Between the Ascension and Pentecost.... Come Holy Spirit!

17th May - Psalm 68:2-7

This week prepares us to live and celebrate the coming of the Holy Spirit, and today’s psalm speaks about who is this Counsellor who Jesus promised to send to be with us forever (Jn 14:16 ). Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation” (v.5). “Father of the fatherless…” These words remind us the sequence of Pentecost, where the Spirit is invoked as the Father of the poor.

In today’s prayer, we can ask ourselves “when do I feel fatherless?” Perhaps when I don’t find meaning to what I am living, or when I feel alone taking decisions and maybe without a sense of building a story in my life. We can know that our life has been desired and loved by God, but existentially, we can forget and live as if that wasn’t real. We need to ask: Come, Holy Spirit and make us experience your love and your protection again.

18th May - Psalm 68:10-21

In prayer, it’s important that we let God express his desire to come and make his home within us. The psalm speaks about “the mount which God desired for his abode,…where the LORD will dwell for ever” and this mount can be each one of us, who seek to love him and obey his teaching (Jn 14:23 ). But we need to desire it as well. So, from our side, there is a path of recognising the need, the longing for his presence in us. In this way, prayer becomes a real encounter of two desires, and we bless the Lord because He is our salvation (v.20). Nothing or nobody can give us the joy, the company, the comfort He gives us.

19th May – Psalm 68:29-36

“Awesome is God in his holy place, the God of Israel, who gives power and strength to his people.”

To meditate on the coming of the Holy Spirit takes us to marvel with His power in our lives, the power of His love and strength. The power that transforms fear in courage, centeredness in oneself in generosity and attention to others, coldness of heart in sensibility to suffering… Today I invite you to ask the same as the psalmist “summon again, O God, your power, the divine power you once showed for us.” Sometimes tiredness, weaknesses (ours or others’), complexity of situations... can discourage us and make us give up fighting, but Jesus sends us Your Spirit to give us the power and strength we need to continue to witness his presence, his word with trust and serenity.

20th May – Psalm 15:1-11

To receive the Spirit and to live guided by Him is to accept the counsel of God, to accept that He put a law in my heart to instruct me and to follow it. We need to be attentive to see from whom we receive counsel. The mentality we breathe every day, not always is God’s thinking and the ways presented to reach peace and happiness need to be illuminated by His word. Unless we recognise that only He is good, our real good, we will not find true joy. We will find many pleasant moments but not the fulfilment in life we seek. As the psalm says “you are my Lord, you are my only good.”

Let us trust that the Holy Spirit will show us “the path to life, abounding joy in his presence, the delights at his right hand forever”.

21st May – Psalm 103 : 1-2, 11-12, 19-20

This psalm is an invitation to thanksgiving, to bless the Lord, to recognize who He is, his great love for us. To give thanks is a deep attitude we need to develop our spiritual life. Sometimes we feel like giving thanks because we see God’s gifts to us clearly but many other times we loose that vision and it is not so spontaneous to recognize his goodness. But still in every moment God is good and we need to learn to remember that his goodness doesn’t depend on us, on our short or longer vision. So we can always bless him even when we don’t feel or are not sensitive to his steadfast love. The Holy Spirit is the love of God poured out into our hearts, as S. Paul says (Rom 5:5 ), so let’s make the most of this time of prayer to open your heart to his free gift. Let’s recognize that it doesn’t depend on our success or failures. As the psalmist says, “as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.”

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