(Given at Our Lady of Loreto, Feast of Pentecost, May 19th, 2024)

Hello. My name is Austin Habash, the founder of Think Catholic and Sent Evangelization. It is my great pleasure to give this brief reflection as we celebrate today the great feast of Pentecost.

Fire

When I was a seminarian, my Ancient Philosophy professor told us a story of a moment when he was very little, and his father wanted to teach him how to hold a match safely in his hand. 

Now, my professor here as a child, like any other child we might expect (before the match was struck), took two things to be true: 

1) Everything tends downward, and it falls, as was his experience of the world up to that point. 

2) Fire is dangerous; it could cause pain or hurt the one who touched it.

After combining those two thoughts, he concluded that he should hold the match with the matchhead pointed downwards. 

Now, think for a moment, just how reasonable that conclusion would be, given this child’s experience of the world so far.

When we let go of a rock, it falls. Water runs downward, not upward, so we can see just how reasonable it would be to conclude that fire does, too.

But it doesn’t.

In this way, it is not only unique but also a fitting image of the work of the Holy Spirit, here at Pentecost and always, because, as St. Paul says in Romans 5:5, charity is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.

Charity

And charity, as a theological virtue, as a divinely quality infused quality, inflames a man’s will, to (as Aquinas put it) love for God for God’s sake, and one’s enemies all the way to the point of dying for their salvation.

And as charity draws a man’s affections upward, it, at the same time, for God’s-sake, diffuses them outward…just like fire.

Fire tends upward at the same time heat and light go outward. So it is with those possessed by charity. As Aquinas put it:

The more ardent one’s charity, the further will its flames reach. Even to the point of warming strangers and enemies.

In loving God, we necessarily desire, and we are compelled (in Christ) to seek out the salvation of others: 

In one way, by prayer, which is like flame’s heat, is unseen yet felt by those to whom it touches, preparing the heart for conversion as we saw with St. Monica’s influence on St. Augustine.

In another way, preaching and teaching, analogous to a fire’s light, the word of the preacher or teacher can enter the heart and dispel the darkness of ignorance or confusion.

Pentecost

It is this flame of charity and charity’s effects that are most conspicuously seen today at Pentecost in which Christ’s desire and aim:

“…to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” (Lk. 12:49).

Is brought to fulfillment, as today the Catechism states, the apostles receive:

…the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, manifested, given, and communicated as a divine person” (CCC #731)

Let us look at that effect: Before this event, Peter, has betrayed and abandoned Christ out of fear of the maidservant.

Now, after this outpouring, in the same city that crucified Jesus, to the same people that asked for his crucifixion, St. Peter cries out to a crowd of of thousands of people (according to Scripture) as says:

“Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit (Lk. 2:38).

Look at what happens to his listeners. Before this moment, it says in the Book of Acts chapter 1 that 120 followers were gathered. After this moment, 3,000 souls will be added to them, as it says in Acts 2:42.

The Work of the Holy Spirit

It is in these two events—the justification of the sinner and the manifest outpouring of charity upon the apostles—that the Holy Spirit is especially manifested in power and majesty.

1. As far as the first is concerned, it is written, “no one can call Jesus Lord except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Cor. 12:3); the justification of the sinner is a greater work of Holy Spirit than the creation of the whole world, as the Catechism states:

Justification is the most excellent work of God’s love made manifest in Christ Jesus and granted by the Holy Spirit. (and then quoting St. Augustine, it says) the justification of the wicked is a greater work than the creation of heaven and earth (CCC #1994).

2. Then, looking at the second, the gift of charity, St. Paul takes to be a greater gift and, therefore manifestation of the Holy Spirit (being an effect of sanctifying grace) than any gratuitous grace or combination of gratuitous graces, as He says,

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not charity, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not charity, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not charity, I gain nothing.

Charity never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways…So faith, hope, charity abide, these three; but the greatest of these is charity. (1 Cor. 13)

Pharaoh’s magicians worked wonders; the “lawless one,” as he’s called in Scripture, that is to come, according to (2 Thess. 2:9), will work wonders, but the wonder exclusive to the Holy Spirit is sanctity, and the divinely infused quality of the will, we call charity. 

The Definition of a Christian

It is what defines the Christian, as St. Augustine defined the Christian in the 5th Century, designating him or her under the description:

Amor Dei Usque Ad Contemptum Sui (the love of God all the way to contempt of oneself).

This is descriptive of Peter, who will go on from this day at Pentecost to the day of his death as a martyr in Rome as a witness to Christ. 

Or take a personal example:

Like a man I once knew, now buried in a nameless grave in southern England. A Carthusian when I was a Carthusian. 

He would wake up in the middle of the night screaming because of the burning in his palms, but that wasn’t the most wonderful work of the Holy Spirit in Him. The most wonderful work of the Holy Spirit was his life.

I used to look over at him at 89 years old, on the other side of the Church, chanting the psalms from 12:30-2:30/3:30 A.M, like he had done every day since he was 20 when I entered the Carthusian cell, and I would just weep.

I used to assist him in celebrating his private mass at 90, in a cell without heat, in the depth of winter. And as he slowly died from his various ailments, he would shake from the pain; during the Consecration, tears would roll down his face, but he would not make a sound; Carthusians prefer silence, I suppose. 

“To be a Saint,” he said to me just before he died, and I think he was.

The world will never know his name; only those in the Order knew his religious name. Some of us know his baptismal name, but I am confident his name is enrolled in heaven.

He was a man possessed…by the Holy Spirit.

I also saw this while living with the Missionary Sisters of Charity in inner-city St. Louis: the work of the Holy Spirit.

The sisters worked almost non-stop, which included feeding the homeless for most of the morning, providing a program for their kids until the evening, and ending the day after prayer, around 9 P.M., to the sound of gunshots in the neighborhood. 

They woke up around 6 A.M. to cook for the women who had spent the night there. Then, they prepared the soup kitchen and fed everyone from the neighborhood until about noon. From noon to one, they ate by themselves; from one to two was their only break of the day, and from two to three was Holy Hour. 

Then, from three to seven was the “after-school program” for the kids in the neighborhood. After that, they prayed evening prayer, brought the women in from the street, cooked them dinner, and gave them a bed for the night. 

The sisters would sleep on the same building floor as their guests, with only a thin wall separating them from the other women. 

So, if the ladies on the other side got in fist fights (which happened) or brought in screaming children (which happened more often), all hope of getting any sleep was lost. 

This was their life. Every single day except Thursday, they had off, and every 10 years, they got three weeks of vacation. And to this day, they are still the happiest people I’ve ever met.

Women possessed…by the Holy Spirit.

Eucharistic Revival

And so must every single one of us (in our own way & place) as we in America soon embark on what the Eucharistic Congress is calling:

“ new Pentecost.”

As we embark on this year of Mission “to share the gift of our Eucharistic Lord,” beginning July 21 to conclude the Feast of Pentecost 2025.

And the key to this evangelization will be our fruitful reception of the Eucharist, also known as the Sacrament of Charity, for when it comes to evangelization in the Modern World, as it states in Evangellii Nuntiandi, Evangelization in the Modern World:

Modern man listens more willingly to witnesses than to teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it is because they are witnesses…(the witness of what exactly, it continues).. the witness of sanctity.

But, surely all of us have received the Eucharist before, many of us receive it daily. Does our sanctity resemble St. Peter’s, the Carthusians, the Missionary Sisters of Charity…. is their Eucharist, Body/Blood/Soul and Divinity of Christ different then ours, so then why this difference, as St. Alphonsus Ligouri asks in his work on the Eucharist, why is it:

…that in so many souls we see so little fruit with so frequent Communions?

It is because our heart is fixed on temporal goods, is St. Alphonsus Ligouri’s response, we love other things, and so arrive at communion like wood soaked in the liquid of earthly desire and simply cannot ignite.

I imagine this is one reason Mary said, “God has filled the hungry with good things.” But how can he fill us if we are already full of other stuff?

The Church has described the kind of witnesses she is looking for in this evangelization of the modern world by continuing:

…by her conduct and by her life the Church will evangelize the world, in other words, by her living witness of fidelity to the Lord Jesus-the witness of poverty and detachment, of freedom in the face of the powers of this world, in short, the witness of sanctity.

In those areas where our state allows poverty, let us voluntary choose it, and where it doesn’t, let us take up detachment to set our hearts free and tend upward. 

Let us be a supernatural witness this year of mission to those who know us and who live around us by arriving at the Eucharist hungry, as Mary says, so that God may fill us with good things.

It is not about doing more things, its about living a life about One thing: the Triune God. Like fire that strives with all its might in one direction and in doing so serves as a source of light and heat to others. Like men and women possessed by the Holy Spirit.

In a story, which I will close with, very well-known from the Desert Father’s to allow us to meditate on this point as we go forth in prayer and celebration on this great feast of Pentecost. 

“Abba Joseph came to the Desert Father Abba Lot and said to him: ‘Father, according to my strength I keep a moderate rule of prayer and fasting, quiet and meditation, and as far as I can I control my imagination; what more must I do?’ And the old man rose and held his hands towards the sky so that his fingers became like flames of fire and he said: ‘If you will, you can become all flame.’