Our human hearts were made to love and to be loved, to give and receive love. Every beat of every heart is made possible through a God who is love. But do you know that the very heart of God also beats for you? That is what Jesus said to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, Apostle of the Heart of Jesus, as he revealed his enflamed heart to her: “Behold this Heart which has so loved men as to spare Itself nothing, even to exhausting and consuming Itself, to testify to them Its love.” This revelation is what we have come to know as the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Today, Holy Mother Church celebrates the Solemnity of Pentecost which is when the Holy Spirit came upon the Apostles. It’s also the birthday of the Church. Now, let me ask you a question. When did you first receive the Holy Spirit? At Baptism. Remember, when I baptize you, it is done in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. When is the next time you receive the gift of the Holy Spirit? At Confession. After that? Holy Communion. Now, you may be thinking, “You also receive the Holy Spirit at Confirmation.” Yeah, you do. You receive Jesus, and you receive God the Father. That 3 in 1 and 1 in 3 thing. You receive the fullness of the Spirit. In each Sacrament, you receive the whole God.
The Sacraments are given for different purposes depending on your particular mission in the Body of Christ. At Baptism, you were given the gift of God Himself. In each Sacrament, you get the gift of the whole God…not just a slice of Him. You get the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. In Baptism, Christ asked for, and you, through your parents, gave Him your human nature. The human nature He took from Mary in the body He was born with, taught with, healed with, suffered with, and redeemed us with is now in Heaven. So, how does He continue His mission to teach, heal, and sanctify the world? It goes on through us by living a good Catholic life. In whatever part of the Body of Christ He has assigned us, we work for His glory and the salvation of souls. So, if you are in hell, you are a self- made man.
Christ takes our human nature at Baptism, so, we are part of His new body which is the Church. Each of us has a place in the body of Christ to do the work of bringing Him to the world. Through the gifts of the Holy Spirit, He helps us accomplish that mission. There are seven gifts (wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of the Lord) and 12 fruits (charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, long-suffering, humility, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, and chastity). The whole purpose of giving us the Holy Spirit through the Sacraments is to bring God’s love to the world and to make that love manifest in whatever part of the Body we are in. The graces of the Holy Spirit strengthen us so that we can carry out that mission.
Part of my job as a priest is working at the veterans’ hospital in Hospice. Hospice is a part of the hospital where people who are very sick and in the last six months of their lives are cared for by specially trained doctors and nurses. They have all sorts of terrible diseases. We had one patient who had Progressive Supranuclear Palsy which is a rare disease that the patient contracted while working as a doctor in Vietnam. His brain turned into jelly, and there is no treatment. It’s so sad. The hospice staff try to make their patients as comfortable and pain-free as possible. A few years ago, there was a nice area with a kitchen and dining room where hospice patients could come out of their rooms and eat together. Other veterans from across the hospital would come down and have lunch with them. It was so much fun to laugh and talk with them. I would pick up trays and do whatever I could for them. You know what a sign of God’s love looks like? There was a hospice patient at the luncheon who couldn’t feed himself…he was that sick. Another man who, after this incident died about two weeks later, was also at the luncheon. But, instead of eating his own lunch, he spent that time feeding the patient who couldn’t feed himself. One would think that if you’re dying, it would be all about you. But, this is what God’s love looks like. This was an act of the Holy Spirit. The staff would have fed that patient, but he did it. He didn’t have to do it, but he wanted to. He made sure that man ate before he did. That is a sign of the Holy Spirit in action and God’s love is in the world.
Another thing they have done in Hospice, and hopefully will do again once COVID is over, is that when veterans are actively dying and don’t have family members there, volunteers come and sit with them all night and all day so that they don’t have to die alone. Usually, the veterans are very old and don’t have anybody. But, a veteran should never die alone. In the military, you never leave a fallen comrade. I’ve always thought that this is a sign of Christ, along with their guardian angel, being with them as they leave this life. You see the love of Christ in those volunteers. They don’t need to teach us…their actions teach us everything. It’s all through the promptings of the Holy Spirit who moves and works within us – not always the way want; otherwise, I’d be a monsignor!
I’ll tell you a story about the nursing staff. Don’t let this get back to them. World War II veterans are very old, and when they are nearing the time of their passing, all of the memories of what they had to do during the war come back. Mine will come back too when it’s my time. It’s just part of what we went through. It comes back for a lot of the men who saw combat. Many times, it was their wives who helped them keep it all together, and if their wives are no longer with them, it’s a real hardship for them. I remember this one man who was in his nineties and about to leave us asked the nurse if she would hold his hand until he fell asleep. The memories had come back, and his wife had done that for him. That’s not in any nurse’s job description. But, she sacrificed her own time to sit with that man while he faced his nightmares. I’ve sat with veterans as they were passing from this life…that’s what we do. We offer spontaneous acts of love. I’ve seen you do it. Your acts of generosity are acts of the Holy Spirit. You are showing Christ’s love. If you ask anyone why they do it, they would probably say that they don’t know, but it felt like the right thing to do. Do they get paid for it? No. It was just the right thing to do. These are the actions of the Holy Spirit using our human natures to show Christ’s love to the world. But, so that we can repeat these acts of love, we must be refreshed in the Holy Spirit by frequently participating in the Sacrament of Penance and Holy Communion.
What is so beautiful about these acts of love is that you do it without thinking. It’s just a normal response. You don’t stop and think about what you should or shouldn’t do…you just do it. That’s the action of the Holy Spirit letting the Spirit work in you to bring the love of Christ to the world. And, believe it or not, someone will see and be taught God’s word simply through your acts of love
How will you apply this message to your life? Refresh yourself in the Holy Spirit by frequently participating in the Sacrament of Penance and Holy Communion
You can read all of Father Fitzgibbons’ sermons by going to https://annunciationcatholicalbemarle.com/ and clicking on “Blog” then “Categories” and then “Sermon Notes.” From a cell phone, click on “Blog” then “Menu” and then “Categories” (located at the end of page). There is also a search box if you are looking for a specific topic.
Our all-loving God does not desire that we seek suffering to become holy, but he does desire that we surrender to him in our suffering so that in our brokenness, his mercy can make us whole again. In being broken open by suffering, we are offered the opportunity to let those open spaces be filled with the mercy and compassion of our God, and in the depth of that mercy to be moved to love him more deeply. Surrendering to suffering is the path we walk backwards through the pain of the fall toward the life of Eden.
It is God’s love that is still holding me by the shoulder as, spoonful by spoonful, I consume the warmth of his mercy into my physical and spiritual being. And when I am fully restored and well, it will be with love and great delight that he touches my hand and calls me to serve again.
We are not called to live a life of servitude to a demanding Father. We are his children whom he wants to heal and feed, then lift into service as evidence of his great love and delight in us. Let us not confuse the two any longer but open our eyes and be fed so that we might serve him from the fullness of our hearts and our confidence in his love.
“Whenever that sacrifice of Christ is memorialized in the Church, there is an application to a new moment in time and a new presence in space of the unique sacrifice of Christ Who is now in glory. In obeying His mandate, His followers would be representing in an unbloody manner that which He presented to His Father in the bloody sacrifice of Calvary. After changing the bread into His Body and the wine into His Blood: He gave it to them (Mark 14:22). By that communion they were made one with Christ, to be offered with Him, in Him, and by Him. All love craves unity. As the highest peak of love in the human order is the unity of husband and wife in the flesh, so the highest unity in the Divine order is the unity of the soul and Christ in communion.”— Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, p. 401-2
“Oh, my soul, how much longer do you wish to be so stingy with Jesus? Why so negligent towards Jesus who made You? Why so lazy towards Jesus who redeemed you? Who do you want to love, if you do not want to love Jesus?” — St. Gemma Galgani
“Love Mary! She is loveable, faithful, constant. She will never let herself be outdone in love, but will ever remain supreme. If you are in danger, she will hasten to free you. If you are troubled, she will console you. If you are sick, she will bring you relief. If you are in need, she will help you. She does not look to see what kind of person you have been. She simply comes to a heart that wants to love her.” — St. Gabriel Possenti of Our Lady of Sorrows
Mary would have to remind herself whenever she would remember and start to dwell on Jesus’s suffering, that love redeemed it all, and with the coming of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, she again saw in a flash of light that love was the reason from all eternity. Jesus came to love us and show us the love of the Father and how we are to love the Father. And with that vision, there seemed no past anymore, or even future. Everything was now, everything was new and exciting in the present. And how marvelous to live in that reality that was a preview of what was to come but more importantly, was already here, happening in her. She was living in the kingdom and all that needed to happen was that moment when she entered and saw the kingdom of love that was already there inside and all around her.
“On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him. Nobody can always have devout feelings: and even if we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love, either towards God or towards man, is an affair of the will. If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ He will give us feelings of love if He pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves, and we must not demand them as a right. But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.”— C. S. Lewis, p. 132
