Are you familiar with this traditional prayer? “Come Holy Spirit, fill my heart, and kindle in me the fire of your love.” It calls on the Holy Spirit to recreate, deep within us, the love that shaped the person of Jesus. While we might think of it as a prayer perfectly suited for the end of the Easter Season (Pentecost), it is a prayer for every day of the year. It is an honest plea for the deeper virtue that our present Lenten journey is offering us, which is what God really wants for us.
In the Gospels, Jesus calls His disciples to “a virtue” deeper than that of the scribes and Pharisees. A major commandment, for example, was “You shall not kill.” The call of Jesus goes deeper than that; it goes below the actual act of killing to the underlying attitudes and emotions which lead people to kill or injure each other. Lent is inviting us to look below the surface of what we do, to cure the underlying passions. We need a renewal of the heart and mind, a true “repentance” or “conversion.”
Let’s not forget, however, that the renewal Jesus calls for is not something we can bring about on our own. We need the Holy Spirit to work that kind of deep transformation within ourselves. “Come Holy Spirit….”
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People use both further and farther to mean “more distant.” However, American English speakers favor farther for physical distances and further for figurative distances. Thus, the farther we go into the Lenten season, may the Holy Spirit draw us further into the mystery of God’s love.
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March 3 is the Feastday of St. Katharine Drexel: St. Katharine was a spiritual bridge-builder and founder of the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament. When she asked Pope Leo XIII to send more missionaries to Wyoming, he asked her, “Why don’t you become a missionary?” As a young, wealthy, educated girl from Philadelphia, this was hardly the expected lifestyle for young Katharine. But raised in a devout family with a deep sympathy for the poor, Katharine gave up everything to become a missionary to the Indian and African American communities. She founded schools in thirteen states, ninety mission centers, and twenty-three rural schools. She died at the age of ninety-six and was canonized in the year 2000.
Let us pray. “Ever loving God, you called Saint Katharine Drexel to teach the message of the Gospel and to bring the life of the Eucharist, especially to the Black and Native American peoples. By her prayers and example, enable us to work for justice among those living in poverty and the oppressed. Draw us all into the Eucharistic community of your Church, that we may be one in you now and always. Grant this through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
