Veni, Sancte Spiritus

There’s an old saying about teaching I learned years ago that goes something to the effect of: “New teachers teach what they know, veteran teachers teach what they like, great teachers teach what their students need.” 

If that saying is true—and I think it is—our Principal Anthony Fior ’02 (literally, our “principal teacher”) is a great teacher. Since taking command of the academic faculty of the school, Anthony and President Fr. Ray Guiao, S.J. ’82, have established a theme for each academic year, themes which highlight key spiritual ideas that may be overlooked. This year’s theme revolves around the work of the Holy Spirit in the life and lives of Saint Ignatius High School.

“Veni, Sancte Spiritus,” “Come, Holy Spirit.”

Such is the invocation the Saint Ignatius community will make when students, staff, and faculty gather in the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist in downtown Cleveland this Friday to celebrate the annual Mass of the Holy Spirit. The Mass—a tradition at Saint Ignatius since its founding—has been celebrated throughout the world at the beginning of each academic year in Jesuit schools since those institutions first came into being in 1548 in Messina, Sicily.

It is right that we call upon the Holy Spirit. He is the one Who, in baptism, bestows upon all of us His gifts: wisdom, understanding, right judgment, courage, knowledge, reverence, and wonder and awe. They are the gifts that enable us to come closer to the Lord, to see His presence and action in the events, experiences, and relationships of our lives.

So it is wholly appropriate that at a school community which calls on its students to “find God in all things,” that we call upon the One Who gives us the eyes—and heart—to do so.

Yet we Catholics tend to overlook the Holy Spirit in our spiritual lives. Sure, there was a fairly vibrant Catholic Charismatic movement in the ‘70s and early ‘80s which embraced Him in a pretty profound way, and our Pentecostal brothers and sisters in the Protestant community have long placed the third Person of the Trinity at the fore, but for most of us, He is the Person Who makes the Trinity a Trinity; we think about Him at the time of Confirmation and we remember that He breathed life into the Church at Pentecost…but that’s where our attention tends to end.  

I suspect one of the reasons we tend to overlook the Holy Spirit is that deep down we know that a relationship with Him means moving out of our comfort zones.

Because opening and abandoning ourselves to the indwelling of the Spirit will quite literally change our lives. Ask the shepherd boy, David, who became king of Israel when the “Spirit of the Lord…rushed upon him.” (1 Sam. 16:13). Ask 13-year-old Mary of Nazareth to whom the Holy Spirit gave the “Son of the Most High” (Lk. 1: 35). Ask the faithful Apostles in the Upper Room on Pentecost—terrified of being alone in the wake of Jesus’s death, resurrection, and ascension—who, filled with the Spirit, boldly proclaimed the message of Christ in the face of persecution and death (Acts 2:1-12).

Those people were taken to unexpected places in their lives by the Spirit’s promptings. We push devotion to Him on the back burner because deep down, we know He will lead us to unexpected places, too. Places where we and our talents, our experiences, and our compassion will be called upon to help transform lives for the better: places our world desperately needs us to go. But those places can be scary. I suspect, in part, this is why when God (or one of His messengers) called our Biblical ancestors to some sort of action, they often (some 70 times in Scripture) initiated the encounters by telling the recipients to “be not afraid.”

And why one of the most important of the gifts the Holy Spirit bestows on us is courage.

Veni, Sancte Spiritus, and may Your will be done.

A.M.D.G. / B.V.M.H.