Today, we celebrate an essential doctrine of our Catholic faith — the Most Holy Trinity. It expresses God as three Divine Persons, unified in One Divine nature. It is a topic we could never exhaust nor fully understand until we see God face to face. Although it is incomprehensible, it is still deeply personal. 
 
Our Second Reading, from St. Paul, expresses the relationship of the three Divine Persons — Father, Son and Holy Spirit. By our Baptism, we received the Holy Spirit becoming adopted children of God. It is by the grace of the Holy Spirit that we call God, “Abba, Father!” And it is with the Holy Spirit that we can unite all of our sufferings to Christ so that we might one day rise with Him. 
 
Our relationship with God is right before us. As we became God’s adopted children, we received His endless grace. We can cry out to our Father in a moment of joy or sorrow, invite the Holy Spirit in to all that we do throughout our days, and suffer every hardship with Christ Himself. All we need to do is invoke His name in each moment. 
 
As we celebrate this glorious Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, may we praise God in word and deed and may we seek moments to encounter the Father, Son and Holy Spirit each day — through Scripture, prayer, sacraments and blessings throughout our day, as Jesus tell us, “I am with you always, until the end of the age.” 

Our Easter season culminates with the glorious feast of Pentecost. We can imagine how incredible that moment was for the apostles and all who witnessed it. The Holy Spirit was alive and working. 
 
The Holy Spirit is just as alive and willing to work here and now in our day-to-day moments as back at our first Pentecost. 
 
Our First Reading bears witness to the first Pentecost. During this encounter with the Holy Spirit, the apostles and Mary felt a driving wind, there were tongues of fire on the heads of each of them and the Spirit allowed them to speak in different tongues proclaiming acts of God. 
 
We might hear this reading and wish the Holy Spirit worked that obviously in our lives each day. The truth is, the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives is obvious — we just might be blind to it, or it might be that we have closed ourselves off to the Holy Spirit’s wonderous works. 
 
Our tongues of fire might be a profound conversation with a friend, something that you needed to hear in that exact moment, or even a closed door to an opportunity for something much, much greater. These are movements of the Holy Spirit in our everyday moments. 
 
The more we take time to recognize them, the more we become aware of them.
 
On this Pentecost Sunday, let us give thanks to God for sending us His Holy Spirit. And let us strive to be in tune with the Holy Spirit by looking for the ways God has been working in our lives.

We often cite Jesus’ quote from today’s Gospel of Mark: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the gospel to every creature.” This was not a suggestion from the Lord. It was quite frankly a command, and it is one which still holds for each of us. Being an evangelist, being a disciple, being a steward is not a matter of choice for those of us who are Catholic and Christian. It is something the Lord expects of us.
 
Often, we may like to spend time debating how to do that, but that does not lessen the fact that it is something we are supposed to do. We need to acknowledge that even the original Apostles and followers of Jesus did not do that immediately. We learn that they stayed in Jerusalem for some time, and it seemed to be only when the Church and its followers were persecuted that they began to reach out and truly share the “Good News.”
 
Once Christians accepted that charge from the Lord, they did indeed take the Word of God to all corners of the earth. Look at the Church today. It is incredible how this Church has grown from one Man/God and a small group into what it is today. That does not, however, get us “off the hook.”
 
As much as we may argue about how to carry out this command from Jesus, the fact remains that our very lives need to stand as a representation of what it means to be a Christian, what it means to “love one another,” what it means to live and to work as a disciple of Christ.

Our readings today call us to love as Christ loves. 
 
In our Gospel, Jesus says, “Love one another as I have loved you.” The ways Jesus has loved us and continues to love us are endless. 
 
We are called to imitate this love. And He tells us the greatest way to do this when He said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”
 
It is difficult to live that out in our humanity. Yet, it is made much easier when we faithfully love Christ. The fact of the matter is, as our love for Christ increases, so too does our capacity to love others.  
 
There are countless moments when we can do just that — for instance, waking up Saturday morning to attend daily Mass instead of sleeping in, or talking to God in the car on the way to work instead of listening to music. These are simple ways to express our love for the Lord by laying down our lives for Him. 
 
The more we find ways to love the Lord, the more we will find it easier to put aside our selfishness and serve others.
 
Christ’s command to love others may seem daunting. Yet, Christ would never ask something of us that we cannot live out. All we need to do is take baby steps. Ask yourself, "How can I better love Jesus right now?" for it is in loving Christ that we will better love others, and it is in loving others that we love Christ Himself.