Christ the Cornerstone

Come, Holy Spirit, fill our hearts on Pentecost and beyond

The Sequence for Pentecost Sunday, “Veni, Sancte Spiritus,” completes our celebration of the joy of Easter by calling on the third person of the Blessed Trinity to come into our hearts, bringing light for our darkness, comfort for our distress, healing for our souls’ sicknesses, warmth for our frozen hearts, and joys that will never end.

How can we expect the Holy Spirit to give us “joys that will never end”?

We know that our lives are filled with sorrow and disappointment. We know that even after receiving God’s saving grace and being reconciled to him in the sacrament of penance, we will sin again. We know that all those whom we love, and we ourselves, will one day suffer and die. What’s the point of asking for unending joy?

Our faith is weak, isn’t it? Just six weeks ago, we celebrated the great miracle of our salvation and the true source of all human hope and joy. We believe that the Lord is risen, that he has conquered sin and death, and that we are truly free. We believe this, and yet we have our doubts.

We hope in Jesus Christ, and yet we give in to sadness and despair. This is precisely why God sent us his Holy Spirit—to give us courage in our weakness, to sustain us in our fidelity to his Word, and, yes, to fill our hearts with joys that will never end!

Pope Benedict XVI told us in his 2010 Easter message “Urbi et Orbi” (to the city and the world): “Easter does not work magic. Just as the Israelites found the desert awaiting them on the far side of the Red Sea, so the Church after the resurrection always finds history filled with joy and hope, grief and anguish.”

Joy and hope do not eliminate our grief and anguish. They transform them—making them like the Lord’s passion and death: a participation in the painful pilgrimage of human suffering to the abundant joy of eternal life.

In his Easter message this year, Pope Francis said the resurrection of Jesus offers hope in a world “marked by so many acts of injustice and violence,” including parts of Africa affected by “hunger, endemic conflicts and terrorism.”

Easter “bears fruits of hope and dignity where there are deprivation and exclusion, hunger and unemployment; where there are migrants and refugees, so often rejected by today’s culture of waste, and victims of the drug trade, human trafficking and contemporary forms of slavery,” the pope said.

This is why Easter is the season of hope. Our hope is not idealism, a form of “wishful thinking.” Our hope is not political or ideological. It is Christian realism, grounded in the person of Jesus Christ and in the story of his life, death and resurrection. Christian hope is not an illusion. As the Letter to the Hebrews assures us, “we have [hope] as a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul” (Heb 6:19).

We are truly anchored to our heavenly home regardless of the storms we encounter along the way. For Christians on the way to our heavenly home, life’s difficulties are not eliminated, as if by magic. They are endured with confidence, with hope and, yes, with the joy of the Risen Christ.

That’s why we dare to invoke the Holy Spirit and to ask for joys that never end. We know that we need the help of God’s grace to face the pain and the weariness of daily life. We know that we need the Spirit’s sevenfold gifts (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord) to sustain us in life’s journey. We know that, as Pope Benedict reminds us, “the Church after the resurrection always finds history filled with joy and hope, grief and anguish.”

That was certainly true for the disciples of Jesus. Many faced bitter persecution and death as they carried out the Lord’s great commission to go out to the whole world as missionary disciples to preach the Gospel and heal the sick in Jesus’ name. They experienced no end of suffering and disappointment, but they served the Lord joyfully because they were empowered by the Holy Spirit and were burning with the fire of God’s love.

When the dark days come—in our personal lives and in our common life as missionary disciples—we should call on the Holy Spirit and invite him to come into our hearts as he did with the hearts of Mary and the disciples on the first Pentecost. Come, Holy Spirit, bring light for our darkness, comfort for our distress, healing for our souls’ sicknesses, warmth for our frozen hearts, and joys that will never end.

Is this too much to hope for? Our faith says, “No!” †