While waiting for the coming of the promised Holy Spirit, they all persevered with one mind in prayer, together with the women and Mary, the Mother of Jesus…1. Everyone is in the same place, in the Upper Room, animated by the same love and a single hope. In their center is the Mother of God. Tradition, in meditating on this scene, has seen Mary's spiritual motherhood over the entire Church. "The era of the Church began with the 'coming', that is, with the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles gathered in the Upper Room in Jerusalem together with Mary, the Mother of the Lord"2.
Our Lady lives a sort of second Advent, a waiting, which prepares the full communication of the Holy Spirit and His gifts to the nascent Church. This Advent is at once very similar to and very different from the first, the one that prepared for the birth of Jesus. Very similar because in both there is prayer, recollection, faith in the promise, and an ardent desire for it to be fulfilled. Mary, carrying Jesus hidden in her womb, remained in the silence of her contemplation. Now, Our Lady lives deeply united to her glorified Son3.
This second expectation is very different from the first. In the first Advent, the Virgin is the only one living out the promise fulfilled in her womb; here, she waits in the company of the Apostles and the holy women. This is a shared waiting, that of the Church which is about to manifest itself publicly around our Lady: "Mary, who conceived Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit, the love of the living God, presides over the birth of the Church on the day of Pentecost, when the same Holy Spirit descends upon the disciples and enlivens the mystical Body of Christians in unity and charity"4.
The purpose of our prayer today, on the eve of the great solemnity of Pentecost, is to await the arrival of the Paraclete closely united to our Mother, "who implores with her prayers the gift of the Holy Spirit, who at the Annunciation had already overshadowed her"5, making her the new Tabernacle of God. Before, at the dawn of the Redemption, she gave us her Son; now, "through her most efficacious supplications, she obtained that the Spirit of the divine Redeemer, already bestowed on the Cross, should be communicated with His prodigious gifts to the Church, newly born on the day of Pentecost"6.
"The one who transmits this detail to us is Saint Luke, the evangelist who narrated the infancy of Jesus at greatest length. It seems as if he wants us to understand that, just as Mary played a leading role in the Incarnation of the Word, in an analogous way she was also present at the origins of the Church, which is the Body of Christ"7.
To be well disposed to a greater intimacy with the Paraclete, to be more docile to His inspirations, the path is Our Lady. The Apostles understood this; that is why we see them alongside Mary in the Upper Room.
Let us examine how our habitual relationship with Our Lady is; let us make a specific resolution for today: let us take better care of praying the Holy Rosary, contemplating its mysteries; let us offer her some small mortification different from those we are used to during the week; let us take better care to greet her through her images that we encounter on the street, in our room…
HCD