“Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love.”
Many of us have heard this prayer before. But how often in daily life do we actually hear the Holy Spirit? We may think we are listening, but we get so caught up in our routines that we don’t even realize we have been touched by the Holy Spirit until someone points it out.
After reading the “Volunteer Voice” column in St. Mark Parish’s bulletin one Sunday, I realized I have been touched by the Holy Spirit – numerous times.
It is the Holy Spirit that leads us out of our comfort zone. It leads us to say “yes.”
I once heard that real volunteering is about doing what is needed, not what you want to do. I have certainly found that to be the case for me.
One Sunday while I was at St. John Neumann Church, it was announced that volunteers were needed for RAIN, the Regional Aids Interfaith Network. This wasn’t what I considered one of my “causes,” but people were needed, so I signed up. To this day, even though I have since moved away and attend a different parish, I am still friends with one of my teammates from RAIN.
Another example: One Sunday years ago at St. Mark Parish, one of the ushers asked me if I spoke English and would be willing to read at Mass, as they didn’t have an English lector for the bilingual liturgy. At first I said no, I would be too nervous. As I went to my seat, I realized I was reacting selfishly; a lector was needed, and I shouldn’t be concerned about being nervous. So I found the usher, volunteered that day and ended up doing readings on numerous Sundays after that.
Now the usher and I talk whenever we see each other at church. So not only did I have the honor of reading Holy Scripture, I made a new friend!
More recently, I joined the Eucharistic Ministry for the Homebound. I used to find the idea of aging a little intimidating. Since I started going to the local nursing home to bring the residents Holy Communion, I have discovered it is a beautiful (although sometimes difficult) stage on our life’s journey to the Father. And I have met some people with amazing life stories, including a woman who served in the French Resistance in World War II and who smuggled forged papers to help Jewish residents escape from the Nazis.
So the next time you hear volunteers are needed, sign up! Even if it isn’t a ministry you ever thought you’d be interested in or good at doing, you may surprise yourself. Listen to the Holy Spirit calling you.
Diana Patulak Ross lives in Charlotte.
I love Catholic education for two main reasons: First, it is my home field so to speak, as a Catholic educator in the classical model. Second, it’s a good topic since good Catholic education is needed to accrue social capital.
In his book “Renewing Catholic Schools: How to Regain a Catholic Vision for a Secular Age,” Archbishop Samuel J. Aquila articulates that Catholic education sought to “innovate” and abandon its 2,000-year educational model rooted in the classics and adopt secular teaching methods. The result was a catastrophe. Enrollment plummeted and schools closed across the country. Now, as we see throughout the West, the collapse of the Catholic school system has gone hand in hand with the spiritual poverty Mother Teresa warned was more deadly than the material poverty she witnessed in Calcutta.
So what can we do? British philosopher Sir Roger Scruton once said that “the postmodern believes he rarely finds things he loves, always finds something gone wrong, something hateful even, and you’ve got to mobilize against it.” To restore Catholic education, we must instead be more like Scruton’s vision of how man ought to be, the man who “looks around himself finding things that he loves and thinks ‘well those things are threatened, they’re vulnerable, I’ve got to protect them.’”
As St. Thomas Aquinas once said, “Wonder is the desire for knowledge.” Our educational institutions should protect and love this wonderful heritage of centuries of grasping for the transcendent, where a genuine sense of delight and satisfaction can be found in pondering the mysterious questions of who God is and why He deemed to create.
Stephen Thomas is the middle school history teacher at St. Michael School in Gastonia.