REFLECTIONS

Looking For the Holy Spirit

in Unholy Places

Fr. Johnny C. Go, S.J., School Director

Mary the Queen Parish

04 June 2006

      
Posted Tuesday, 13-Jun-2006 10:08 AM

     Today is the Feast of the Pentecost when we recall that event recounted in our reading when the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles and emboldened this frightened group of mostly fishermen to stand before the crowd to preach the Good News.  In my opinion, the Holy Spirit is probably the most misunderstood and underestimated Person of the Blessed Trinity.  This evening I’d like us to ask ourselves this question:  “The Lord promised to send us His Holy Spirit to help us as He did His apostles.  So where can we find the Holy Spirit?” 

     Last April I made a pilgrimage to Lourdes, where our Lady had appeared to a peasant girl, Bernadette.  Lourdes is a popular Catholic pilgrimage because of its miraculous waters that have allegedly healed thousands of sick people.  Anyway, I took a train to Lourdes by myself, and despite my non-existent French, I managed to find my way to the holy site.  The place was teeming with people—old and young alike, the healthy and the sick.  And these weren’t just tourists, but actual pilgrims who were there for at least one of two reasons:  to pray or to be healed. 

     I found myself before the grotto, a kind of cave believed to be the actual site of our Lady’s apparition to Bernadette.  I fell in line with people who were waiting to go near the cave even if I didn’t exactly know what they were up to or what was in store.  As I got near the grotto, I realized that the pilgrims simply wanted to get as close to the grotto as possible, touching the stones of the grotto as they prayed.  There was something about that place, the stones of the grotto and the fervent prayers of the people that made me feel the palpable presence of something holy.  In a way I still cannot explain, as I prayed on my knees there before the grotto, amidst that crowd of pilgrims, I was overcome by a powerful sense of the presence of our Blessed Mother and of the Holy Spirit.

     Of course it’s not at all surprising to experience the Holy Spirit in a place like Lourdes.  After all, shouldn’t we expect to find the Holy Spirit in such a holy place?  But what about places that are not quite as holy?

     During lunch today I was chatting with a Xavier alumnus named John who is what you would call a “hydrogeophysicist”—essentially, a scientist who specializes in the study of water and uses his knowledge to help improve the lives of people.  He was telling me about his involvement in the rescue operation in the recent Leyte tragedy, when an entire barangay was buried by a mudslide.  Among the victims were about two hundred school children and their teachers who had been trapped under the earth.  John was telling me that what made the whole thing more excruciating for the rescuers was that, you may recall, some of the children and teachers were sending text messages to their relatives, begging for help.  The messages continued for a number of days until they finally stopped coming. 

     The international rescue team had failed.  Later the rescuers realized why. All along, while they were digging at the original site of the school building, they had actually been looking in the wrong place.  It turned out that the school building, along with the other buildings next to it, had been swept to a location almost half a kilometer away.  What was even more frustrating is that since the text messages of the children were getting through, the rescuers believed that they could not have been buried more than four feet underground.  In other words, they could easily have been rescued if only the team knew where to dig.

     In this Leyte tragedy, more than a thousand lives were lost.  The rescuers who toiled from Day 2 to 8 found not a single live person.  All in all, only twenty people survived—plus one chicken and one cat.

     We can’t help but ask:  Where was the Holy Spirit in this tragic event?  If the Holy Spirit had been present, shouldn’t the rescuers have been given the much-needed inspiration or some sort of clue as to where or how to save the innocent mudslide victims?

     When John came back to Manila, he attended Mass, and the Responsorial Psalm went something like this:  “Lord, I called for Your help, and You answered my prayer.”  But did the Lord answer his prayer?   Given the failure of the rescue team to save the children, it certainly did not seem that way.

     I asked John what he thought about that.  I asked him if he felt God’s presence.  His answer surprised me.  He said:  “There was an extraordinary outpouring of generosity.  More than a thousand people were searching for the kids.  The children and people who were buried became our kids, our brothers and sisters.  We became one family, united with one goal.”

     He said that each day the rescuers thought about the kids and the people who were buried.  The evening discussions with the rescue teams were always filled with hope until finally they had to make the decision to stop all rescue efforts, if only to provide a closure for the family of the victims. 

     That’s not all.  After the rescue operation, John was able to raise P120K from his batchmates to start the construction of telemetric rain gauges that will help gather and monitor rainfall data that can serve as early warning device to prevent such tragedies from occurring again.

     Appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the Holy Spirit was very much present in the Leyte tragedy—although certainly not in the way people desired or expected.  And the Holy Spirit was very much active during and after the tragedy through concerned citizens and NGO’s that worked so hard and gave so much.  It seems then that the Holy Spirit is present and active even in our unholiest experiences.  Or maybe, it would be better to say that the Holy Spirit is present and active especially in our unholiest experiences, because that is, after all, when we need the Holy Spirit the most.

     I think all this tells us something very important about the Holy Spirit:  We can never stereotype the Holy Spirit.  We can never put the Holy Spirit in a box.  The Holy Spirit refuses to be contained and refuses to be limited to the so-called "holy places."  The Holy Spirit insists on crossing boundaries.  The mystics like to say that God is like the wind that blows where it pleases. We all know how the wind can surprise us, blowing one direction one minute, and going off to a completely different direction the very next.  The Holy Spirit is like that.  And why not?  God, after all, is a God of surprises. 

     Is it possible that the Holy Spirit is present in our lives much more than we think?  Is it possible that the Holy Spirit is active in ourselves much more than we suspect?  Perhaps the reason why we don’t sense the presence of the Holy Spirit as much as we should is that just like the rescuers in Leyte, we have been looking in the wrong places. 

     Think about it:  Are there places in your life that you don't expect to find the Holy Spirit?  Are there places in your life that you don't want to find the Holy Spirit?

     Today, on the Feast of the Pentecost, let us open our eyes and our hearts—and seek the Holy Spirit not just where and how we expect the Holy Spirit to be, but everywhere—in the holy places of our lives, but also even and especially in the unholy places.

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