Wholly Spiritual

If there's anything that should come across powerfully through today's readings (aside from a sense of shock and awe at Paul's lambasting the Galatians), it is that God wants us to ask for (and receive) the Holy Spirit.
For Paul, the Galatians' earlier reception of the Holy Spirit was so remarkable that he could refer back to it rhetorically, asking why on earth they wanted to "go back" to the ritual observances of a Judaism they (former pagans) had never known, when they had already experienced the greatest gift of all.
And in the Gospel, the familiar and comforting "Ask and you will receive, seek and you will find" is related above all to the gift of the Spirit. "The Father will give the Holy Spirit to anyone who asks."
It made me really perk up and take more notice at the "epicleses" of the Eucharistic Prayer at Mass, those two moments when the priest asks God "send your Holy Spirit to hallow these gifts" and "send your Holy Spirit upon us."

This week our community is invoking the Holy Spirit for all our apostolic undertakings: we are scattered to the four winds as of today, with Sr. Laura going from Minnesota to North Dakota, where she will meet Sr. Helena and Sr. Irene Regina (who were in northern Wisconsin). They will hold a book display at a Eucharistic/Marian Congress in the Fargo diocese. And I will going with a volunteer, the ever-faithful Blanca, in a borrowed van (God bless Larry and Cari), to Milwaukee, to run a book display for Catholic educators at the Midwest Airlines Center. Pray for our safety, for great diffusion of the Word of God, and above all for all the many, many people we are meeting on the way. (I'll be back Friday night.)