Three times now it has happened in the past two months in my experience: when people unite in grief and wait, the Holy Spirit comes.
The setting the first time was a class of staff who are refugees serving newer refugees. It was the third day of a training. I intended to teach “deep empathy”—empathy which goes beyond what has been said to read a person’s heart. I opened with the topic of grief through this brief, wordless video. Spontaneously, people began to talk about their grief as they left their country and people they loved behind.
And spontaneously, we were united in love as we were united in grief. Though I have never had such an experience of loss, my heart opened. I could only share their story in my imagination, but I could and did share their grief in my heart. As is consistently true when deep empathy happens, my heart expanded. I had more Understanding, and with that understanding came more capacity to love as God loves—seeking and seeing the good of the other.
It didn’t just happen in me. It happened to the others in the room. Some of us talked about it this past week. The reports were united: yes, something happened to increase the capacity to love and share in others’ pain in all of our hearts.
It happened twice more this past week in different settings. People shared grief, they waited, and the Holy Spirit came. Once the Holy Spirit came, faces and lines of conflict softened. A peace and unity filled the room.
Those experiences have given me a bit of a different lens with which to see today’s readings and feast.
Divergent and Emerging Perspectives
The disciples-soon-to-become-apostles grief as they saw Jesus ascend into heaven must have been very different from their grief on Good Friday night. Their grief on Good Friday was likely tied to emotions of disappointment, shame, and fear, as well as sadness. They had spent three years with Jesus. They had left everything to follow him. They had said, “You are the chosen One of God.” They had seen his miracles, heard his preaching again and again, and lived with him through so many life-changing adventures.
You might remember from the Gospel of John that Jesus got up from the table in the middle of the Last Supper before he instituted the Eucharist and washed feet—BECAUSE the disciples were jockeying for positions of power as Jesus “came into his Kingdom.” When Jesus came into his Kingdom on Good Friday by being crucified on a cross, their confusion must have taken over.
According to Matthew today, all those appearances in the forty days after Easter did not take away their confusion. Matthew begins, “The eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had ordered them. When they saw him, they worshiped, but they doubted.” [Note: Matthew has the Ascension take place in Galilee; other evangelists name the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem as the place of the Ascension.]
The Need for a Softer Heart
It is human nature: when we have a fixed idea in our minds; our minds are not open to some other idea—even if there is clear evidence the other idea is closer to the truth. The confused disciples were very human. Very limited like the rest of us—until the Holy Spirit came to fill them with the Divine.
In the first reading today, Luke also names the disciples’ confusion. He has them ask Jesus, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom of Israel?” Most likely, they were disappointed with Jesus’ answer and departing words, “It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
They did not know what the Holy Spirit was. What did Jesus mean by power?
Luke had not been at the Crucifixion or Ascension. By the time he became Christian, the now apostles and their followers knew much more about the Holy Spirit. His description of the Ascension is the prologue to his whole book of the Acts of the Apostles, which could just as easily have been called “The Acts of the Holy Spirit in the Apostles.”
But Matthew was there at the Ascension. He remembers what is now known as “The Great Commission” in today’s Gospel: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.”
This was followed by some very last words of reassurance, “And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age.”
In the Upper Room Today
No matter where the Ascension happened or what exactly Jesus said, at the Ascension Jesus left earth and went to be with the Father—you could say at the heavenly headquarters of the Kingdom of which we are a part two-thousand years later.
As I imaginatively enter the scene of the disciples as they obeyed Jesus to wait in prayer for whatever the Holy Spirit was to be, my heart enters the Upper Room, too. I am there with Peter, Andrew, James, John, the other disciples, and the Blessed Mother. On one hand there was real grief: they had seen Jesus go up into heaven. While he said he would be with them always, there had to have been a sense that whatever that meant, it didn’t mean a return to traveling together through Galilee or listening to Jesus debate in Jerusalem. There must have been a sense that life as they had known it for three years was gone.
That experience in the grief video (click here to access it) must have been theirs. But this grief was very different from the grief of Good Friday. Their shared experiences since the resurrection, their shared experience of the Ascension, their prayer, AND their obedience to Jesus to pray and wait—all that changed their hearts to erase many of the conflicts of the previous years. It expanded their hearts to be big enough and soft enough to receive the Holy Spirit.
Ephesians 1:17-23
Paul speaks of the coming Holy Spirit and the Great Commission about 25 years after Ascension and Pentecost. He applies it to us today, “May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call, what are the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power for us who believe….”
Applications
How do you see yourself when you put yourself in the Upper Room now seven days before Pentecost? Is there serious loss in your life that you grieve? Has God seemed to disappear in your prayer or life?
Share your grief—with God, with others. Be open to share the griefs of others. Pray. Wait. How will the Holy Spirit come for you? I don’t know if it will happen for you, but it is happening for me: when I enter into the hearts and griefs of others, God comes, softens and heals hearts, and fosters unity.
Prayer:
Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, and enkindle in us the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and we shall be created, and you shall renew the face of the earth. Amen.
The nine days of prayer of the disciples between Ascension and Pentecost is the basis for the Catholic prayer practice of saying novenas. Novena means nine. There is no single prayer to say as you wait for a personal outpouring of the Holy Spirit. The one above is a simple one often used. Many others can be found in prayer books and on the internet.
Let us wait and pray.
