[00:00] My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on this day before Pentecost, it's good to refer to Mary, our model of life in the Spirit, she who is known by the title, Spouse of the Holy Spirit. I don't know who in the history of the Church coined that phrase, it might have been St.

[00:35] Francis of Assisi, but certainly it's a title that applies to her as the mother of the Church, the one chosen by God to bear His Son, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit. So the title is very appropriate, who is the spouse other than the one who generates the child, the Holy Spirit, and it's what St. Maximilian Kolbe described this relationship

[01:15] as a quasi relation, she's quite like, excuse me, I don't remember the exact words he used, but she is connected to the hypostatic union. It's her flesh that Jesus took in the union of God and man. So that fecundity, that fertility of the Spirit that took flesh is what we the Church

[01:55] want to imitate, to be so receptive and so united with God that the body of Christ becomes incarnate in us as members of His body and also as missionaries who spread the faith by our work, by our witness, and especially by our love, by our charity.

[02:28] So Mary, the mother of Christ, is our mother in grace, and that grace works through us to bring new souls to life in Christ through baptism, through the life of the sacraments in union with God, through participation in the life of the Church. So Mary's intimate link with the Holy Spirit is the model of receptive faith.

[03:04] She who conceived of Christ first in her heart through her union with God and then in her womb. That was beyond any kind of human possibility, to conceive a child without a human father. This only happened one time, through the Holy Spirit in Mary. But her faith is what we want to model, that trust in the Spirit that can accomplish what

[03:38] our planning and our efforts cannot, to cooperate through faith and obedience with the will of God as Mary did. And then to move from that union with the Spirit, that union of faith and charity, to a kind of docility or receptivity to the promptings of the Holy Spirit that then become real action

[04:11] or real works, fruits that can be seen, fruits that affect souls. So one of the things that we must do, or learn to do, is to not delay into over-analyzing the promptings of the Holy Spirit, but to consent to them.

[04:42] We do have to discern, of course, and we do that prayerfully and we do that also under the authority of the Church. We seek the confirmation of inspirations, what we believe to be inspirations, but when they are blessed by the approval of an ecclesiastic authority, then we know we're on the right track.

[05:13] And we can expect that the Spirit will produce love. The Spirit is given so that love is poured into our hearts. To bring St. Maximilian and Mary Kolbe into the picture, what his teaching is, is that the shortest, surest, most secure way to be united with Christ, who is the source of charity,

[05:46] who is charity itself, God is charity, is through this consecration to Mary, Spouse of the Holy Spirit, mother of the Church, to give ourselves entirely in love to her, for her to take us and form us as other Christs. Not necessarily in the ministerial sense of the priesthood of clergy, the hierarchy, but

[06:17] every Christian is supposed to be another Christ, we're His body, we should reflect Him, and Mary, who formed Him, will form us. And that's also the action of the Holy Spirit, working through Mary, she's the Mediatrix of Graces. So we should seek to be docile, which isn't necessarily to go with every feeling that comes along that we believe to be the Holy Spirit, but that kind of docility that submits

[06:57] even to the authority. So there's obedience involved, it's not just sentiment. Docility is to submit to the Holy Spirit and to submit also to the authority of the Church, to submit to righteousness versus those things that come easily and are ego-gratifying. We pray with Mary as our model, we seek to imitate her faith and her obedience, to imitate

[07:34] her fiat, yes, to the will of God, even when it seems impossible, even when it contradicts what we thought was God's plan for us or what we understood it to be, but when it's revealed that it's something else, we should be prepared to accept that as Mary was, trustingly, to look for the fruits of charity then, that our inspirations, our good works should expand

[08:11] God's love among us and those that we minister to, and it should bring about reconciliation among people. She's the mother of reconciliation, the Holy Spirit reconciles us to God, Christ reconciled us to God, this was also continued, it's continued through the action of the Holy Spirit in the Church today.

[08:43] So St. Maximilian's teaching, which reflects also St. Francis' as Mary's, as the Spouse of the Holy Spirit, is a good reflection to make today as we prepare to enter into the festivities of Pentecost with the Vigil Mass tonight and the Masses tomorrow, to give our faithful consent to the will of God, which, as I always say, means to embrace the cross,

[09:23] that's an indispensable part of our Christian path and our docility to God. It's known to us by, I think, the extent to which we're willing to embrace the cross. That's what it means to follow Christ faithfully and to be docile to the Spirit so that we may see the fruits of love and mercy as were exemplified best by Mary, the mother of mercy.

[09:58] Praise be Jesus and Mary. Amen. Amen.