Solemnity of Pentecost: The Spirit in Mary

We call this celebration Pentecost, meaning ‘the fiftieth day’, and our tendency is to associate it only with that singular cosmic event that occurred fifty days after Jesus’ Resurrection: wind, fire, a cacophony of voices. But what we celebrate is bigger than just that event, amazing at is surely was. What this celebration is ultimately about is God’s outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon His people, igniting his sons and daughters to do their part of building the Kingdom of Heaven.

It so happens that this year, this solemnity falls on May 31st, which the Church’s calendar reserves for the Feast of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a date that concludes this month, in which we honor Mary’s role in God’s plan. I remind us that roughly 34 years before the outpouring of the Spirit at the Pentecost, that same Spirit was poured over, or maybe better said, moved through young Mary of Nazareth. The angel told her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God…you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus.….The holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you….” (Luke 1:30-35). It was in that moment that she became, what we sometimes call her, Spouse of the Holy Spirit.

There’s a beautiful poem written by the English Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins (D. 1889), from which I offer the following verses:

Wild air, world-mothering air, nestling me everywhere…
…This air, which, by life’s law, my lung must draw and draw Now but to breathe its praise, minds me in many ways
Of her, who not only gave God’s infinity, dwindled to infancy Welcome in womb and breast, birth, milk, and all the rest
But mothers each new grace that does now reach our race— Mary Immaculate, merely a woman, yet whose presence, power
is great as no goddess’s was deemèd, dreamed….
….God’s glory which would go through her and from her flow
off, and no way but so. (1)

And even for the encounter we refer to as the Visitation, in which Mary, newly pregnant, newly espoused to the Holy Spirit, made haste to attend to the needs of her relative, Elizabeth, who herself was six months pregnant. And it’s as though that when at last these women greeted one another at the doorway, that same Spirit was alive and at work in their lively words, their mutual love, and in the dynamic exchange between the children within their respective wombs. Yes, in so many ways, Mary herself serves is the very picture of what it means for us to be alive in the Spirit.

The word spirit comes from the word spirare, meaning ‘to breathe’, calling to mind the breath God blew into the nostrils of Adam; calling to mind the breath that Jesus breathed it upon his disciples, as described in today’s Gospel.

We received that promise in our rebirth at baptism: that life-giving Spirit was breathed into each of us. Understood this way, we can therefore understand the Spirit as not so much something that comes to us from ‘out there’, but instead, something that wells-up from within. Jesus had said, the Father will give you the Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth….to remain with you, to be in you….. (John 14:15-18). That spirit within us has the capacity—and for sure, the purpose—to move us, to draw us out of ourselves.

I want to suggest that in whatever way you are preoccupied primarily or only with how things affect you, seeing no further than the end of your nose, that it’s all about you, your needs, your rights, your demands—well, your lungs may be working through all that, but it may well be only your human breath at work, not the Spirit. Like Mary, like the Church at Pentecost, the Spirit calls us to something beyond ourselves. To be part of God’s plan, not just our own. Are you a little too self-focused these days? God wills for us to have real-life, to be driven by His breath. Let us pray that the living promise of the Spirit will draw us out of ourselves.

Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful

and kindle in them the fire of your love.

Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created.

And You shall renew the face of the earth.

(1) Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air We Breathe