Guided by the Holy Spirit to the Truth that Leads to Greater Perfection, Sixth Wednesday of Easter, May 8, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Sixth Week of Easter
Memorial of Blessed Miriam Teresa Demjanovich
May 8, 2024
Acts 17:15.22-18:1, Ps 148, Jn 16:12-15

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Today in the Gospel, on the eve of the “Decenarium of the Holy Spirit” that begins tomorrow on the Solemnity of the Ascension,  Jesus speaks to us about how the Holy Spirit “will guide you to all truth” because, he says, “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.” Kindergarteners are not taught calculus, quantum physics or advanced semiotics for a reason, because they cannot handle it yet. There are various steps in learning and assimilation in the spiritual life as well, and God knows how he has made us. The transition from natural religion to the covenants of the Old Testament was an enormous step in the learning curve; from Old Testament to New Covenant another. But that learning continues. It continued for the Church at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, helping Christians not only to understand the significance of so much Jesus taught and did but to learn how to align their lives to that truth. That growth continues for each of us. The Holy Spirit continues to want to lead us to all truth, making explicit what was implicit in what has already been given and making vibrant what has been dormant. Are we open to that continued formation? Are we hungry for it?
• This is a key work of the Holy Spirit. St. John Paul II, in his encyclical Dominum et Vivificantem, he uses the expression “Spirit of Truth” 42 times and how the Holy Spirit helps us to know, love and live the truth another 56, far more than any other expression. In a relativistic age, and one desperate for a New Evangelization, St. John Paul II focused on the mission of the Holy Spirit with regard to the truth more than under any other title. He wrote there, “It becomes clear that this ‘guiding into all the truth’ is connected not only with the scandal of the Cross, but also with everything that Christ ‘did and taught.’ For the mystery of Christ taken as a whole demands faith, since it is faith that adequately introduces man into the reality of the revealed mystery. The guiding into all the truth is therefore achieved in faith and through faith: and this is the work of the Spirit of truth and the result of his action in man. Here the Holy Spirit is to be man’s supreme guide and the light of the human spirit.”
• We see the Holy Spirit’s work in and through St. Paul as together with the Spirit the Apostle sought to lead the Athenians from what they knew into something much deeper. He began with their religiosity, surrounded by the statues of all the pagan gods, and praised their wisdom in the statue dedicated to the god they didn’t know. The statue to the Unknown god comes from the time of Epimenides who, according to Athenian legend, had been brought by them from Crete to rescue Athens after one of the leading families had murdered someone at the altar in the temple and soon the city began to suffer from political strife, a plague and various sorts of pollution, all of which the Athenians understood as a curse. Epimenides suggested that there might be a god unknown to them who would be willing to help Athens if proper sacrifices were made to him, and so the Athenians built many altars and made many sacrifices and the city was saved. Epimenides as a poet had written, “They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one, Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. But you are not dead: you live and abide forever, for in you we live and move and have our being.” In his Letter to Titus, Paul referenced how Cretans were “always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons” (Tit 1:12) which showed his familiarity with Epimenides, whose history and line about God being the one in whom we “live, move, and have our being” is quoted on Mars Hill.
• Much like we spoke about when Paul preached to the Jews in the Synagogue of Antioch in Pisidia, he was accustomed to begin with people’s aspirations, then go to how Christ is the fulfillment of them, how Jesus was rejected but God the Father raised him, and how now everyone needs to make a choice. While the premises needed to change while he was speaking to the non-Jewish Athenians at the Areopagus, the general structure remained. He began with their aspirations for salvation, citing the unknown god of Epimenides, their general religiosity seeking God, and the revelation they have in common through creation. He sought to help them to know the Unknown God, and not just as one God among others, but as the one true and only God. He helped them to see that God was not made by hands out of marble but by their Maker. He helped them to see that he gave us Creation to get to know him through seeking, even groping, in order to find him. He helped them to see how God wants an intimate relationship with all of us, so that in him would “live and move and have our being” and grasp that we “are his offspring,” that he seeks to adopt us as his beloved children. And he helped them to see that life isn’t a debating society, that religion is not just a thing to think about, but the most consequential thing we do, because there is a judgment coming on which our continued life will depend. He concluded by speaking about Jesus’ bodily resurrection and saying that, in contrast to the Greek notion of the continuance alone of the soul, it is meant to harbinger our own.
• What was the reaction? We see them depicted in the stained glass windows in the Chapel of St. Paul on Columbia’s campus. There were three. The first group scoffed. The second procrastinated, saying that St. Paul’s message wasn’t important enough to act on today. The third was faith, as we see in Dionysius and Damaris. Those three reactions we can look at with regard to the work of the Holy Spirit in leading us into all truth. Some scoff, as if such a thing were impossible, who think they already know everything they need to and respond with hardened soil to God’s progressive revelation. Others put it off and read the daily newspaper or go about the chores of daily life. But the Holy Spirit wants us to respond by “joining” the Holy Spirit and “believing.”
• St. John Paul II wrote in 1965 a series of 13 Meditations on St. Paul’s sermon in the Areopagus and what we can learn from it. We don’t know for whom he wrote it or whether it was ever delivered. But a couple of years ago it was rediscovered and was published in English in 2020 by Ave Maria Press under the title Teachings for an Unbelieving World: Newly Discovered Reflections on Paul’s Sermon at the Areopagus. George Weigel and Scott Hahn give the Foreward and Introduction respectively. The main point of the future Pope’s reflections is that we learn from St. Paul in Athens some of the main markers for the New Evangelization today. And St. John Paul in those reflections focuses on the work of the Holy Spirit, not only during Creation hovering over the waters but especially in the redemption, that the Holy Spirit leads us not only to the truth about God but also the truth about ourselves. He writes that St. Paul’s message of conversion to the Athenians — “he demands that all people everywhere repent” — is one of the key works of the Holy Spirit, given to the Apostles in the Upper Room at the same time that Jesus was breathing on them and saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” Quoting the Second Vatican Council’s Gaudium et Spes (10), John Paul says, “The Church firmly believes that Christ, who died and was raised up for all, can through His Spirit offer man the light and strength to measure up to his supreme destiny.” He goes on, “No one else, only he the Spirit of Truth… can touch that profound discrepancy that is within the human being, that brokenness that is in him.” He does so by bringing something greater than evil, love, which has “been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given us” (Rom 5:5). The Spirit helps us, he adds, not only  to be witnesses to Christ together with him in all contexts but to pray with him for those who  will hear the world.
• This work of the Holy Spirit in guiding us to the truth, in helping us to see in Christ on the Cross our Redemption and to unite ourselves to him so that in him we may live, move and have our being, is seen today in the holy one the Church in the United States remembers on this day. Blessed Miriam Teresa Demjanovich, a girl from across the Hudson River in Bayonne, was raised to the altars in the Cathedral Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Newark a decade ago this October, the first American ever to have her beatification ceremony in the United States.  She sought to base her whole life on him the Truth to which the Spirit leads as a brilliant student and then a teacher. As soon as she entered the Bayonne public-school system, she couldn’t hide how smart she was, not only earning double promotions but graduating as the salutatorian of Bayonne High School at the young age of 16. She went to the College of St. Elizabeth in Convent Station, N.J., where she graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in literature — academic achievements that were rare for women at the time. She took a teaching position at the Academy of St. Aloysius (now Caritas Academy) in Jersey City, where she taught Latin and English. During her two years with the Sisters of Charity, she taught at St. Elizabeth’s Academy in Convent Station. In these teaching positions, she was known not only for her clarity, but for her faith, often being found kneeling on the floor of the chapel praying the Rosary or adoring the Blessed Sacrament with outstretched arms. We see how docile she was to the Holy Spirit in how she allowed herself to be guided by him along the paths of holiness, whether at home, at school, in spiritual direction, or in the convent. She had long desired to become a cloistered Carmelite, but when she finally approached a Bronx monastery, the nuns thought that she should wait because of lingering problems with headaches, poor eyesight and other health issues. Her brother Charles, who had recently been ordained, and other family members suggested that she should join a teaching order to serve God with the brain he had given her and formed in the truth. She ultimately made a novena before the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception in 1924, asking Our Lady’s help — and Our Lady didn’t let her down. She discerned God was asking her to enter the order with which she was already familiar from her college days, the Sisters of Charity, founded by St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, the first American-born saint. She entered two weeks after her father’s death, in early 1925. And she sought to help guide others by the same Holy Spirit who had helped her in her discernment. Despite being a postulant for just three months, a novice for two years and a professed sister for five weeks — and despite much of that time being sick — she made great contributions to her order. She taught at St. Elizabeth’s Academy. She wrote two plays, several poems, letters, meditations and biographical recollections. And, most valuably, at the request of her spiritual director, Benedictine Father Benedict Bradley, and with the permission of her mother superior, she wrote 26 conferences on religious life that Father Bradley preached to her and her fellow novices as if he had composed them. Father Bradley acknowledged that he had received a grace to ask Sister Miriam Teresa to do something that was basically unheard of for someone so young in the religious life. “I believed that she enjoyed extraordinary lights, and I knew that she was living an exemplary life,” he stated. “I thought that, one day, she would be ranked among the saints of God, and I felt it was incumbent upon me to utilize whatever might contribute to an appreciation of her merits after her death.” It was only after her death that he put a note on the motherhouse’s bulletin board declaring, “The conferences that I have been giving to the sisters were written by Sister Miriam Teresa.” Her brother, Msgr. Charles, published those conferences a year later under the title of Greater Perfection.
• The summit of that journey is a truly Eucharistic life, in which we seek to draw our life fully from him in whom we live, move and have our being. She wrote about how the Holy Spirit leads us to grow toward and through a Eucharistic life. “In partaking of the Blessed Sacrament,” she wrote, “we have a most powerful aid to sanctification. God himself comes to perfect us, if we but so will.” She so willed, and so advanced in holiness. She developed the point:  “The imitation of Christ in the lives of the saints,” she wrote, “is always possible and compatible with every state of life. The saints did but one thing — the will of God. But they did it with all their might. We have only to do the same thing — and according to the degree of intensity with which we labor shall our sanctification progress.” She added, “The reason we have not yet become saints is because we have not understood what it means to love. We think we do, but we do not. To love means to annihilate oneself for the beloved. … To love is to conform oneself to the Beloved in the most intimate manner of which we are capable.” The way we learn to love like that is in the celebration of the Mass. We must, she wrote, “will with determined effort to live out our share of the sacrifice of the Mass in union with our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, and to participate in that Sacrifice as frequently as it is offered. … Only in trying so to live, to make the Mass a vital thing in our daily actions, to live our faith in practice, to perform our tasks in the spirit of our living Head and according to the principles He … laid down for us — only in trying so to do shall we be rendering to God the things that are God’s, our being, our life, our soul, with the full capacity of our measure as creatures of God.” This is what we might call the Eucharistic unity of life, that she herself lived and helped her fellow sisters to live.
• Today at Mass, Jesus at Mass continues through the power of the Holy Spirit to teach us and guide us into all truth. He continues to nourish us, leading us to appreciate even more what we’re about to do by the power of the Holy Spirit, so that in our Eucharistic Lord we may “live, move and have our being.” Let us, through the intercession of Blessed Miriam Teresa, ask for the grace to correspond to the Holy Spirit as much as they did, to choose the will of God with all our might and be led by the Holy Spirit to Greater Perfection in this world and final perfection with Blessed Miriam Teresa, St. Paul and all the saints!

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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