THE SPIRIT IS FOR EVERYONE
Our life is made up of multiple experiences. Joys and troubles, successes and failures, lights and shadows get woven together in our daily life, filling us with life or weighing down our heart.
But frequently we are incapable of perceiving all that’s in our very selves. What we grasp in our conscience is just a small island in the very wide and deep sea of our life. Sometime it gets away from us, even what’s most essential and decisive.
In his precious book Spiritual Experience, K. Rahner reminds us vigorously of that radically different «experience» that happens within us, though often occurring unperceived: the living presence of God’s Spirit who works from within our being.
An experience that almost always remains as if covered up by many others that occupy our time and attention. A presence that remains as if repressed and hidden underneath other impressions and worries that take hold of our heart.
Almost always we seem to think that what’s great and gratuitous must always be something fairly infrequent, but when dealing with God, it’s not like that. There’s been a tendency in certain sectors of Christianity to consider this living presence of the Spirit as something more likely reserved to chosen and select people. An experience proper to privileged believers.
Rahner reminds us that God’s Spirit is always alive in the heart of human beings, since the Spirit is simply God’s own communication in the most intimate part of our existence. This Spirit of God is communicated and given even where nothing apparently is happening. Where life is received and the weighty obligation of each day is being fulfilled simply.
God’s Spirit keeps working silently in the heart of regular and simple people, in contrast to the pride and pretensions of those who feels themselves in possession of the Spirit.
The Feast of Pentecost is an invitation to seek that presence of God’s Spirit in all of us, not to present it as a trophy that we possess in front of others who haven’t been chosen, but to welcome that God who is the font of all life, no matter how small or poor it could seem to us.
God’s Spirit is for everyone, because the immense Love of God can’t forget any tear, any groan, any yearning that springs from the heart of God’s sons and daughters.
José Antonio Pagola
Translator: Fr. Jay VonHandorf
