God's Indwelling Presence (Easter 5.B)

Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house.

At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised.

But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to?

The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards.

You thought you were going to be made into a nice little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.

That's from Mere Christianity, the classic book by the remarkable Anglican writer C.S. Lewis. (I spied the quotation in Imprint, the inspiring and attractive magazine of the Sisters of Life.)

Lewis’s words are almost all we need as a homily on this morning’s Gospel. If we connect them to what Jesus is saying, our hearts will open to the best-kept secret of our Christian faith.

What is that secret? Simply this: that “we are called to be a dwelling for the Most Holy Trinity.” I didn’t write that either—it’s straight from the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Of course, Jesus reveals the secret in the words we’ve just heard, but in a more roundabout way. Just as Lewis uses a house as a metaphor, Jesus uses a vine.

He also uses a word that isn’t all that familiar to us. The word is “abide,” and it appears eight times in this short Gospel passage. But when we hear it nowadays, it’s usually in a sentence like “I really can’t abide him” or “I guess I have to abide by the decision.”

Those uses have nothing to do with what Jesus is saying. The translators have used abide in its old-fashioned meaning: to live or to dwell.

We can easily understand “abide” in this context if we think about “abode,” a word we still use in its original meaning. We know what an abode is, don’t we—it’s a home.

If it’s still a bit had to take Jesus at his word, all we need to do is flip back a page in the Bible, because in the previous chapter of John’s Gospel, Jesus says “Those who love me will keep my words, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them.”

C.S. Lewis was on the money: God wants us to become a dwelling in which he can live. He wants to live in us.

Let’s talk briefly about what it takes to be house fit for God. Lewis speaks of God reconstructing us; although Jesus was a carpenter, he sticks with agriculture and talks about pruning and bearing fruit.

If we are to make space in our souls for Jesus, we need to remain connected to him so that we may be pruned and purified from sin. There’s no secret about that. But earlier I said that the indwelling of the Trinity in our souls can be called a well-kept secret.

Father James Brent, a young Dominican theologian, was asked recently whether people know about this wonderful truth.

Here’s his answer: “I’ve travelled the country and preached to many audiences, many different people, and this comes as news to a lot of Catholics. I hate to say it. Some people have a kind of very vague awareness, but it’s not front and center in their consciousness. And the Church wants this to be front and center.” (This too is from Imprint.)

Not only the Church, but Jesus himself, judging by what he says in today’s Gospel. He wants to live in us; he desires to make his home in us—not as a reward for good behaviour, but so that we can experience in the most intimate way possible his love for us and his presence in our lives.

There’s no doubt that this is a deep theological truth. But how to make it real in our lives?

Father Brent offers a simple answer: The single most practical thing that you and I can do is make acts of faith. Say often: “Jesus, I believe in You”; “Holy Trinity, I believe You dwell in my soul.” That’s where it all begins. And then we need a lot of silence in our life.

“We do this by first becoming aware of the indwelling, and then by taking advantage of the silence and time for prayer that we’ve been given. Any kind of prayer is good— lectio divina, the rosary, etc. — but really just believing that the Holy Trinity dwells within you is a good start.”

So let’s start now. We’re three Sundays away from Pentecost, a celebration closely connected to the doctrine of the indwelling presence of the Trinity, and the Sunday after that is Trinity Sunday.

There couldn’t be a better time to prepare our hearts to be a home in which God can live.