Our Founder's Pentecost Homily
Here it is:
This Feast of Pentecost is a very important Feast for Our Lady’s Society. On this Feast, the body of Pope John XXIII was manifested as incorrupt. And our seminarians served at that
The gift of the Holy Spirit is the great reality that has to come into our lives, and into the whole world….This relationship with the Holy Spirit is very important in Our Lady’s Society.
In the world, there is a great need for the healing of human love. We are destroying human love everywhere you look, in every way. We don’t know how to love humanly, freely. Children do, for a little while. But we lose it very quickly.
If you look at marriage and family, husbands and wives are in a self-destruct pattern. They destroy human love by the way they relate to each other even before they are married. All over, human love is being destroyed.
How does God feel about this? He has gifted us with human love. Jesus comes to us and loves us humanly!
So how do you heal this?
This Feast is the answer. This Feast is a gift of Divine Love. Divine love heals human love.
We have to come to an understanding of Divine Love. I was listening to the sequence, and one of the first things it tells us about the Holy Spirit is that He is the Father of the poor. Sometimes people will come, charismatics, and say: ‘Father, I’m filled with the Holy Spirit. We have the Holy Spirit.’ And I ask them how they are working with the poor. And they say: ‘We’re not working with the poor!’ And I say, well that’s not the Holy Spirit I know. They think they have the Holy Spirit if they have this and that, material things, etc. That’s not the Holy Spirit…….He is the Father of the poor. If you have the Holy Spirit you are marked by this. This is the true Holy Spirit.
God’s ways are not our ways. And the ways of the Holy Spirit are not our ways. God wants, in His generosity, to give us the fullness of the Person of the Holy Spirit. Not just His gifts. Those are wonderful. But He wants to give us the Person of the Holy Spirit.
And He has particular, beautiful characteristics. For instance:
He wants to regale us, not afflict us. People have a sense of affliction in their lives. The Holy Spirit reaches into their afflictions and heals them. Where do you go in sadness and sorrow. People have deep sorrows. Where do they go? To the Person of the Holy Spirit. He gives you that spirit of consolation and compassion. You have to recognize He dwells within you as a Person.
And with grief, when people are grieving and in deep pain, they don’t know what to do with themselves. You have to see the Holy Spirit brings you to joy and rejoicing. He is the joy of your life. That’s why He was sent. Without Him you don’t know yourself, you don’t know where to go. People go everywhere else, to counselors, psychologists, to companions. Go inside yourself to find Him. Go to Him.
Our human nature is very uneducated, very coarse. People can have all sorts of degrees, doctorates, etc. But that’s not education. That’s just knowledge, information. We’re very coarse. There’s a coarseness in us. And if we don’t move toward the Holy Spirit we’re going to move toward things that are passing away and be satisfied with them. Things like materialism and selfism, and relativism and individualism and all the other isms.
So, in Divine Love, God gives us trials, to educate us. He gives us trials, He punishes us. But these are gifts, because we are so coarse. We complain, “why is this happening to me. I’m so good!” We don’t punish our children. It’s because we don’t love them. There’s a coarseness in them too. Often we give God everything but ourselves.
There are tremendous punishments today. The people of old were unfaithful. So God took away their leaders as a punishment. When they were still unfaithful, He sent them into exile until they were ready to be faithful again.
We are in the same pattern. We are unfaithful. We’re killing our children and God has taken away our leaders. In every area you look, there are no leaders. No leaders! And if we continue to be unfaithful, God will send us into exile. And we’re still unfaithful, so get ready!
What can we do? There are three realities present in the world today. Today they are trying to 1. destroy the Priesthood. 2. destroy the Church. 3. destroy all of Christianity.
I spoke with an Anglican Bishop who had left and become a Catholic Priest. And when I asked him where ecumenism was at, he said: “Jim, don’t worry about ecumenism. Ecumenism will take care of itself. You worry about Christianity. The world is trying to destroy Christianity.”
How is the Holy Spirit working with this? The world is trying to destroy everything of Christ, and we have to oppose this. He is everything in all of us. We have to commit ourselves to this. We have to do it wholeheartedly, with everything we’ve got!
If I were to take you to heaven now, and give you the choice to stay there, (and this is so wonderful), or to come back to earth, would you choose heaven now, or to work for the Church, to spend your life for the Church? Our Lady made this choice and She calls you to this.
Don’t work for yourself, but for the Church and the needs of the Church. Bring Divine love to human love. This Feast is about that choice, that decision, that you would work for the Church with all you have, until God has fulfilled His Divine plan.
Open yourself right here, right now, to that decision. Otherwise your life is wasted! Receive Divine love so that you can decide to heal human love, so you can give the gift of the Holy Spirit to all who touch our lives!
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