[Note: the audio recording above will vary in places from the prepared text below.]
The question, “How do we receive the Holy Spirit?” has been our Eastertide inquiry. Christ bestowed the Promise of the Father, the Holy Spirit the Comforter, upon the Disciples in the Upper Room on the Day of our Lord’s mighty Resurrection. And through the Apostles—the first Saints of the Church—through them, Christ seeks to bestow the Holy Spirit upon all the members of His Body, the Church. Christ works through His Saints.
Of course, we receive the Holy Spirit sacramentally and ritually in Baptism. Yet our question has been concerned with receiving the power of the Holy Spirit: of receiving Him effectually, experientially, within the baptismal life: of receiving the fire of He Who is the Giver of Life, He Who bears witness to Jesus Christ and makes Him known, even in the first place enables His disciples to say the holy Name of Jesus Christ. Where the Holy Spirit is, there is the Church. The criteria for a community to be truly Christian has always been whether the community has received the Holy Spirit. And where the Holy Spirit is, there God gives the increase; there God gives growth. And so the question of how we receive the Holy Spirit is wrapped up into the very existence of Christian parish, as well as any future the parish hopes to have.
We have seen in Eastertide that receiving the Holy Spirit happens in the opening of Scripture and the breaking of bread, as at Emmaus. And that happens as a parish more and more becomes sheep: that is, more and more takes up the traditional religion of the Church, through Liturgy and personal devotion, to become sheep that hears Christ’s voice and is led by Him, as at Pentecost (Acts 2.42). All of that arises from a prior yearning and longing for the spiritual milk of the Word: yearning because we instinctively know our spiritual life depends upon the Word. And even prior to that, we saw last Sunday that we must fear the Lord: we must have awe, wonder, adoration, and trembling before God, for such fear is the beginning of wisdom, the beginning of receiving the Wisdom of Christ through the Holy Spirit.
In light of our reflections thus far, the question, then becomes again a practical one: if holy fear is the beginning of receiving wisdom, to where do we look for such holy fear? Who shows what it means to have such fear? Guidance on this is given by our Lord in John 17. This chapter of S. John’s gospel account is known as “the priestly prayer of Jesus,” and our gospel passage today has a portion of it. Our Lord speaks of manifesting the Father’s Name to those He gave Jesus out of the world (meaning the early Saints). He says, “I am glorified in them.”
He speaks, a bit after our passage ends, of how the Saints have Christ’s joy fulfilled in themselves. He asks the Father to sanctify them in the truth, and that Christ has sent them into the world, consecrated in truth, in Christ’s truth, the very truth of Christ. In all this, Christ is referring to the first group of Saints (women and men); and what He is saying clearly, is that the Saints are full of truth, which means they are full of the Holy Spirit: in the Saints, the Holy Spirit dwells as fire, and they spread the Holy Spirit to the world. Jesus makes this clear at the end of chapter 17, when He says, “I made known to them Your Name, and I will make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”
And so our Lord tells us precisely where to look, where the fire of the Holy Spirit is burning: He is burning in the Saints. Receiving the holy fire happens through our relationship and devotion to the Saints: our communion with the Saints, which means our living relationship with the Saints. Because Christ is in the Saints, because the Saints are full of truth, they are full of the Holy Spirit, transformed by the Holy Spirit, and have been sent by God to share the Holy Spirit with disciples so as to make Christ known: so as to make known how Christ, being in the Saints, can also be in us. After all, this is what it means to spread the Gospel: the proclaim that the Kingdom of Heaven is near: this Kingdom being the Holy Spirit.
And the Saint to whom the Church has always looked as the permanent example of this is Blessed Mary, Ever-Virgin, the Theotokos (that is, the God-Bearer). And it is easily seen why. As Christ ascended into heaven and the 120 disciples were obedient to Christ’s command to wait for the promise of the Father, so as to receive the power of the Holy Spirit (for His presence had already been given, but not yet His power), they congregated for nine days in the Upper Room. And as they looked around, to whom would the gathered apostles look to for guidance, for wisdom, for knowledge of Jesus? What one person present would be acknowledged by all to have a strong understanding of Jesus? It was the person who had known Jesus the longest, and who knew Jesus the best: Mary, the Mother of Jesus, the Mother of God. They saw her, rather obviously, as the one more than anyone who had received the Holy Spirit, having been overshadowed by Him at the Annunciation. And they looked to her for what it means to be a follower of Christ, for whereas they had followed Jesus for at most three or so years, she had followed him for 33 years: plus nine months! Mary was the only person alive who knew where Jesus came from in this world, and where He came from out of this world. They looked to her as the Mother of the Church. They looked to her, saw holy fear in her eyes, in her smile, in her face, in her voice, and thereby, in her soul.
So, as the concrete answer to our Eastertide question: we receive the Holy Spirit through the Saints (by studying them with faith), most of all through that of Blessed Mary. She is the Mother of Jesus; the Church is Christ’s Body. Therefore, Blessed Mary is our Mother. To her, and to the Saints, we look to receive the Holy Spirit, because in them, Christ is glorified; and because in them, the Gospel of Christ is made known. After all, it was Saints who wrote the New Testament!
On the devotion card for the month of May has a prayer by Jeremy Taylor, a cleric in the Church of England born in 1613, and who was consecrated Bishop of Down and Connor in Ireland in 1661. The first prayer on the card comes from the most famous of his writings, the Rule and Exercises of Holy Living (which most traditional Anglican seminarians are quite familiar with). His prayer invites us to behold Mary, and specifically to behold God’s action in her. Yet the prayer also asks that the same happen in in us: that like her we receive the Holy Spirit, and like her be filled with Christ’s presence. The prayer reads:
O holy and ever-blessed Spirit,
Who didst overshadow the Holy Virgin-Mother of our Lord
and caused her to conceive by a miraculous and mysterious manner;
be pleased to overshadow our souls, and enlighten our spirit,
that we may conceive the holy Jesus in our hearts,
and may bear Him in our mind,
and may grow up to the fullness of the stature of Christ,
to be perfect in Christ Jesus. Amen.
It is a truly beautiful prayer, inexhaustible in its riches. The prayer is beautiful in part for what it gentle teaches us: Mary conceived Jesus in her heart before she conceived Him in her womb. And it is in that way that we can imitate her: for we can and must conceive Christ in our hearts, which happens through receiving the Holy Spirit upon our heart and mind. Through her example, we by grace learn to imitate her. It is a beautiful prayer, to which by way of conclusion, I would simply add this: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners: now and at the hour of our death. Amen.