DURING these first weeks of our Academic Year, we gather together today to beg the Lord to send the Holy Spirit upon our University community.  We plead with our merciful Father and His loving Son to pour forth the Holy Spirit on our students, our faculty, our staff, our administrators and on one and all in our community.

We ask for the Holy Spirit who is the love between the Father and the Son.  We plead for the Holy Spirit that enlivens and animates the Church and all Christian communities.  We beg for the Holy Spirit to enter your heart and my heart.

Good friends, let us listen now to the description from the Acts of the Apostles of the great day of Pentecost when the Holy Spirit was poured out on the disciples:  “Sa pag-abot na sa adlaw sa Pentecostes, ang tanang magtutuo nagtigom sa usa ka dapit.  Ug sa kalit may dahunog gikan sa langit, sama sa kusog nga huros sa langit, ug milukop kini sa tibuok balay nga ilang gitigoman.  Unya nakakita silag daw mga dila nga kalayo nga nanugdon diha sa matag usa kanila.  Silang tanan napuno sa Espiritu Santo” (Acts 2, 1-4).  HANGIN ug KALAYO, those familiar symbols and signs.  The great symbols of the Holy Spirit: WIND and FIRE.

HANGIN.  WIND.  You don’t know quite where it comes from, you don’t know quite where it’s going.  There is something quite unpredictable about the wind.  So there is with the Holy Spirit.  Dear friends, we can’t control the Holy Spirit as though we’ve corralled him and made him our possession.  There is something elusive, unpredictable, wonderfully so about the Holy Spirit.

When you hand over your life to God’s Holy Spirit, you are not in control … and that’s Good News.  The Gospel says the Spirit blows where he wills, the Spirit blows of his own accord.  And when you hand over your life to the Holy Spirit you are saying: “My life is not about me, I am now under the aegis of, in the control of a power that I cannot manipulate.”

You have to pray therefore for the Holy Spirit.  You have to pray, you have to ask.  Fr. Theodore Hesburgh, former President of the great Catholic University in the US, Notre Dame University; Hesburgh, a legendary Catholic churchman once gave a homily to seminarians and he talked about his own priesthood.  He said THE prayer of his priesthood, he has prayed it from beginning to end, he said a prayer for all seasons, a prayer for any occasion, whether you are rejoicing or whether you are sad … The great prayer is: VENI SANCTI SPIRITUS, COME HOLY SPIRIT.

He said, I prayed it every day of my priesthood.  Every day, many times a day. VENI SANCTI SPIRITUS, COME HOLY SPIRIT.  This prayer acknowledges that you are not in control.   UMARI KA ESPIRITU SANTO.  You must ask that this mighty wind of the Lord will blow in your life.

What else about WIND?  It’s powerful!  Wind is POWERFUL!  Kusog gayud ang hangin!  During storms we have seen wind knock over large mansions and mighty trucks.  I’ve been on many planes that are lifted up, these huge, heavy machines lifted up by the wind. What is it that’s bearing up these huge machines?  Well, it’s essentially air, it’s wind that lifts up jumbo jets.  We have seen typhoon winds which have devastated entire villages and cities.   Wind is powerful!

So it is with the Holy Spirit … when you let the Holy Spirit in your life, it will do something powerful in you!  It will change you, it will uproot things in you.

When I think of the power of the Holy Spirit, I think of St. Katharine Drexel and her story.  She was the daughter of one of the wealthiest people in Philadelphia around the turn of the 20th century.  Katharine Drexel stood to inherit tens of millions of dollars which in today’s terms would be in the billions of dollars.  But she had a religious awakening, a deep sense that there was something more to life than what money could buy.  And so Katherine went to the Pope, Pope Leo XIII.

She knelt down before him and said, “Holy Father, there needs to be an order of religious in my country that will take care of the native Americans and of the African-Americans.”  The Pope turned to her, of course he did not know her at all, he said, “You found that order.”  Katharine responded with surprise, “Me? I’m not going to found the order.  I’m just making a suggestion.  I’ll give them some of my money.”  “No” said the Pope, “you found that order.”  And she did.  She founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Colored People.  The Holy Spirit entered her life with power, uprooted things in her life, turned things around and carry her where she had no idea she could possibly go.  That is what the Holy Spirit does.

Think of St. Francis of Assisi.  A young man who hears this voice from the crucifix: “Francis, rebuild my Church.”  He had no idea where the obedience to that little command would take him but it took him to the founding of this religious order, which now number thousands of men and women religious who cover the globe many centuries later.

Blessed John Paul II.  Pope John Paul II.  Karol Wojtyla. He was in Poland in the early 1980s during the time of Martial Law, in the midst of an oppressive situation.  Speaking the words of the Gospel.  Speaking God’s truth.  Unleashing the power of the Holy Spirit.  And you know what it did?  It toppled that martial law government in Poland.  It toppled the governments in the Eastern Bloc and in time it toppled the mighty Soviet Union.

The Holy Spirit is Wind.  The Holy Spirit is Power.  It can knock over the strongest things.  It can lift the heaviest things.  If we but let it into our lives.

The other great symbol:  TONGUES AS OF FIRE, DAW MGA DILA NGA KALAYO.  KALAYO.  FIRE.  We know how devastating fire can be.  Fire can destroy houses, neighborhoods, whole cities.  Fire can destroy buildings, can kill people.  Fire is destructive.  But fire can also cleanse.  Fire can clear out the old places, allowing modern, better neighborhoods to be born.  That is why the bird associated with fire is the phoenix, because it is the bird which rises out of its own ashes.

So the Holy Spirit is like a cleansing fire.  When you let the Holy Spirit in your life, he will burn things away in you.  My sisters and brothers, I have found this over and over again: when people find themselves attractive to the life of the faith.  They enter into prayer.  They participate in the liturgy.   They give themselves to God.  And then they find … “things have to change in me.”  All is not well with me.  God wants things changed.  He wants to burn away my selfishness.  He wants to burn away my self-regard.  He wants to burn away my pride, and my envy and my anger and my resentments.  All these have to burn away.  That is what the Holy Spirit does in you when you allow him into your life.
But there is more to the symbol of FIRE.  Fire is also illuminating.  Ang kalayo makahatag ug kahayag.  Especially for biblical times, before electricity, fire was light.  Fire was illumination.  It was how you see or read at night.  It lit up the way.

So when the Holy Spirit dwells in you, you receive the light of wisdom, ang kahayag sa kinaadman.  Our books contain dead words, random numbers, inscrutable diagrams unless and until the Holy Spirit lights up your mind.  And then what you study comes to life!  And what you study starts to make sense … it commences to become meaningful and relevant.  Through the Holy Spirit we begin to grow in wisdom.

It’s that cleansing fire. It’s that illuminating light.  But mind you, its not just fire.  TONGUES AS OF FIRE, it says.  Tongues.  Speech.  The first thing the disciples do upon receiving the Holy Spirit, they begin to talk.  Yes, first among themselves and their talk is fiery, not meaningless mumblings.  The disciples proclaim that Jesus is Lord.  They proclaim boldly the things of God.  The Holy Spirit, good friends, lights your tongue on fire, that’s what he does.  And now you want to talk about Jesus.

More to it, they just don’t talk among themselves.  They go out on one of the busiest days of the year in Jerusalem, when it was filled with pilgrims and tourists and hangers-on from all over the place.  They go out and in public they proclaim the Lordship of Jesus, risen from the dead.  The Holy Spirit sends you out to public proclamation of Jesus, Lord and risen from the dead.  Your tongue will catch fire when you allow the Holy Spirit in your life.  And you will proclaim Jesus not only with your words but also with the witness of your life, especially your deeds of service for the least of our sisters and brothers.

After the resurrection, the disciples saw the risen Lord.  They were filled with that enthusiasm and that truth.  But they were not ready for their mission until Pentecost. Until the Church was equipped with the Holy Spirit, only then was it ready for mission.  When that wind and that flame came in to their lives; now they were ready to proclaim.

My brothers and sisters in our beloved Xavier University, today and always God wants to send the Holy Spirit into your lives. HANGIN ug KALAYO. You are invited to let the wind and the flame of the Holy Spirit in your life.  You are invited to let the cleansing fire of the Spirit burn away your selfishness and pride.  You are invited to let the Holy Spirit light your way.  You are invited to let the light of the Spirit illuminate your studies and let the Holy Spirit gift you with wisdom.  You are invited to let the wind of the Holy Spirit empower you so you will proclaim the Good News of Jesus with your words and deeds and the witness of your life.  You are invited to hand over your life to the Holy Spirit so he can blow and lead you where he wills.  And you can be sure the Spirit will lead you to the frontiers, to the unfamiliar.  With the wind of the Holy Spirit beneath your wings, you can be certain that your Ateneo experience will be the most exciting and exhilarating journey ever.

VENI SANCTI SPIRITUS. COME HOLY SPIRIT. UMARI KA ESPIRITU SANTO.