As He said farewell to His disciples, Jesus gave them tranquility, He gave peace, with a promise: “I will not leave you orphans” (John 14:15-21). He defends them from that painful feeling of being orphans. In today’s world, there is a great sense of being orphaned: many people have many things, but they lack the Father. And in the history of humanity, this has repeated itself: when the Father is missing, something is lacking and there is always the desire to meet, to rediscover the Father. Today we can say that we live in a society where the Father is missing, a sense of being orphaned that specifically affects belonging and fraternity.
And so Jesus promises: “I am going away, but someone else will come who will teach you how to access the Father. He will remind you how to access the Father”. The Holy Spirit does not come to “make us His clients”; He comes to point out how to access the Father. That is what Jesus opened, what Jesus showed us. A spirituality of the Son alone or the Holy Spirit alone does not exist: the center is the Father. The Son is sent by the Father and returns to the Father. The Holy Spirit is sent by the Father to remind us and to teach us how to access the Father.
Only with this awareness of being children, that we are not orphans, can we live in peace among ourselves. Wars, either small ones or large ones, always have a dimension of being orphans: the Father who makes peace is missing. And so when Peter and the first community respond to the people regarding why they are Christians (1 Peter 3:15-18), says: “do it with gentleness and reverence, keeping your conscience clear”, that is, the gentleness that the Holy Spirit gives. The Holy Spirit teaches us this gentleness, this tenderness of the Father’s children. The Holy Spirit does not teach us to insult. And one of the consequences of this feeling like orphans is insulting, wars, because if there is no Father, there are no brothers, fraternity is lost. This tenderness, reverence, gentleness are attitudes of belonging, of belonging to a family that is certain of having a Father.
Let us ask the Holy Spirit to remind us always, always about this access to the Father, that He might remind us that we have a Father. And to this civilization, with this great feeling of being orphaned, may He grant the grace of rediscovering the Father, the Father who gives meaning to all of life, and that He might unite humanity into one family.
Francis, “The Holy Spirit reminds us how to access the Father” homily, Chapel of the Domus Sanctae Marthae, Vatican City, 17 May 2020, https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/cotidie/2020/documents/papa-francesco-cotidie_20200517_spiritosanto-accesso-al-padre.html