Persist in Love

Listening to the first reading, I pictured St. Paul standing right here, looking out at you — and marveling. Because what he saw in Corinth is what I see: a room full of gifts: The capacity to listen. To comfort. To make someone laugh on their worst day. To welcome the new girl. To teach, to challenge, to organize, to inspire, to correct with kindness, to simply sit with someone who is struggling.

Those gifts are not accidental nor are they a genetic inheritance. Paul is specific: it is God who “produces all of them in everyone as a manifestation of the Spirit.” And in the Gospel, Jesus makes a promise about that same Spirit — it “will be in you, and will remain with you always.”

That is what we are doing here today. We are not invoking a far-off, celestial being somewhere up in the clouds. We are celebrating a Spirit that lives inside every single one of us. God’s Spirit cannot be put under a microscope or weighed on a scale. But neither can love. Neither can kindness, or friendship, or courage. And we know how impoverished our lives become when those things are missing.

There’s a scene in the novel The Secret Life of Bees that says this better than I. An older woman named August is trying to explain to a girl named Lily what a statue of Mary actually means. She tells her:

“Mary is not some magical being out there like a fairy godmother. She’s not the statue in the parlor. She’s something inside of you.

“All those times your father treated you mean, Mary was the voice in you that said, No, I will not bow down to this. Whether you could hear the voice or not, she was in there saying it.

When you start pulling back into doubt and small living, she’s the one inside you saying, Get up from there and live like the glorious girl you are.

Whatever it is that keeps widening your heart — that’s Mary too. Not just to love, but to persist in love.“

Persist in love. Write that on your hand if you have to. That is the assignment for you that matters more than any other this school year.

Persist in love. Write that on your hand if you have to. That is the assignment that matters more than any other this school year.

Whatever keeps widening your heart. Whatever tells you to get up and live like the glorious young woman you are. That power inside you — that is God’s Holy Spirit whom we are calling on at this Mass. Whether we choose to listen to that voice or not, it is in each one of us, saying over and over: persist in love.

Today, as a school, we pray for the ears to hear that voice — not the other voices shouting at you constantly, the ones that only talk about looks, followers, money, and who’s in and who’s out. We pray for the courage to trust the inner voice telling you that you are bigger than you think you are. The voice that sends you toward the person eating lunch alone, not away from her. The voice that says: walk with the ones who are struggling and don’t look away from those who are grieving.

Let me tell you about a young woman who listened to that voice. She wrote to me about volunteering at a hospice — simply dropped into a ward of dying people. She was paired with an eighty-five-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s. She sat with that woman every week for the seven months before she died. I quote:

I longed to help her in some meaningful way and found myself helpless to do so. But I found within myself a capacity to love I had never known before. The most I could offer her was myself — someone to be with her, and love her, to the end of her life.

She could not fix anything. She could not cure anything. What she offered was herself — fully present, unhurried, unimpressed by all the things our culture tells us matter.

The Secret Life of Bees called that “capacity to love” “Mary.” That young volunteer discovered it within herself without ever naming it. We call it God’s Holy Spirit, alive inside every one of us — the same Spirit Jesus promised would never leave us.

As you begin this year: trust the voice of God’s Holy Spirit. Not the ones telling you who to be. The one already inside you, telling you who you are, a beloved child of God.

Come, Holy Spirit — fill the hearts of your faithful ones, and kindle in them the fire of your love.