Psalm 130 teaches us to pray: “My soul relies on God more than a sentry on the coming of dawn.” Someplace deep inside us we know, even in our loneliest moments, that we are not alone. When there is no light and no sense of direction and no clear provoking voice within us, there is nevertheless a sense of Presence that carries us on. When life is bright and good and full of blessings we can almost feel the Hand of God upon us. We know that there is power in us. We can feel a life beyond our own.

Clearly we have not “been left orphans.” The Holy Spirit has indeed come. The only condition of the Presence is that we allow ourselves to see the compelling reality of it, that we watch for it “like a sentry for the coming of dawn.” The condition is that we do not take God for granted.

God is a gentle God who never forces the presence of God upon us but we have a continual choice: We can attend to the presence of God or we can ignore it. We can see it in what we cannot understand or we can deny that we are overshadowed by something greater than ourselves and refuse to give in to promptings finer than our own.

Hildegard of Bingen, caught up in the Holy Spirit wrote, “I am a feather on the breath of God.” We, on the other hand, wrestle with life intent on wrenching everything in it into the puny and the obvious and the controllable. We refuse to let go. We plan. We strategize. We fix. We refuse to fall trustingly into the arms of the Spirit whom Jesus sent so that His power, His love, and His direction could be everywhere rather than limited by the time and place and country and incident and situation of the historical Jesus.

The Descent of the Holy Spirit is the call to be abandoned to the Will of God. It is a call to risk the consequences of God’s love, here and now.

—from In Pursuit of Peace: Praying the Rosary through the Psalms (Benetvision) by Joan Chittister