I AM With You Always by Our Summer Seminarian

 The last words the Lord speaks to his disciples in Matthew’s gospel are: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations…and behold, I am with you always, to the closing of the age” (Mt 28: 19-20). He says “I am with you always” and then he leaves. For some of us that may seem a bit contradictory. How is it then that he remains with us always?
Today we celebrate the feast of Pentecost, the day on which the disciples received the Holy Spirit. We read in the gospels how after the passion of the Lord the disciples were afraid and hiding from the Jews. But later in the Acts we find those same disciples who were afraid and hiding, preaching fearlessly out in public, proclaiming that the Lord was truly risen! It was the Holy Spirit who banished all fear from their hearts and gave them the strength to become what God wanted them to be: true Disciples of Christ. Without the Holy Spirit it would have been impossible for them to preach the Risen Lord. But this is not an isolated event that happened two thousand years ago, but it is an even which repeats itself again today for us!
Now some of us may be like the disciples from Ephesus and say: “We have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit” (Ac 19:2). We may go through our days thinking that we are on our own, having to solve all our problems alone. But the Lord has TRULY remained with us always. In the Holy Spirit we have the opportunity to have a deeper relationship with God than a mere physical one. Do you feel lonely, overwhelmed, and sad or perhaps you cannot relate to those around you? Do you feel like your parents, spouse, children, or co-workers speak a totally different language and this creates an invisible barrier that seems impossible to break? Well today, rejoice! Because the Lord did not leave you alone. The Holy Spirit comes, in the words of St. Cyril of Jerusalem, “with the tenderness of a true friend and protector to save, to heal, to teach, to counsel, to strengthen and to console.” It is through the Holy Spirit that, as St. Basil the Great explains, “we enter into eternal happiness and abide in God…we acquire a likeness to God…we attain what is beyond our most sublime aspirations – we become God.”
Peace,
Fredy