We all face the challenge of finding our place.  But the most serious task anyone will ever have is to find one’s place in the Church.

It’s not a matter of receiving a number and waiting to be shown to our pre-assigned seats as at a concert or ballet.  We can approach our life in the Church as a passive thing, in which we have little say, and perhaps little desire to say. The Church becomes somebody else’s responsibility, and we praise or criticize them for what they do with it.

Belonging to the Church is anything but passive. Even if we were held and spoken for by someone else at our baptism, we all have the choice of taking up that new life in the Spirit and making it our own.  How will we discover and wield its meaning in our life? Or do we see baptism merely as an insurance ticket into Heaven, in case it exists?  Baptism cannot be undone, but it can be left dormant. We all live our baptism, or don’t.

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And each of us can help prevent others from falling into baptized ‘sleep’ mode, inert in a pew.  We can inspire each other to inhabit with spirit our life of faith, and take our place in the Church. 

Where the Church is, there the Holy Spirit is working:  ever-fresh, constantly giving us Christ, breathing life into us. In His constant descent upon us, is the Church’s continual renewal.  If He were to withdraw, we would cease to be. He is the expression of God’s generosity and self-forgetfulness as he goes out towards creatures says Dumitru Staniloae: “the Holy Spirit is caused to proceed, giving rise to communion so as to give joy to each person, the joy God finds in them and they in God.”

A mentor of mine, named Sr. Mary, was the Holy Spirit’s gift in encouraging me to take up my place in the Church. From saying good-bye to her family at 18 on entering a convent, at a time when family visits were not part of vowed life, to coming out of retirement at the Archbishop’s request to catechize, Sr. Mary was a model of fidelity and vivacity.  She loved to learn and teach the truths of the faith, and to find and light the fire of the Spirit in others, whether disabled children or distinguished members of the hierarchy.  One of her favorite stories was the time she spit orange juice all over the Archbishop, seated beside him at a breakfast meeting, when he reached a punchline just as she’d taken a big gulp.    

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Another was of her little sister clinging to her knees crying “Don’t go, Mamie, don’t go,” when she left to take final vows. When next they met, the sister—all grown up now—didn’t recognize her.  She didn’t want children to forget their relationship with God and the Church, as her sister forgot her, but to grow and develop in faith and understanding all their lives.

I never saw anyone more alive with the Spirit, who seemed to sing in her, for the sake of His people.  How could we not let that same Spirit sing in us, too?

The life of the Spirit is the life of the Church.  We can’t have one without the other.  Receiving Christ leads to being baptized in the Spirit, for the two Persons are one with each other and the Father, and thereby we join the Church (see Acts 2:38). The New Testament is filled with expressions of the Spirit’s divine Person and unique activity. After the Resurrection, we see Him active in bringing the Church to birth and ‘paracleting’ its good growth.  

From New Testament times into early Church life, fitting ways to express who Son and Spirit are in relation to the Father were explored and adopted.  Our familiar precious words, from the Nicene Creed as expanded in 381 (Constantinople I), claim the Spirit’s divinity, naming Him “Lord, the Giver of Life.”  The Church’s understanding of the Holy Spirit came not out of a philosophical exercise, but from experience, prayer and worship.  

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The Spirit’s distinctness is how He is the same in us all, bringing us to the Father in Christ, without anybody losing their identity. Our baptismal identity depends on our relationship with the divine Spirit inHis eternal relationship with Father and Son.  The Spirit shines through the Cross, the Resurrection, and Pentecost. Sister Mary, ever the catechist, taught this truth by her words but also by her way of being.

We need the Spirit, and we have the Spirit.  Without Him, we cannot name Jesus as Lord, nor God as Father. With him we can take our place in the Church, the place that is nobody else’s, and here find life (not inertia). As St. John Chrysostom wrote, “we can celebrate Resurrection and Pentecost every day, because both the Holy Spirit and the risen Lord are with us.”