Console Us.  Disturb Us.

Fr. Joel Tabora, S.J.
Mass of the Holy Spirit
3 June 2009

This year, on the very first day of class, in the best of Jesuit tradition, we begin our academic year with the Mass of the Holy Spirit.  In the week after the great the Feast of Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came with the sound of a great wind as tongues of fire that rested on each of the apostles, transforming fearsome men into courageous witnesses to the Resurrection, we ask that the same Fire descend upon each of us, to fill our interior lives – as our first reading mentions - with the fruits of the Spirit:  love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. 

We do so conscious of the fact that without the Spirit, we are bodies without life, workers without joy, counselors without peace, teachers without patience, mentors without kindness, helpers without generosity, friends without faithfulness, healers without gentleness, and fighters without self control.  Without the Spirit we are an educational institution without mission, motive, interiority, soul.

We pray then for an increasing consciousness of the Holy Spirit as he works in our lives – leading us to truth.  This is precisely what the Gospel says the Holy Spirit does:  He leads us to truth.  As an educational institution, we are about truth.  Our lives as teachers or students or researchers or administrators are about truth.   We need the Spirit to lead us to truth.

For truth is elusive in our confusing world.  Learning even under the best of mentors seems to fall short of truth; teaching even the best of students seems to fall short of the truth we need to communicate.  There are treasures of truth, we know, in a plethora of books, gathered by scholars, preserved by sages.  Teachers help us to enter this truth.  We must revere this truth and patiently open ourselves to it in classrooms, libraries and quiet study nooks; we must study the recorded wisdom of the ages that have gradually unfolded the mystery of humanity;  we must appreciate the grand achievements of humankind celebrated in various permutations of human culture and civilization;  we must learn the disciplines that have allowed man to manipulate the natural elements and bring us our skyscrapers, our malls, our laptops, our cinemas, our ipods, our celfons.  

At the same time,  we know the irony of this truth:  that so often it leaves us dissatisfied, unhappy, restless.  We find truth, only to be convinced we do not yet have it.  Especially when we become aware of a divergence between what we know-from-all-these-books and what we are, what we say and what we live, what we profess and what do.  Truth, we then realize, is not just in book learning, but in making knowledge work for people, in dealing with others with sensitivity, in living with integrity, in discerning the difference between right and wrong and engaging the world for what is right, in learning the difference between the important and the petty, and in never going to war for the petty.  Truth is in knowing when we must risk much for the measured goal, and when we must risk all to take an absolute stand, failing which we lose all.  Truth is fidelity to ourselves in this world - ourselves loved by our parents, our brothers and sisters, our students, our colleagues, our friends, our wife or husband, our children, our God. … It is the Spirit, our Gospel says, that leads us to truth – leading us from one truth to another, beyond our comfort zones, from the merely exterior to the interior, from the merely interior to the manifest.  He leads us to truth in consoling us.  But also in disturbing us.

The Spirit leads us to truth.  Where he leads is often inconvenient, difficult, sometimes even painful.  As when Jesus was led by the Spirit into a desert, where He had to wrestle with severe temptation.  It is in the desolation of the desert that the human wrestles with the Spirit.  He is disturbed, provoked, made aware of his personal weaknesses and shortcomings, his narrowness, his small mindedness, his deeper hunger and thirst, his dependence on a Providence beyond him.  Often he is made aware of his complacency, his lazy compromises, his unachieved life goals, his increasing refusal to take risks to achieve more.  Perhaps, in times when we think that we have made it, that all is sunny and rosy, that there is nothing more to be achieved, it is the Spirit who leads us to pray:

Disturb us, O Lord,
when we are too well pleased with ourselves
when our dreams have come true
 because we have dreamed too little;
When we arrived safely
because we have sailed too close to shore.

Disturb us, O Lord,
when with the abundance of things we possess
we have lost our thirst for the waters of life;
when, having fallen in love with life,
we have ceased to dream of eternity.
And in our effort to build a new earth
we have allowed our vision of the new heaven to dim.

Disturb Us, O Lord,
to dare more boldly to venture on wider seas
where storms will show your mastery,
where losing sight of land, we shall find the stars.
We ask you, push back the horizon of our hopes,
And to push us into the future
with strength, courage, hope and love.  

The Spirit disturbs us to bring us back to the fresh challenge of the Lord’s mission, to bring us deeper into his consolation, and the warmth of his embrace.  He is not defeated;  he is not dead.   The disciples walking on the road to Emmaus were profoundly disturbed in their thinking he was dead.  It was a disturbance in the Spirit that the Lord, journeying with them, allowed.  And it was through this disturbance that they were lead to greater truth.  The Spirit led them to truth.  “Were not our hearts burning within us?” they asked in amazement as they came to understand truth.

Our shared prayer then is that the Spirit come:  especially when we think that in this secular world we don’t need him, when we think that the human spirit suffices, and that the Holy Spirit is passé.  Our prayer is that the Spirit come, especially when we need to learn something of importance, not just for an exam, but for life; that the Spirit come, when we need to teach something of eternal moment to a student we love, where the inner intention of the teacher must meet the heart of the student in the interiority of the Spirit.  Our prayer is that the Spirit come, to teach us genuine gratitude for our achievements, the latest being extended accreditation for our high school and – as a first in the country – accreditation for our entire institution,  but also to disturb us because so many still remain ignorant and poor and hungry and sick, and the entire educational system seems to be defaulting, and the abject destitution that we see around us can never be the will of the Risen Lord who calls us to love, community and human dignity.  May the Spirit console us in our traditions, our songs, our dances, our Isarog and Mayon, our rivers and lakes, but also disturb us in the erosion of our local culture and cherished devotions, and the diminishment of our sense of national purpose and our commitment to national reform.  May the Spirit console us in the constitutional freedoms and democratic institutions we enjoy, won at great price, but disturb us by the current attempt of  shameless politicians to win political power illegal constitutional manipulation.  May the Spirit console us in our community of friends in the Lord, help us to lock arms in solidarity and shared purpose, but disturb us in his Cross, without which we cannot celebrate Resurrection.  

It is the Spirit of Jesus who came to bring us life, and to bring it is all fullness (John 10:10);  it is the Spirit of Jesus who speaks to us to bring us joy, and the fullness of joy (John 15:11).  It is this Spirit we pray to come into our new academic year.  May we be filled with the fruits of the Spirit – with love, joy and peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control…