Yesterday, on the Holy Feast of Pentecost, our Chaplain, Father Joseph Hamilton, Private Secretary to Cardinal Pell, preached the following Homily at the Chapel of All Saints, Wardour Castle. We are deeply grateful to him for allowing us to share it.
“THOU HAST CONQUERED, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from thy breath”. This, a famous quote paraphrased by the Victorian poet Charles Swinburne, takes the words of Julian the Apostate and injects them with just a little bit more vitriol. The story goes that Julian, at the age of 32, led his army into defeat in Mesopotamia. Mortally wounded with blood, covering his hands he tossed the blood in the air and famously said, “thou hast conquered, Galilean”. Julian, the nephew of Constantine the Great, Emperor in his own right for just two year’s had publicly renounced Christianity two years earlier. Turning his back on the faith he had been brought up in, he restored paganism, wrote against Christianity, and even planned to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem, not for the honour of the Jewish religion but to prove the invalidity of the Christian. His poet admirer Swinburne would probably have made a good head of religious programming content for the BBC.
The words Swinburne put into Julian’s mouth are that the world has grown grey from the breath of the Galilean. The breath of Jesus. The breath of God. The ruach of the Old Testament. The breath that hovered over the waters of Genesis at the beginning of Time. Who knows what was in the mind of the author of Genesis as he wrote those words? With the contemporary advances in physics … had he seen, was he writing of the Holy Ghost as a vast cosmic wind moving through the void, coalescing as the presence of the Trinity? Had he seen the Second Person of the Trinity making the Word of the Father reality, the fiat lux of Genesis light exploding in what today we call the big bang?
The author of Genesis had inspired knowledge of the Trinity, St. Augustine in his homily on Genesis tells us that at the beginning of each of the days of Creation, the angels would contemplate the things that God would create at that day, and in the evening the angelic host erupted in a paean of praise for the things created. Our own prayers should always include an element of praise. The Gloria we have just sung does just that in the Mass … we will lift our voices again shortly to join the thunder of the seraphim and cherubim in their triumphant chorus of Holy, Holy, Holy, ... St Augustine tells us that at the last moment of creation God, says, “let us make man in our own image”; Father, Son and Holy Spirit descend over the newly created planet Earth, the Holy Spirit standing as a person in his own right, the Trinity surrounded by the angelic court. A foretaste of what awaits us in Heaven.
The primal moments of Genesis are repeated after the Resurrection of Our Lord. He breathes upon his disciples and says to them “receive the Holy Spirit”, and on the morning of Pentecost the disciples hear a sound like a mighty wind. The breath of God, that sends galaxies hurtling out through the Universe, setting stars on fire, moving through a simple house in Jerusalem to accomplish an even more spectacular feat than the creation of the Universe – the creation of the Catholic Church. This time instead of igniting suns, he descends as tongues of flame and the breath of the Galilaean transforms the disciples, establishing the college of bishops and granting to them the fullness of the understanding of Revelation. And those twelve simple men go out into the world and with the Gospel of Jesus Christ change the course of human history.
Twelve. There are a hundred people in this Church this morning. Think of what we might do if we were filled with the Holy Spirit the way the initial Twelve were. You might say to me –Father, that sort of stuff is not for us. To which I reply, “rubbish”. God has a plan for everyone sitting in this Church this morning. Some he has appointed to be Apostles, some he has appointed to be Teachers, some he has appointed to be Mums and Dads, some he has appointed to be Knights of Malta, he has even chosen the most unlikely to be priests. But you know what? He wants All to be saved. He wants everyone in this Church to be happy, not just here on Earth but with Him forever in Heaven. And he wants us to get out there and show the happiness that He offers to a world that so desperately needs it.
We have come through very difficult period, I am sure we all know people whose lives have been claimed by the pandemic; for us who are still here, lives have been changed by the pandemic. But this morning, this Pentecost, we are here in this Church, praying for the Holy Spirit to transform our lives. We might not hear a mighty wind, tongues of flame might not appear over our heads, but if we ask, if we pray, in true poverty of spirit, “Come Holy Spirit, I give you permission to enter into, and transform my life”, then that power which descended on the Apostles at Pentecost will overshadow and enter your soul and transform you.
The Emperor Julian died at 32, in the prime of youth. He had everything the world could desire. He ate the finest food, could afford the most fashionable clothes, drifted between palaces, and sought to emulate Alexander the Great. He desired the colour, encouraged the bizarreness, and indulged in the brutality of the ancient pagan, and frankly Satanic cults. Today his is the life that is held out to us as being full, Instragrammable, Facebookable, Twitter-worthy. And yet here he is with his last breath accusing Jesus’s breath of having turned the world grey. The world turned grey. This chapel is anything but grey – look about you! Today’s feast reveals that poor Emperor Julian had subscribed to an ancient lie, a lie that is presented to us by the world again and again … the lie is this: if you believe in God, if you believe in Jesus, if you live according to the laws and precepts God has set down, as our Church preserves and teaches, then you will not be free, you will not be able to live in technicolour; you’ll be boring, unattractive, no one will follow you on Facebook, your world will be just grey. That is a lie, that is the dangerous rubbish that the Devil whispers in our ears.
So here, in this chapel this Pentecost morning let’s reproclaim the Truth that countless saints and holy men and women have loved and lived, and passed on to us: If we believe in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit we need have no fear of anything – pandemics, wars, recessions, even death. If we believe in Jesus we will never be without a friend in need, and if we embrace the gifts of the Holy Spirit being poured out today, really embrace them, we will be transformed, and we as Catholic Christians can repaint the world in colours so vivid the glories of the Renaissance will pale by comparison. That is the truth of our faith. That is the truth of the Pentecost, and that is the truth of the Holy Spirit being poured out on His Church again today. Our duty this morning is get out there and proclaim it, and in doing so renew the face of the Earth.
Veni, Sancte Spiritus.
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