The Spirit empowers us

          The Spirit Empowers us and Speaks to us in the ordinary events of daily life

 We have been preparing during the past few weeks for the feast of Pentecost. The time when the Holy Spirit came to the Mother of God and Jesus’ Disciples in the upper room.  ‘They (the Christian Community) all joined together constantly in prayer, along with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brothers.’ Acts 1:4.  The Spirit empowered them to go out, with courage, and spread the Good News. What is that Good News? The Good News of Christ is that, He came down to earth not only that He may share in our humanity, but that we may share in His divinity.  Jesus came among us to show us the way to live our lives and remind us that he is present with us, individually and collectively, until the end of time. And there is more!

But how do WE today experience this outpouring of the Spirit?

There are times when I can be so full of my own thoughts and ideas that
I don’t stop and listen to how the Spirit may be speaking to me through other people or in our world. Take for instance this beautiful season of Summertime. The freshness of new growth is all around, the splash of colour, the various shades of green on the trees and the buttercups in a green grassy meadow. Add blue skies and sunshine and you cannot but see God’s Hand at work.

The Spirit speaks powerfully to us through other people, our family and friends. We feel it when we are encouraged to try something new or challenging in our lives. We learn to listen  and know  the voice of the Spirit when we feel a sense of peace. If the opposite is the case it may not be from the Spirit of God.

I came across this lovely poem by RS Thomas which may help. It helped me look to my daily life and how the Spirit is present in the ordinary even ‘singing to me in a chain’ –saw!!

‘Suddenly’

Suddenly after long silence
he has become voluble.
He addresses me from myriad
directions with the fluency
of water, the articulateness
of green leaves; and in the genes,
too, the components
of my existence. The rock,
so long speechless, is the library
of his poetry. He sings to me
in the chain-saw, writes
with the surgeon’s hand
on the skin’s parchment messages
of healing. The weather
is his mind’s turbine
driving the earth’s bulk round
and around on its remedial
journey. I have no need
to despair; as at
some second Pentecost
of a Gentile, I listen to the things
round me: weeds, stones, instruments,
the machine itself, all
speaking to me in the vernacular
of the purposes of One who is.

 (RS Thomas Suddenly, in Collected Poems, 1945 -1990)

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