A Living Icon of Holiness

From a bulletin this past Sunday:

Pentecost, Come, Holy Spirit! —  Today we celebrate the birth of the Church, when the Holy Spirit filled the apostles with himself and transformed them from apostates into apostles and from cowards into courageous preachers and livers of the Gospel. We pray in a special way that our nation, our parish, and each of us experience a “new Pentecost,” a total spiritual rebirth, so that the same dramatic transformation worked in Jesus’ first disciples may likewise help us to metamorphose into real icons and agents of holiness. On the cover, I have put the image of the Holy Spirit from the top of our Pentecost window in the Church. It remains one of the most powerful images I have ever seen. The color scheme shows that the Holy Spirit is bursting out with fire, ready to ignite us and the whole world with the fire of his love so that, with tongues and hearts of fire, we may in turn take that holy flame out to ignite the world! We pray in the words of today’s Sequence, the Veni, Sancte Spiritus: “Wash [in us] that which is unclean, water than which is dry, heal that which is wounded; bend that which is inflexible, warm that which is chilled, make right that which is wrong. Give to your faithful who relay on you the sevenfold gifts. Give the reward of virtue, the end of salvation, and eternal joy. Amen. Alleluia!”

Click here for a closer look at the image.