Jesus Returns to the Father to Send Us An Advocate

In today's Gospel, John 16, 5-11, Jesus tells the apostles and his disciples that he will be leaving them.  He notices their sadness and then says to them:  "It is better for you that I go.  For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you."  The Advocate is the Holy Spirit. Following His Ascension into heaven, Jesus will no longer be speaking to them  through His flesh but through the Spirit.

The Spirit of God is everywhere, in  all created things, in the core of our very beings, present wherever we are.  As with the return of Jesus to His Father and the disciples sadness, we, too, are distraught when the spirit of our loved ones leaves their body and they are no longer physically present to us or able to speak to us through their earthly bodies.  As with Jesus who no longer spoke to the apostles or his disciples in His flesh but through the Spirit, so, too, our loved ones, once they leave this world, no longer speak to us through their earthly bodies, the flesh, but through their spirits, present, I believe, wherever we are.  As with the disciples who did not recognize the Risen Christ, we do not, normally, recognize the spirit of our loved ones at our sides either.  However, that does not mean that they are not there, any more than, our not seeing the Holy Spirit with the naked eye, mean that the Holy Spirit is not hovering over us always.