The month of May is the most beautiful month in the year as far as I’m concerned.  When I think of May, these words of Gerard Manley Hopkins come to mind:

‘Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightenings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
 The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling’.
(Spring)

This year, Spring came early after a mostly mild winter – evidence perhaps of global warming.  As I write in mid-April, my garden actually looks as it should in May, very beautiful yet rather disturbing that it should all happen so soon.

For the Christian the blossoming life we witness in Spring is evidence of the Spirit of God at work.  As the psalmist puts it:

‘O Lord, how manifold are your works!
in wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures …
When you send forth your spirit they are created,
and you renew the face of the earth’.

During this month, we shall also be celebrating the giving of life of a different kind, but nevertheless given through the same Spirit of God who is at work in nature.  I am referring, of course, to the celebration of Pentecost.  On that day, we bring Eastertide to a conclusion as we remember the moment at which God poured out His Spirit on the disciples of Jesus gathered in the upper room.

This gift welded them together, transforming them from a group of rather bewildered followers of Jesus into the Body of Christ, the Church.  Together, they now formed the community of the Spirit in which the life of the risen Christ Himself was manifest in the world.  Poured out on them that day were all the gifts they needed, not just to be the Body of Christ but to proclaim him to the nations.  The experience was so overwhelming that they could only describe it in terms of wind and fire and they found themselves speaking in ecstatic tongues which could be understood by people from all over the known world.

At our baptism, we shared in this same outpouring of the Spirit of God, though the experience may not necessarily have been as powerful as it was for those first Christians.  We didn’t join a human institution or club, but the Church of the living God.  We were incorporated into the same Life as those who were present in the upper room on the Day of Pentecost.  So, on Pentecost Sunday, we are not just celebrating an historical event, but a living reality in which we all share.  Our task is to use the gifts of the Spirit in which we share, to proclaim Christ and to really be His body in the world, fighting for justice, peace and love.

Fr. John

Previous letters:

January 2007
February 2007
March 2007
April 2007