In every heart, every family, every community…
The Holy Spirit is blowing… It is the Spirit of the Risen One, coming to bring something new; let us not fear this breath of fresh air! Will we allow it to enter every corner of our hearts and our relationships? O blessed light, come and fill the hearts of all your faithful to their very depths…
The sounds of war are there—alas—but a new world has already begun… The Spirit of the Lord poured out in our hearts leads us to build bridges through dialogue and encounter, uniting us all to be a people always at peace… (First address of our Holy Father Leo XIV), through Him we become one in Jesus Christ, we participate in His fruitful offering and, with the apostle Saint John, we can say: As for our communion (communion with you, communion of the Holy Spirit), it is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ (1 Jn 1:3).
This is our faith and it is also our daily experience: the Carmelite convents of our Federation bring together sisters from various countries, often from four continents. It is Pentecost every day! Living together 365 days a year, uniting our voices in the same liturgy seven times a day, sharing our joys and sorrows, which are understood and expressed in so many different ways, remaining in love… calls us to live constantly in the Spirit of the Lord. It is an exciting adventure, in many ways, which allows us to perceive the link between the wounds of the Risen Christ and the brotherhood we have discovered or rediscovered. Grace is asked for in prayer and received in the sacraments. It is also, though, sometimes barely perceptible, a work animated by the Holy Spirit: those dead leaves gathered in the hallway maintained by another sister, that offense forgotten as we wash the feet of a traveler, that smile springing from a deep kindness… Wash what is soiled, bathe what is dry, heal what is wounded (Pentecost Sequence)…
This communion that you also experience, we announce to you, we write to you so that our joy may be complete and, united in intercession, especially for peace,
we wish you a holy and joyful feast of Pentecost!
“Spirit of God, sap of love from the immense tree where you graft us, may all our brothers and sisters around us appear to us as a gift in the great Body
in which the Word of communion is fulfilled.”
(Pentecost Hymn)