By Barb Arland-Fye
Editor
“Patrick, are you going to take me home tonight?” our son Colin, who has autism, asked his brother Patrick for the third or fourth time in an hour. Exasperated, Patrick responded, “You know the answer to that question.” This routine takes place whenever my two sons, who do not live together, visit Steve and me, their parents.
The Holy Spirit inspired me to recognize Colin’s repetitive question (and others like it) as his way of communicating a need for reassurance and certainty. It is the language of his autism and I try to remind Steve, Patrick — and myself — that we need to hear and understand Colin’s language.
As we prepare to celebrate Pentecost, I think about how the Apostles understood the myriad of languages of devout Jews gathered in Jerusalem for Pentecost. “And they were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim…. Are not all these people who are speaking Galileans? Then how does each of us hear them in his native language?” (Acts 2:1-11)
This Scripture inspires and energizes me. The awesome event of the birth of our Church, as described by Luke, conveys for me the Apostles’ receptiveness to communicate with and understand the faithful, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. It is the language of love, which comes to fruition for me when I am able to practice patience, kindness and self-sacrifice.
Praying to the Holy Spirit for guidance requires me to be attentive to nudges and resist the temptation to give in to animosity, frustration, hurt feelings and resentment. Some days are more challenging than other days, such as this morning when pressing deadlines, a malfunctioning laptop, a flood of emails requiring responses and other distractions weighed me down. I felt the nudging of the Holy Spirit to reflect on the people and things who “spoke” the language of love today through their interactions with me. They practiced patience, kindness and self-sacrifice.
“The Acts of the Apostles describes how the Holy Spirit empowered the early Christians to bear witness to Christ by their sharing love and strong Faith,” Father Antony Kadavil wrote in an enlightening column that appeared May 17, 2018 in Vatican News. The Holy Spirit “changes our lives, helping us to be more patient and forgiving, to seek new beginnings in our relationships with one another and to let the power of God’s love have the final say over the conflicts and difficulties we get into. He is available to us every moment of every day as we face the choices between being self-centered or being God-centered people …” (https://tinyurl.com/yb6sebvx).
In his homily concluding Mass in honor of the Jubilee of Families, Children, Grandparents and the Elderly on June 1, Pope Leo XIV said we are here to be “‘one’ in our families and in those places where we live, work, and study” (Vatican News, 6-1-25).
On May 25, my husband Steve and I celebrated our 40th wedding anniversary. Colin and Patrick stood by our sides as we received a blessing from our pastor, Father Apo Mpanda and the congregation during Mass the night before. The Holy Spirit guided us to this milestone and continues to guide us as we work on practicing the language of love at home and beyond.
(Contact Editor Barb Arland-Fye at arland-fye@davenportdiocese.org)
