Waiting in Anticipation for the Holy Spirit
Fresco from St. Charles Church, Vienna
Easter Season is drawing to a close this week. The season itself lasts fifty days. It begins with Jesus’ Resurrection and concludes with the arrival of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. The last nine days, from the Feast of the Ascension until Pentecost, are a special time of prayer to invite the Holy Spirit to come into our lives ever more deeply as well.
Jesus promised his followers that when he returned to his Father, he would send a Paraclete to them. Some translations use the term Advocate for Paraclete. The choice of word, as is generally the case in translating, gives a slightly different sense to the promise and its implications.
Advocate is a term used to describe lawyers who plead the case of persons accused of wrongdoing. Advocates are also people who argue on behalf of people who are at a disadvantage in a social setting or a negotiation. Advocates are people everyone needs at one or another point in life. Having an Advocate sent from Heaven on our behalf is not a bad thing. It can be quite encouraging. Yet the term carries with it a sense of our unworthiness and sinfulness. We need someone to represent us in dealing with the Father.
A couple of weeks ago, our pastor suggested that the word Paraclete might actually be better translated as Cheerleader. In this sense, the Holy Spirit is the one who encourages us, seeing the good we do, how hard we try, how we keep falling and yet encouraging us to get up and try again. Fr. Ron explained that God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – is our cheerleader, our biggest fan. God got excited enough about humans to become a human (Jesus). And Jesus returns to the Father, fully God and fully human, promising to share that spark of Love, the Holy Spirit, with all of us too.
What a wonderful promise! Not only do we have an advocate who’ll plead for us when we mess up; we also have a cheerleader who’ll be there to cheer us on as we keep trying and keep believing that we really are lovable.
In these final days before Pentecost, lets hold on to this promise, waiting for the gift of an even deeper relationship with our God. A relationship that doesn’t depend on how well we manage to live our lives, but rather on how crazy God is about each of us and how much God wants us to respond in love to that gift of love.
Come, Holy Spirit, come!
