Come and fill us from your abundance

Come, Holy Spirit
come and fill us.
Come and fill us
from your abundance.
Pour out your grace
on our hopes and dreams.
~ Prayer from a Pentecost Novena created by a Benedictine friend

It's Saturday evening: across the world the universal Church has already begun celebrating the great and lovely feast of Pentecost. All the novenas and prayers of the past week or so are gathered into one huge prayer of joy and longing, that the Holy Spirit will indeed come and fill our hearts from his great abundance, kindle within us the fire of God's love, and renew the face of the earth. 

In our communities we have a tradition, on this feast, of prayerfully drawing pieces of paper with the Spirit's gifts and fruits written on them, to see which ones have been given to us to accompany us throughout the coming year. Since I started living alone I have not been able to rely on picking a written word to convey the Spirit's desires for me: but somehow - whether in prayer, reading, or simply going about my daily life - the Spirit will always manage to point me towards a particular gift or fruit, to be with me in the months to come. I just have to be attentive, and ready to receive whatever the Spirit sends; though this year, inspired by my friend's prayer, I also hoped and prayed for an abundance.

And this year the Spirit started a few days ago, by whispering the word peace while I was praying after a full-on and troublesome day. It is, of course, the Risen Jesus' first greeting to his disciples; it is also, for me, a continuation of a call I felt during Lent, in a world filled with conflict and war, to really work at creating peace and reconciliation in my corner of the world. And then, yesterday, I found two folded up slips of paper tucked inside a book. Last June, when I led a faith-sharing group on the Sacred Heart and Pope Francis' Dilexit nos, I ended each session by inviting the group to draw something to accompany them that week. One session we had attributes or virtues of the Heart of Jesus: two were left over, which I took for myself. I'd almost forgotten about them, but here they now were in my hand... The Peaceful Heart of Jesus... The Joyful Heart of Jesus. 

The Spirit had hovered gently over our drawing last year, and no doubt hovered over my discovery of these two attributes - which of course, are both fruits of the Spirit. This year I get not one fruit but two! - from the Spirit's generous, overflowing abundance. And so, peace and joy are what will accompany me, what will call me; what, I pray and hope, will fill me... The peace offered by the Risen Jesus, and so needed in our world, and his desire for his joy to be in me, so that my joy might be complete (cf John 15: 11). 

And, as I believe in that abundance, I am sure there will also be a gift, which will make itself known... maybe by the time you read this, that too will have come to me. 

Happy feast of Pentecost to you all! May the Spirit fill you abundantly with the gifts and fruits you need, and may God's grace be poured out on all our hopes and dreams, for ourselves, and for our blessed and broken world.