On Sunday we celebrate Pentecost, and in doing so, we each celebrate the gift of the Holy Spirit in our own lives and our commission as disciples to go out and continue the work of Christ in the world. Jesus calls us into a special relationship with God through our baptism giving us the mission of continuing his work of being the presence of God’s love to all people. Part of that mission is to spread the gospel message of God’s love among all people and to call others to join us as disciples of Christ. The Catholic tradition tells us that human beings have a natural ability to know and love God, that is to say, that human reason can lead a person to God, even if he/she has never been exposed to Christian revelation. Being created with the ability to know and love God means that all people are called to know and love God, regardless of whether or not they are Christian. People can know and experience the existence of God just by looking at the world around them and reflecting on their own experiences of love, goodness, beauty and truth. A brief study of history and other cultures witnesses to that truth when we see the phenomenon of so many people across different places and times having a belief in some type of God. Hence when missionaries go into a non-Christian territory, they are taught to look for the ways that God is already working among the people that live there before they try to teach people about God.

Too often people do not experience the Church as a sign of God’s presence in the world, but rather see the humanness and failings of the people that make up the Church. One of the greatest scandals of the Christian Church is the divisions between the different denominations. Thankfully, we have made great strides toward unity in the Christian Church in recent decades. I have always thought one of the greatest gifts of the Catholic Church is its principle of maintaining unity in diversity and diversity in unity; that we have many gifts, but the same spirit. In other words, there is a great blessing in the fact that the Church is able to hold together in the one Body of Christ so many people who come from different perspectives and who have different experiences of God and of life. We can celebrate our differences, while holding onto the firm foundation of our faith in one Lord, one baptism and one Church.

Our Church is made up of people who live out their baptismal calls in many different ways. Those who live out their baptismal vocation through religious life take vows of poverty, chastity and obedience (the evangelical counsels), but as disciples we are all called to be witnesses to the world through lives of poverty, chastity and obedience. We embrace poverty by not clinging to our possessions and by realizing that God has called us to be good stewards of our resources, making sure the goods of our world are fairly distributed. The first Christians actually held all of their good in common, dividing them “among all according to each one’s need (Acts 3:45).” Chastity, while often understood as celibacy, actually means to remain true to one’s state in life. Thus for single people, priests or religious, it means to be celibate; and for those who are married, it means to remain faithful to one’s spouse. Finally, all disciples are always called to be obedient to the will of God in their lives. As we celebrate this Pentecost, I pray that we will all feel renewed in the Spirit to recommit ourselves to living out our baptismal vocations, to being Church, to being the Body of Christ in the world.