I started the process of preparing for Pentecost last week when I recorded this video and included it in my newsletter. If you haven’t done so already, please consider watching it… it’s intimately connected with this reflection—a reflection on the Holy Fire of God’s Pentecostal Love.
On Memorial Day I noticed a swell of anxiety rising in me. I’m humbled by the debilitating power of anxiety. It can be a heavy and unpredictable cross to bear. My heart goes out to those who face the specters of anxiety daily. By no virtue of my own, I’ve been fortunate to be free of anxiety most of my life.
After a joyous and super productive weekend, I found myself face to face with this insidious, stealth adversary of anxiety. At first it disguised itself as spikes of resentment fancifully dressed as righteous annoyance. I felt there were important logistical details being dropped by others. I believed after hustling, striving to be generous, and acting as a driver of solutions to benefit myself and others that I was being abandoned when I needed people the most to follow through on their commitments.
Let me make this real. My mom died in September. I’m living in a large and beautiful home I rented to make mom’s last years comfortable. Following sage advice related to the subterfuge of grief, over the last nine months I haven’t made many changes in my life. However, pragmatics dictate I sublet rooms in the house. I had been resisting for awhile but after Easter I was pushed by the Holy Spirit to be an agency of His cascading blessings. I went into high gear. Things quickly fell into place. On Memorial Day I was teetering on the overwhelming precipice of a slew of changes.
How’s this for irony? As a consultant one of the things I do is help organizations and people navigate the operational, performance, social, and emotional complexities of change. So, making mental space and physical room for people in my house, being ready and able to be supple with my habits and idiosyncrasies to better accommodate others, moving into the master bedroom where my mom died, along with a barrage of other changes were giving me the heebie-jeebies.
Cool, calm, collected and self-confident, on Memorial Day I was blissfully oblivious to the real source of my “resentment.” I was ready to get on my high horse. My fear-based “resentment” was creeping into my thoughts, attitudes, intentions, emotions, some of my words, and ready to veer into the reckless, fast lane of my behaviors.
Through a grace—a wondrous, surprise gift from our ever-present Loving Poetic God—I was brought to my knees. While organizing my things I stumbled upon a handwritten letter from my mom.
Let me put this into context. My mom was not a woman of many words. Mom was tireless in her loving actions, but she was always quiet and measured with her words. I have a handful of cards with a few lines in them but no other handwritten letters that I’m aware of.
There were three things in this letter I really needed to hear. Here’s are the first two:
Mom was rock solid. She neither dwelled in the negative—preferring to find ways to turn lemons into lemonades—nor did she linger in the positive. She taught me to move onto the next thing. However, she wasn’t effusive. So, while my mom was always warm and supportive she wasn’t emotive. Her admission of wanting to be “more expressive” echoing from the past when the present changes in my life were accosting me with anxiety and fear, made me feel loved, seen, and consoled when I needed it.
The second message struck me as hard as the first. It was God granting my mother a passageway right into my quivering heart. I needed an affirming push forward. Her words are a tacit, tender acknowledgment of my hardships, sorrows, and obstacles assuaged by her encouraging heavenly confidence in my desire to grow and stretch in new directions.
The third message is a doozy for me.
Giving love and respect grants me great peace and joy. Unfortunately, receiving true, deep, selfless love, and respect in many of my most important relationships has been elusive at times. I’m sure many of you can relate. I continually face the demons of entitling expectations, and my crippling fears of abandonment that if given their druthers warp my desire for genuine love and respect into something more selfish and egoic. That’s where our Good and Great God comes in. Jesus, our King of Love, is pure boundless, limitless Unconditional Love. It’s Him we seek. There is no substitute or anything that can even remotely come close to the power of His Love. And In Him, and with Him, we become agents of His Love to others, and ourselves… a never Ending LOVE story.
That’s the theme of this Pentecost reflection. To put a bow on my story, as I read the letter I dropped to my knees and sobbed tears of gratitude. Is God really that present in my life? He knew what I needed to combat my fears and insecurities. Consider how he worked across time and space knowing this exact moment in my life when I would need this letter. I’m sure when I first read the letter, I only vaguely appreciated its priceless value. Try to imagine Jesus smiling with His eyes burning with Unconditional Love for me and for every person. Jesus knew how he was going to use this letter to encourage me, nourish me, strengthen me, and draw me closer to His Sacred Heart. Jesus, we love you and adore you!
Pentecost is our close encounter of the Infinite Kind… an endless encounter with God’s co-creative Love. This is what will set the world on fire. As branches of His fruiting vine, we are called to entwine ourselves around every person, situation, and encounter in our life to be Jesus Christ’s embodied Love in the world.
Gracious God have mercy on us and be pleased to make us instruments of your Peace and Love. Please Jesus, set your Church on fire with Holy Love. To you, the Father, and the Holy Spirit we give all glory and honor now and forever.
Take a few minutes to soak in Jesus’ words on Love from the gospel of John:
“Whoever loves me will keep my word,
and my Father will love him,
and we will come to him and make our dwelling with him.
Whoever does not love me does not keep my words;
yet the word you hear is not mine
but that of the Father who sent me.
“I have told you this while I am with you.
The Advocate, the Holy Spirit
whom the Father will send in my name–
he will teach you everything
and remind you of all that I told you.
Peace* I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.”
John 14: 23-27
“As the Father loves me, so I also love you.
Remain in my love.
If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love,
just as I have kept my Father’s commandments
and remain in his love.
I have told you this so that
my joy might be in you and
your joy might be complete.”
It was not you who chose me, but I who chose you
and appointed you to go and bear fruit that will remain,
so that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.
This I command you: love one another.”
John 15: 9-12
