”

In one of his writings, Les Grandes Cimitières sous la Lune, the French writer Georges Bernanos sets a scene in a country church. The parish priest, foolishly or bravely, invites the local atheist to address the congregation. The atheist, perhaps not wanting to be outdone by the parish priest, spoke at great length.  But the core of what he said was this: what you Christians believe is staggering. Really to believe that the infinite God loves us enough to send his Son to die for us and to save us would be a wonderful thing. If it were true, it should change one’s whole life. So, he put a challenge to them, “Where the devil do you hide your joy? Surely it should be shining out of you!”

So the Spirit’s presence gives us hope and fills us with joy; but it is also uncomfortable and challenging because the joy is not just for us; it is for the world. We have a mission that is founded on the all-powerful action of the Spirit. But that is not a source of complacency; it is the very opposite.  As Karl Rahner expressed it on one occasion:

The Spirit of Pentecost is the spirit of holy unrest, of eternal discontent, the spirit that again and again startles us with the cry: “You still have far to go”, the spirit that makes even the saints dissatisfied with themselves... the spirit that wills to renew the face of the earth, the spirit of life in ever new forms, on new roads, in new vehicles, on bold ventures .

The life of the Church is the work of the Holy Spirit. Than means that we are at the service of a goal that is greater and more surprising than we have imagined.  We often pray that the Holy Spirit will “renew the face of the earth”.  We would not say that prayer so easily if we stopped to ask ourselves what its fulfilment might involve and what changes it might ask of us.

What it means is that our most cherished plans and our fondest hopes are utterly inadequate, shallow, misguided and, literally, small-minded.  What the Holy Spirit is bringing about is a new unity in which every human being of every age and culture can feel fully at home.  The Holy Spirit is bringing about a world without sin -- no hatred, no cruelty, no dishonesty, no infidelity, no injustice. The Holy Spirit is bringing about a world without suffering -- no death, no bereavement, no illness, no injury. 

A little reflection on what that might mean, how different it will be from anything we imagine, is enough to give one a certain sympathy with Thomas’s question, “Lord, we do not know where you are going, how can we know the way?” (Jn 14:5).  In one sense Thomas was absolutely right -- we cannot know the way.  Jesus is the way, but the precise paths along which the Spirit leads us to him are not clear to us. Our understanding of what the definitive Kingdom will be like is always unclear; we need to be constantly reminded that it is infinitely bigger and more all-embracing than any plans we can formulate or imagine.

We can recognise the action of the Holy Spirit in the search for truth, wherever there are efforts for the promotion of justice, where there is opposition to violence and falsehood.  That is relatively easy, but, as the French bishops put it nearly 30 years ago:

The Holy Spirit is never really received into our souls except when he disturbs our routine, sets our lives on fire and draws us on to greater courage and sharing in his work for the human race and for the gospel .

We are challenged by that kind of statement when we feel disillusioned by the failure of some undertaking in which we have invested a lot of ourselves and a lot of our hopes. Or when we are shattered by some loss that seems to undermine all we had hoped for.  Or by some change in our situation which means that nothing is going to work out as we had imagined. Do we think because we are disappointed that God’s plans must be in ruins?

But God’s plans cannot be defeated. In the book of the prophet Isaiah God says: “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and return not thither but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I purpose, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it (Is 55: 9-11)..

Often it doesn’t feel as if we are on the winning team.  It looks as if everything is going wrong. It is no accident that the first gift of the Spirit mentioned in the drama was the gift of courage or fortitude.  Renewing the face of the earth involves a lot of uncomfortable changes. There is something in us that doesn’t want to be asked to do anything too brave.  In the BBC programme, Yes Minister, the civil servant, Sir Humphrey could always stop the Minister in his tracks by saying: “Congratulations, Minister, that’s a very courageous decision!”

The goal for which we work is not our kingdom but God’s. The face of the earth is renewed according to his plan not ours -- which is just as well!  Our plans, even when they work out, can often be rather disappointing!  But there is never a good reason for disillusionment about the purposes of God or about the life of the Spirit.

That is the perspective that gives us the courage and the freedom to let our faith be seen, to let our joy be shared.  When he visited Ireland, Pope John Paul told us that every new generation was a new continent that had to hear the Good News and that we would have to look for new ways to bring the Good News to that new continent.

There are two things we need to remember and they are taught to us by the gifts of the Holy Spirit – we have been given the truth which is the meaning of life.  At the Last Supper, Jesus promised the apostles that the Holy Spirit would teach them everything and remind them of all that he had said to them (Jn 14: 26) would guide them into all the truth (Jn 16: 13).  We have to be faithful to the truth of the Gospel.  We also have to remember that it is not our truth, but God’s. Tradition is the living heritage of Christ’s Church” but we must always be careful to understand that it is “a living reality which grows and develops, and which the Spirit guarantees precisely because it has something to say to the people of every age”

We cannot predict or control when and where the Spirit will blow.  That can be a hard lesson to learn, but learning it is the basis of the fruits of the Spirit, like joy, peace, patience.  They are the fruit of knowing that this is God’s world and God’s church and that, unlikely as it may sometimes seem, God’s Spirit is renewing the face of the earth. The person whose life shows those fruits is a missionary.

All of that vision tells us that the struggle to widen our horizons, to give ourselves generously to other people, to regard every other human being in the light of Christ’s love for him or her, is one that we will never have completed. That is not because God is harsh and demanding. It is because the vision God shows us in Christ is so far beyond our ability to grasp that it stretches us, broadening our tunnel vision, expanding our perspectives and making us realise: “This news is so great that we can’t keep it to ourselves – it’s not just about us; it’s about God’s plan for the universe. No one can really hear and understand this Good News without realising that we are missionaries. We have to spread what we know”

“You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses”.

+Donal Murray
Bishop of Limerick