In God, With God, Through God

God “gives to everyone life and breath and everything…’In him we live and move and have our being,’…[f]or we too are his offspring,’”  we read in today’s first reading, Acts 17: 15, 22-18:1.   In the Gospel, John John 16: 12-15,   Jesus  tells us that when the Advocate “comes, the Spirit of truth, he will guide you to all truth….He will glorify me, because he will take from what is mine and declare it to you. Everything that the Father has is mine; for this reason I told y9ou that he will take from what is mine and declare it to you.”

How awesome is the  relationship God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have developed with us. God who made all that is, the heavens and the earth, and all that is in them, God who  created man and woman in His likeness shares everything with us. The Spirit will bring us to this truth, in fact, to all truth:  the truth about our Creator, the truth about this universe, the truth about ourselves, the truth about a child in the womb, the truth about all men and women created equally in the eyes of God, truth about justice and love and mercy and all that has it origin in God and taught to us by Jesus.  We will come to realize that  God  “made from one the whole human race to dwell on the entire surface of the earth, and he fixed the ordered seasons and the boundaries of their regions, so that people might seek God, even perhaps grope for him and find him, though indeed he is not far from any one of us.” For ‘In him we live and move and have our being,’”!

How do my behaviors/attitudes reveal that I have come to know that God has given me “life and breath and everything,”  that  I “live and move and have[my] being” in God?  Would I treat others differently if I live from the belief that they, too, have been given “life and breath and everything” from God and that they, too, “live and move and have [their] being” in God?

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.