A Concord Pastor Comments: Pause for Prayer: Pentecost Novena

We're offering some special prayers, a novena, in preparation for Pentecost Sunday which falls this year on May 19, 2013. Here's some more info and background on Pentecost and these prayers.

• Check out the widget at the top of the sidebar and choose a song to listen to, to help you slow down and lead you to a prayerful quiet place in your mind and heart...

• A word to reflect on...
   This is the ninth and last day of our Pentecost Novena.
   Tomorrow is the solemn and joyful feast
      towards which we've been praying.
   Spend some time today reading and pondering
      tomorrow's scriptures for Mass.

• Christ promised that he would send me an Advocate, his Spirit,

to be with me, to be my confidence and strength,

and to empower me to live my life as his follower...

• While it's the love of Christ that impels me,

it's the Holy Spirit who empowers me to live as a disciples of Jesus

and on some days that's more difficult to do than on others...

• Spend some time with this reflection* on the eve of Pentecost...

I have days when I’m confident Christ’s love is pulsing in my heart and flowing through all my veins. And other days, I’m a tumbleweed of a soul, a dry tangle of brush, blown here and there where any stray breeze might take me.

Outside my anxieties, beyond the throes of romance, absent the imperatives of danger: what, who impels me?

Whose wisdom drives my choices and decisions? Whose strength pushes my will past satisfied contentment? Whose force empowers me to do what’s right and just?

Who impels my life? my ways? my reason for being?

With Christ at the wheel my course is clearly charted, my sails billow with the Spirit’s breath and I cross the roughest seas like a well bred mariner ought to do. But apart from Christ to captain my journey and the Spirit to fill the sheets, my sails flag and I stall in the doldrums, listless and lost. My resolve wanes and my firm “Yes” and my determined “No” become an ambiguous “maybe,” a weak “I’m not sure,” an unpromising, “maybe tomorrow.”

Only Christ’s Spirit has power to fill my sails and bring me back to life. Only Christ’s love will forge my choices in wisdom, keep me from my selfish ways, and strengthen me to do what’s just. Only when the love of Christ impels me will my old order pass away and all things be made new in my heart.

* This reflection will appear in the June issue
of Give Us This Day

Let us pray...
   Come, Holy Spirit,
      and be the wind in my sails,
         the light in my mind
            and the strength of my soul...

   Come, Holy Spirit,
      and bind me to Christ,
         to his truth and his grace
and his gospel of peace...

   Come, Holy Spirit,
and on good days and bad,
   bring the gifts that you offer
      and the joy my heart seeks...

Today's Take-Away
   On the eve of Pentecost,
where in my life do I need the gift of the Spirit's fire?