The Holy Spirit Is the Light by which We See
Homily for the Opening Mass at Calvert Hall College
Watch this homily here.
Today we celebrate a Mass of the Holy Spirit. And, as you might have noticed, the three Scripture readings we’ve heard this morning all speak about the Holy Spirit: Jesus calls the Spirit our “Helper”, Paul identifies the Spirit with righteousness, peace, and joy, and Ezekiel sees the Spirit replacing hearts of stone with hearts of flesh. Scripture tells us clearly what the Spirit does but is rather vague on what the Spirit actually is.
It's actually rather difficult to know what the Holy Spirit is. We cannot pin the Holy Spirit down and study him like we might dissect a frog or observe a chemical reaction because the Holy Spirit doesn’t have a body. The Holy Spirit is pure spirit. Instead, we only see the Spirit’s aftermath – the effects of where he’s been – and all we can do is attempt to trace that aftermath back to its cause to make some judgement about who he is. All of this is much more like crime scene forensics than it is biology and chemistry.
That’s good news for me because I nearly failed out of chemistry and opted out of physics, so I’m glad my knowing God doesn’t depend on my inability to do science. And I may be entirely off base with the analogy I’m about to make, but I think it works, at least theologically, even if my science is wrong. So, I’m going to go for it. To me, the Holy Spirit seems a lot like light. We need light to see. Without light we can’t see anything. But we cannot see light itself. We see what light shines upon and makes visible. We do not see light but only its reflection.
I think that’s how the Holy Spirit works. We walk in and through the Spirit every day like on a sunny day we walk in and through the light. We stop and notice and marvel at all the beautiful things the light shines upon. And if we stop to ask why we can see this or that, we will say it’s because of the light that we can see anything at all. Now, we can do that because our eyes work and our minds are sharp enough to understand basic physics (even mine).
But here is the problem, we can’t use our physical eyes to see the Holy Spirit; and we can’t simply think through what we observe the Spirit doing to realize that the Spirit is actually the cause of the doing. To see the Holy Spirit takes a new set of eyes and a new way of thinking. And both are the result – both are the gift – of the Holy Spirit himself. The Spirit helps us to see the Spirit around us. Even more than the sun’s light on a bright day, the Spirit saturates everything in creation with his light. Every level of being is completely imbued with the Spirit’s presence and power. Even the darkest moments of tragedy and the places of incomparable poverty are overflowing with the Holy Spirit’s light. The problem is simply that we don’t see it. We don’t see it because we can’t see it. And we can’t see it because our spiritual faculty that is supposed to be attuned to perceiving the Holy Spirt is out of whack. Before it’s fixed, we’re going to walk in darkness like with our eyes closed and blindfolded and soldered shut on the brightest of days. That is certainly no way to live.
The First Reading calls that spiritual faculty that perceives God our “heart”. The Lord told Ezekiel that he would take our hearts of stone and replace them with hearts of flesh. That is the spiritual upgrade that we need. Our hearts have become petrified by our selfishness, our ego, and our pride that turn us in on ourselves so that we become impenetrable to the light that comes from outside us. Hearts of stone are cold hearts, dead hearts. We cannot live, we cannot be fully alive, with a heart of stone. We need to be given a heart of flesh – a living heart that senses and responds to the light of God that is all around us.
With a new heart – with our spiritual faculty restored – we can see the Holy Spirit in and through all that he does in the world and in our lives. Everything is covered with the Holy Spirit’s light and stands ready to reveal the Spirit to us if our heart is alive and our spiritual eyes are open. That is why we begin this school year with a Mass of the Holy Spirit: that God would pour into our hearts the fire of his divine love, to shatter our hearts of stone, and fix within us a new heart, a living heart, that seeks God’s presence as clearly as our eyes see the light of the sun.
How different would our lives be if we let the Holy Spirit give us a new heart! If we could walk every day through life – through these halls – with a firm conviction that God is present here in every classroom and every lab, in the band room and in this theatre, in every person that we meet and even in ourselves: then these halls would become halls of light. For they already are. We’re just too blind and our hearts too hardened to see it.
So let us pray, my brothers for the light of the Holy Spirit to allow us to see.
Homily preached September 16, 2022 at Calvert Hall College.
I like.
Amen.
Dora