The Heart Has its Reasons

While Peter was still saying this, the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

I wonder if we could ever fully appreciate the great paradox of the earliest years of the Church, it being so far removed by miles, millennia, and a culture that is mostly lost to us. No one in the Eastern Mediterranean Jewish lifeworld who followed The Way (as our faith was known) perceived that he or she was part of a new religion. How could they? Their Scriptures were precisely the same. Their customs and feast days had not changed. They continued to worship in the Temple, at least until it was forever erased from the pages of history in 70 A.D. The first generation of Christians in the Eastern Mediterranean not only perceived that they were Jews, but far more than that: they perceived that they were the only Jews, the faithful Jews, the only Jews who truly understood the Scriptures, which had been unlocked for them by the Christ and then by His Apostles. The faith had ceased to be an abstraction for these seekers. It was no longer books and commentaries on books and the Traditions of the Fathers. It was no longer centered in debates among learned men. But it had burst into a brilliant springtime, founded in the hearts of women and men and even children. It had become a living, breathing adventure as God moved among them causing great earth movements, which rearranged their whole world. The One-Who-Was-Coming-into-the-World was no longer debated among them. He had come! The Holy One of Israel! And (as only God could) He had shattered attempts to dismiss Him! He had shaken off a public crucifixion! He had vanquished death! And then He appeared to hundreds of people! Perhaps thousands .... who knows? And what of the old faith and its adherents? They just didn't "get it." They were stuck in the mud .... while everything that they lived for was breaking out all around them and in full motion now!

These men and women, whom we read about in the Book of Acts were walking on air, carried along by God's Spirit on a wave of spiritual light! They were full of expectation! Who knows where God will appear next? Or what may happen ... perhaps around the next corner? Theirs was an exciting world and an expectant one. Have you ever experienced this time of life, of high expectation?

I know how it feels to have wings on your heels
and to fly down the street in trance.
You fly down the street with a chance that you'll meet,
And you meet ... not really by chance. (Oscar Hammerstein II)

And why wouldn't they be expectant everywhere they looked? Had not the Lord Jesus promised that from now on, all encounters with God would be exactly like this:

The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know
where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.

This .... everywhere and for everyone is the nature of the Holy Spirit! And isn't this precisely the way that we speak of love? The hearts of the early Christians were bursting with love! And all the world made sense after long last. Every day was a most special day, and every night they slept in perfect peace.

But why do I speak of love (aside from the fact that it is the theme of the Gospel and Epistles readings this morning)? Why would I quote Oscar Hammerstein II on a Sunday morning? Because ours is the faith of love .... par excellence. Our God is love (1 John 4:8). He is Himself a relationship, the Relationship-of-Three, and One of the Persons of that Relationship is fully human: Jesus, the Son of God.

The reason religious sisters and religious brothers love to say their prayers, love to hear the Scriptures, love to celebrate the Holy Eucharist is that each of these is an encounter with the love of their lives. These are the times when God is likely to speak to us — in the quiet mind of prayer; through the Holy Scriptures, which constitute a holy oracle (Rm 3:2); and in the towering mystery of the Holy Mass. How many times have I been told that some meditation that I had offered touched upon the very burning point of someone's life — the thing she been been up all night praying over and which dominated her mind as she walked into the church that morning. But how could I have known?! And, of course, I did not know. But to quote a friend from Guadalajara, "Los tiempos de DIOS son siempre perfectos!" (God's timings are always perfect!) And the Son reminds us that the Father is the Master of all timings (Mt 24:36).

Here is the paradox of our faith. On the one hand, many Catholics live out their faith lives as if they were a bookish series of chores — of arm-loads of books and Baltimore Catechisms and rote prayers that must be said. And then you go home and read Catholic Answers on the Web to get even more finely diced rules and subrules. And then you start buying books on Catholic Apologetics, so you can argue with Protestants .... or with other Catholics because they're not really Catholic (!). My brothers and sisters in Christ, you will not find our faith in these places. For faith does not happen in our brains. It happens in our hearts and in our souls. Consider our Epistle reading this morning:

While Peter was still saying this, the Holy Spirit fell on all who heard the word.
And the believers from among the circumcised who came with Peter were amazed,
because the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles.
For they heard them speaking in tongues and extolling God. Then Peter declared,
"Can any one forbid water for baptizing these people who have received the
Holy Spirit just as we have?"

Wait! But this is not supposed to happen! This breaks all the rules! Holiness falling on (pardon me) filthy Gentiles! Why, these people are unclean! They eat unclean things! They say unclean words! They live unclean lives! But it is happening! Gentiles shining with a luminous quality that made the hairs on their devout necks stand on end!

St. Paul takes up these very questions while the stodgy Peter and many centered in Jerusalem went back to the books and the rules and insisted on them, required them. (Of course, this is the earlier Peter, not the Peter who had the vision in Joppa, not the Peter we read about in the Book of Acts this morning). In effect, St. Paul wrote, to borrow a humble image of our own time, that the Traditions and the Law were like little boys and girls who needed training wheels on their bicycles. The main thing was to get them upright. But once they were upright, these same wheels prevented them from the point of bicycling, which is to fly ... as if you had "wings on your heels." Yes, the Law enabled people to emerge from chaos, to dust themselves off, and to stand upright. Standing upright is the important thing. This enables us to cross the line from the death of dog-pack existence into the life of the righteous and the just. The Law is a life-line. But what begins as a life-line, to follow St. Paul's logic, can ultimately became a tether tying us to an iron pole or, worse, leather straps lashing us to the earth, rather than helping us to fly to Heaven. The training wheels are always there, of course — they cannot be dispensed with — for even those who learn to fly are still in danger of crashing back to chaos and death. But the aim of godly life is barely to touch the earth, to leave behind earthly resistance, and to fly forward on the narrowest edge of two, thin tires. That is, to love God as He loves us and enter into the joy of His kind of love, as we read in the Gospel this morning!

I share the obvious when I say that most of our world — in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. — is very far from taking wing toward God. The "Western World" as we used to call it has fallen away from God with such rapidity, and even ferocity, that Christians in the U.S. only two years ago wondered which part of our faith would be outlawed next. Yet, our Lord left us with a daunting command. How could we ever ignore it? We are to preach the Gospel at all times and in all places! St. Francis would echo this injunction to his disciples adding, "And if you must, use words."

We have a world to win, billions of hearts whom God loves. But how will we win those hearts? With books and apologetics and Catholic Answers? Has anyone ever been converted to Christianity through apologetics? Apologetics takes place in the brain, not the heart. Ours is not a religion of the book, wrote Benedict XVI, but an encounter, an encounter with a Man, Jesus of Nazareth. And, behold, He is the Man (as Pontius Pilate said), Whose heart is so exquisitely tuned that just gazing into His eyes would reduce a strong man to tears ... of joy.

Our great challenge and privilege is to convert our children to Christian life. But we will not do it by arguing. We will do it through beauty, the beauty of Christian life: pure, patient, kind, generous, and above all loving. For Christian life is the beauty of God. And that is what the devout Jews saw with such brilliance and power when the Holy Spirit fell upon the Gentiles. No longer Temple police, no longer iron commands, no longer a dog pack of men seeking greatest power and killing anyone who stood in the way. But love. Pure, pure love.

Nothing that happened in that luminous moment, when the Spirit descended on the Gentiles, was debated by anyone later. And no heart that was present ever forgot that day nor questioned what it might mean. The encounter with God .... is God. And no category on earth will ever contain Him though any heart in any place at any moment may receive Him.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.