I had the great pleasure on Friday evening of concelebrating Mass with Fr. Ted, Fr. Jeff Coning and Fr. Don Franks in celebration of my 10th Anniversary of ordination. It was a beautiful Mass and a treat to share that moment with those of you that came. It is always a joy for me to reconnect with Fr. Franks, because he was one of the priests who had a significant impact on my spiritual journey.
Let me take you back, for a moment, to my days as a fairly new college student at Ohio State University. During my time there, I lived in a household sponsored by the group St. Paul’s Outreach, SPO for short, which was a Catholic Evangelistic group on Ohio State’s Campus. Many of you have heard me talk about this group before. It was a blessing to be a part of and helped me to discern my vocation to the priesthood. One of the things that SPO did was have a prayer meeting on Thursday evenings. These prayer meetings consisted of a gathering of college students in the basement of Holy Name Parish where we would sing some praise and worship songs and then one of the student leaders would give a talk on some aspect of the faith. They were a great time of prayer and growth together.
So there I was as a new member of SPO at one of these prayer meetings and I see a priest who was about my parents’ age coming down the stairs with a group of young people to come to the prayer meeting. You would think that an older priest might have been a bit of a downer in a room full of college students, but that wasn’t the case at all. Fr. Franks brought such a sense of joy and life that he fit right in with us. Fr. Franks was known to pull people in for a really close hug and then he would pray with you and tell you he loved you. We called it getting ‘Franked.’ This happened to me many times during my college years and I welcomed it.
Getting ‘Franked’ meant hearing beautiful and heartfelt prayers from Fr. Franks encouraging you and telling you how much he saw God working in you. He had the ability to just make you smile and lift you up even if you were having a really crappy day. I remember Fr. Franks often talked about praying to the Lord as ‘cor ad cor loquitur,’ which is Latin for ‘heart speaks to heart.’ Fr. Franks showed me, and I’m sure many of my college friends, what it looked like to be a man who was unabashedly in love with Jesus and who spoke to Him often heart to heart, through the Spirit. When I experienced praying with him, I knew that if I was called to be a priest, I wanted to be one like him.
Those experiences of getting ‘Franked’ stuck with me because they were close encounters with the Holy Spirit at work in the heart of another person. This is something that the Lord desires for each and every baptized person. Jesus wants us both to be drawn into intimacy with Him and to draw others to that intimacy. And that intimacy comes through the Spirit.
Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord, that incredible moment where the Apostles saw Jesus ascend bodily into Heaven. It’s tempting to just think of this as the disciples looking on while Jesus rises into the sky, defying the laws of creation to which we are all subject, like when He walked on water in the Sea of Galilee. But there is something much deeper going on. We know this because of what Jesus tells the Apostles when He ascends. He tells them to “wait for ‘the promise of the Father about which you have heard me speak; for John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit.’”
So here Jesus gives insight into why He is ascending to the right hand of the Father. This is not to leave us, but to draw us there into the intimacy of the Trinitarian life, to be filled with the Holy Spirit. The word translated as ‘baptize’ here means to plunge. So Jesus is instructing the Apostles to wait and expect to be plunged into the life of the Holy Spirit. Because Jesus has drawn our human nature into the intimacy of the Tritiarian life by His Ascension, it makes it possible for us to be plunged into the fire of the Holy Spirit.
This plunging should be a normal part of our Christian experience. We become a temple of the Holy Spirit in Baptism and are strengthened for mission with His gifts in Confirmation, but these Sacraments are not magic. The Holy Spirit invites us to cooperate with those fantastic gifts of grace we receive in the Sacraments, not just one time, but on a daily basis. So the challenge for us is to take Jesus seriously when he says to each of us before His Ascensions: “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
The power Jesus speaks of here is that plunging into the depths of those gifts of the Spirit that Isaiah spoke of in the Old Testament: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord. The presence of the Holy Spirit within us and our cooperation in His power also involves the living out of the theological virtues: faith, hope and love. When these gifts and virtues come alive through our willingly being plunged into the Spirit, it allows us to be effective witnesses to others and helps us to live in the abundance that Jesus wants for us now and journey towards the fullness of life in Heaven. I pray that we all experience what St. Paul talks about in the second reading today:
May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened,
that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call,
what are the riches of glory
in his inheritance among the holy ones,
and what is the surpassing greatness of his power
for us who believe
By the Lord’s Ascension, He opens up the power of living in that divine intimacy, entering into that prayer where heart speaks to heart. I was and am blessed by the friendships I have with people like Fr. Franks, because they have shown me what that life in divine intimacy looks like. My prayer for all of us is that we allow our hearts to be drawn up into that intimacy through Jesus’ Ascension.
+ Father, thank you for making a place for us with You. Jesus, we praise you for the gift of being drawn into Divine intimacy with the Trinity through your Ascension. Holy Spirit, enlighten our hearts so that we might live more and more in your power and thus draw more to that intimacy with You, the Son and the Father. We ask this through Jesus Christ, our risen and ascended Lord. Amen. +