Friends
Peace be with you.
This Sunday, we will begin our Fall parish mission: Holy Spirit, Healing Fire. It proposes to be a very charismatic experience for all who attend and I hope you will. For those of you who attended the mission two years ago with Fr. Greg Bramlage, this will probably be a very similar experience. For those who didn’t and are a little leery of doing something like this, let me admit that it tests my comfort zone as well. When I was in high school, my girlfriend convinced me to go to a concert with her Protestant youth group and, in the middle of the concert, they started raising hands in prayer, speaking in tongues, and praying over people. I was a little on edge just being there because I’ve always been a very devout Catholic but this amplified it. I assumed it was a Protestant thing. However, the truth is that it is a prayer thing, not a denominational thing. And, even though there is one spirituality just as there is one Holy Spirit, the way that spirituality expresses itself is different for each person in their particular point in life. For some people, raising their hands in prayer while singing a praise song is exactly what moves their hearts to prayer. For others, they are not in the frame of mind for that to happen or their personality doesn’t allow for it to be a profitable experience. The only challenge I would have for everyone is that all spirituality fails if we don’t actually walk in expecting to have an encounter with the Holy Spirit. I can sit in front of the Blessed Sacrament all day long but, if I don’t open myself up to Christ’s presence there and ask the Holy Spirit to move my heart to prayer, I might as well be sitting and looking at my phone. I can go to Mass, but if I don’t listen to the readings and prayers and have faith in what they say, I may as well be doom scrolling youtube shorts. So I’m asking you to just be open. Ask the Holy Spirit to help your unbelief if that is something you struggle with. You may walk out with a whole new source of prayer or it may just be a good few days of growing deeper with the Lord. Worst case scenario, you walk away with a deeper appreciation of the prayer you currently have.