Fr Antonio Pineda
he Holy Spirit is the star of the Pentecost story. The First Reading this Sunday describes the dramatic and spectacular way He made His grand entrance that fateful day. The Apostles and Mary were all in one place, and then a thunderous noise like a strong wind, like a tornado, came from the sky. And then flames appeared. Flames of fire just appeared out of nowhere, spontaneously, hovering in the air. And these flames divided up and started floating through the air until they came to rest on each of the people gathered.
The result? All of a sudden, the Christians started speaking in languages that they didn’t know. A crowd had gathered by now, with visitors from all over the world who were in Jerusalem for the festival. Each one heard the Christians explaining the gospel in their own language.
But we would be wrong to conclude from this that the Holy Spirit’s normal way of acting in our life is through dramatic fireworks. In fact, it’s just the opposite. God’s action in our life is most often gentle and hardly perceptible at first. How does Jesus send the Spirit to his Apostles after his resurrection? He breathes on them — quietly and subtly. How does St Paul describe the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church? Like the soul of a body — powerful, essential, but invisible and subtle. In other words, the Holy Spirit works quietly.
Consider the example of Mary. The Bible tells us that Mary was there in the Upper Room, waiting with the Apostles for the coming of the Holy Spirit. She was the mother who had given birth to the head of the Church, Jesus, in Bethlehem. And now she is the mother who is helping to give birth to the rest of the body of the Church at Pentecost.
What was she doing? Praying with them, certainly. But she was probably also serving them, being a mother to them in the midst of their confusion and nervousness. They probably were asking her about Jesus, and listening – maybe for the first time — to the story of his birth and childhood. Maybe this is when they first heard about the Annunciation. That was the day the archangel Gabriel came to her and explained that “The Holy Spirit will overshadow you and you will conceive.” She probably told them about the many conversations she had in her heart with the Holy Spirit after that day, the ones St Luke referred to in his Gospel when he wrote (more than once): “And Mary kept all these things, contemplating them in her heart.”
This is the key. To contemplate is to go over an idea in the silence of your mind in converse about it with God. And that’s what Mary was always doing. Becoming the spouse of the Holy Spirit didn’t bring fireworks and fancy balls into her life, it brought meaning, mission, wisdom, courage — virtues that take root and grow in the quiet centre of the soul, just as seeds take root and grow in the unseen darkness of the soil. Quiet, gentle, unseen, yet powerful, transforming, and everlasting — that’s the work of the Holy Spirit.
Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta put it beautifully when she said: “God is the friend of silence. See how nature — trees, flowers, grass — grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.”