Life Is According to the Holy Spirit, or It Is Not Life
Sixth Sunday of Easter
My guess is that most of you have met someone or experienced something that changed your understanding of what is possible in life. Maybe a teacher who revealed to you a passion that you never knew you possessed. Maybe a friend who showed you the deep potential of human love. Maybe you witnessed a work of art or the power of a sunset that gave you an experience of beauty so profound that the horizons of what is possible in life changed forever.
We human beings tend to want for ourselves only what we believe is possible; the limits of possibility are usually the limits of our potential. A few years ago, I read a book about the history of the Protestant Reformation, and the author made the point that it is likely no accident that the religious leaders who came to reject the truth of the Church were children in those first years after the discovery of the New World. For the first time in centuries, the human mind could imagine something new, a different kind of world not defined by the universal reality of Christian Europe.
We tend to want for ourselves only what we know is possible. And Christianity, I want to say, is a promise of new possibilities for our human lives. What are these possibilities? There are two, I think, that matter the most. The first is the possibility given to us in Christ—that death will not define our lives for eternity. There is life everlasting given to us in Christ; his victory over death is extended to us. The second is the possibility given to us in the Holy Spirit—that death does not need to define our lives now. There is a new life given to us now, a life of the Holy Spirit, a life of love and joy and peace and kindness and goodness and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control.
That first possibility given to us in Christ, that death will not define our lives for eternity, usually gets most of the attention. And that makes sense. The passion and resurrection of Christ claims the necessary victory over death that makes new life possible. But what Christ wants us to know is that we do not need to wait for this new life; it is given to us now. Christ tells us in the Gospel today that he will give to us an Advocate who will remain with us and that we will remain with him. The Advocate is the Holy Spirit, and the Holy Spirit is God, and Christ tells us that God will live within us, and that we will live within God, and that our remaining in God and his remaining in us is a reality that begins now and that continues endlessly into the future.
The gift of the Holy Spirit makes a different kind of life possible for the Christian. But I think that in our world today, we have too frequently forgotten the horizons of possibility that the Holy Spirit gives to us. We settle for a spiritual life that is so much less than what the Holy Spirit offers. What do I mean?
Imagine that you know a person who, so far as you can tell, lives a life according to the Holy Spirit, a life that is guided by the Holy Spirt. You read what St. Paul has to say about the life according to the Holy Spirit in his Letter to the Galatians, you see how this person is living, and you say to yourself: ‘Here is a person who lives a life of love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and generosity and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control; here is a person who lives a life according to the Holy Spirit.’ Now imagine that witnessing the life of this person, seeing the goodness of how they are living, you then ask the question: ‘Your life is very beautiful, very holy, but I’m curious to know if you are a very spiritual person? What do you do to take care of your spiritual life? Do you read books? Do you go to adoration? Do you contemplate scenes from scripture? How many rosaries do you say each day? Do you pray the Liturgy of the Hours? Your life is very good and beautiful, but I want to know what you do to make your life spiritual.’
What is our mistake? Well, we go off on a search for something extra that we call ‘being spiritual’ or ‘living a spiritual life,’ when to live a spiritual life most basically means to live a life according to the Holy Spirit—a life of love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and generosity and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control. For St. Paul and for Christians in the first several centuries of the Church, to live a spiritual life was to reject life lived according to the flesh, a life defined by fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. You know the list. To belong to Christ, says St. Paul, means to crucify the flesh with its passions and desires. Living a spiritual life means living a life that is animated and vivified by the Holy Spirit. The person who keeps in step with the Holy Spirit lives in this world but is not of this world. To live according to the Holy Spirit means to not become conceited, never to become arrogant; it means to not compete with one another, says St. Paul; living according to the Holy Spirit means to not envy one another. And St. Paul is convinced that we can live a life according to the Holy Spirit now, in this life.
Christ tells us in the Gospel today that he will send us an Advocate, the Holy Spirit, who will remain with us and that we will remain with God and that our remaining in God and his remaining in us is a reality that begins now and continues endlessly into the future. And for centuries in the history of the Church, to live a spiritual life meant nothing more than to live a life according to the Holy Spirit and to reject a life lived according to the flesh. St. Peter in our second reading today encourages us to live this life according to the Holy Spirit: To give an account of our faith with gentleness and reverence; to keep a clear conscience; to suffer well, with grace and with patience. St. Peter tells us that Christ leads us to God, and that just as Christ was put to death in the flesh and so brought to life by the Holy Spirit, so must we put our desires of the flesh to death so that the Holy Spirit might give us life.
Here is a question for you: If you want to live a spiritual life, have you crucified your flesh today? Are you living in this world but not of this world?
Here is another question for you: If you want to live a spiritual life, are your days defined by love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and generosity and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control?
Maybe one last question: If you want to live a spiritual life, is the life described by St. Paul enough for you, or are you on a search for something ‘deeper,’ something more experiential or emotional or relational?
Something happened in the history of the Christian life, maybe seven or eight centuries ago, and to be a spiritual person now means to live a special kind of Christian life. The kind of life that St. Paul and St. Peter talk about in the scriptures is no longer the default way that we talk about being a spiritual person. To be a spiritual person now means to have access to a certain kind of religious experience, or to possess for yourself a certain kind of interior life, or to live as someone who is ‘deep,’ or to engage in certain kinds of religious practice—holy hours, rosaries, reading scripture, so many varieties of worship or prayer.
Maybe I should make a few facts clear: I think that many kinds of religious experiences are good. There is no doubt that the formation of our interior lives matters a great deal. I like to consider myself a pretty ‘deep’ person. And, of course, our religious practices are vital elements in our Christian lives—the holy hours, the rosaries, reading scripture, forms of worship like these are how we communicate with God; we won’t get far in the Christian life without them.
So, what is my concern and why does getting clear on the meaning of the spiritual life matter? My concern is that when the spiritual life becomes a special kind of religious experience or practice or particular formation of the interior life, then it becomes very easy for Christians to live like everyone else in the world. You can have an authentic religious experience and never put to death your flesh with its passions and desires; it happens all the time, actually. You can possess for yourself an interior life of great depth and meaning and continue to live a life of enmity and anger and impurity and licentiousness; in fact, the depth of your interior life might even make these vices more real. You can pray countless rosaries and read scripture and spend a whole day in the adoration chapel and go right on living a life of avarice and greed and gossip and envy and jealousy. We live in a world now in which any who wants can call themselves ‘spiritual,’ and yet very few live a life according to the Holy Spirit. And that is my concern.
Maybe there is another way for me to say it: We Christians go right on living like the rest of the world and get away with it because we can call ourselves ‘spiritual’ even though it is not love and joy and peace and patience and kindness and generosity and faithfulness and gentleness and self-control that defines our lives. My concern is that we have lost sight of the horizons of possibility given to us by the Holy Spirit. We human beings tend to want for ourselves only what we believe is possible; the limits of possibility are usually the limits of our potential. And if we do not believe that it is possible to live a life of freedom from the works of the flesh, to live in this world but to not be of this world, then we will always struggle to desire the glory of the Christian life won for us by Christ and given to us by the Holy Spirit. We will settle for less, and call that good Christian living.
There is real loss that comes from settling for less than what the Holy Spirit makes possible for our lives. First comes the loss of authentic Christian witness in the world. Cardinal Suhard, the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris during the 1940s, once said that: To be a witness does not consist in engaging in propaganda, nor even in stirring people up, but in being a living mystery. It means to live in such a way that one's life would not make sense if God did not exist. There is a good question for us: Is your life a mystery to the world, the kind of reality that only makes sense because God is real and true and good and remains in you because you remain in him? That is the only kind of Christian witness that converts cultures and changes hearts and minds. And when we settle for less than what the Holy Spirit makes possible for us, then our lives are no longer a living mystery. We end up living like everyone else in the world, living a life according to the flesh right alongside everyone else, only with our own special Roman Catholic way of being spiritual persons.
The second loss is far more personal: We just won’t live in the freedom that Christ and the Holy Spirit makes possible for us. We human beings tend to want for ourselves only what we believe is possible; the limits of possibility are usually the limits of our potential. And if we do not believe that it is possible to live a life of freedom from the works of the flesh, to live in this world but to not be of this world, then we will always struggle to desire the glory of the Christian life won for us by Christ and given to us by the Holy Spirit. My best guess is that each of us will always struggle in some way or another to live the kind of freedom that St. Paul talks about. The gift of the Holy Spirit won’t make us into super-humans who suffer from none of the afflictions of life in a broken and sinful world. Even St. Paul admits in his Second Letter to the Corinthians that he is suffering from a thorn in the flesh that was given to him.
But imagine what your life might look like defined by the life of the Holy Spirit: love in the face of hatred; joy in the face of suffering; peace in the face of restlessness and discord; patience in the face of trial and tribulation; kindness and generosity in the face of every motive to remain selfish and conceited; faithfulness in the face of disloyalty; gentleness in the face of violence and ugliness; self-control in the face of willful pride and unchecked desire. Imagine that kind of life for yourself. Christ has won a victory over death and now as a Church we are moving toward the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. We will receive an Advocate who will remain with us always, and through the Holy Spirit we will remain in God and God will remain in us, and now there is so much possibility for our Christian lives. We can only want for ourselves what we imagine is possible, and we should not settle for less.
Homily preached on Sunday, May 14th at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary