Yesterday, a freshman student waited around after completing his final examination in “Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance Thought” to talk with me.  In our conversation, Adam told me how the readings for the course and the class discussions had challenged him to reconsider the importance of “making virtuous decisions” and not simply “going along with the crowd.”

“It’s not easy, Father,” Adam said.

Further on in our conversation, Adam also told me about the lack of religious practice in his family, principally because his parents do not share the same religion.  When I called this type of marriage an “interfaithless marriage,” Adam told me that his grandmother―“she’s one of those traditional, Italian-type of grandmothers,” he said―has been on his back to practice his Catholic faith.

So, I asked Adam, “Are you confirmed?” “Oh sure, Father.  I got confirmed during my junior year in high school,” he said, adding, “But, I need a stronger will.”

Several weeks ago, a number of the young people in our parish came forward to institute a radical change in their lives, one so radical it required asking for God’s grace to strengthen their power of will.  While preparing for this day, each youngster may have said proudly to relatives and friends, “I’m getting confirmed.”  Perhaps, too, their parents of these youngsters boasted, “My son (or daughter) is getting confirmed.”

But, receiving a sacrament, including the Sacrament of Confirmation, is not something that people―like Adam as well as you and me―“get.”  Instead, sacraments are sacred rituals―outward signs instituted by Christ―through which God provides the graces people need if they are to make those radical changes in their lives and, ultimately, world.  To accentuate this point, each of our young people told the bishop as part of the ritual, “I want to be confirmed.”  That is, these youngsters were telling the bishop that they wanted to lead their lives from that day forward as mature, young Catholics who, with souls filled with the Holy Spirit, would carry through on their intention.  In that sacred ritual and through the ministry of the bishop, God infused the souls of these youngsters with the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit―wisdom and understanding, counsel, fortitude, and knowledge as well as piety and fear of the Lord―so that, if they will it, each of the newly confirmed will be mature, young Catholics.

It’s relatively easy to get confirmed, as Adam noted yesterday. However, it’s a much more difficult and challenging matter to be confirmed, as Adam has learned.

Perhaps this is so because, in the midst of the many trials and hardships that confront us almost daily, it may seem as if God is entirely absent and we lose the will power to follow through on our commitment.  “Where is God now when I need Him most?” we might ask ourselves as trials and hardships besiege us.  Perhaps we even gazed at the Cross during the reading of the Passion on Palm Sunday when we heard Jesus crying out, “My God, why have you abandoned me?” and took comfort in the fact that Jesus himself believed that God was absent.  Or, like Mark Twain, maybe we’ve concluded that the course our lives traverse is rather grim.  He wrote:

The burden of pain, care, and misery grows heavier year by year. At length ambition is dead; long for release is in their place. It comes at last, the only unpoisoned gift earth ever had for them―and they vanish from a world where they were a mistake and a failure and a foolishness, where they left no sign that they ever existed―a world which will lament them but a day and forget them forever.
 

How tragic and sad it would be if, wouldn’t it, if in the midst of the trials and hardships that we had only ourselves to depend on?  And, then, in the flash of an instant following the reading of our last will and testament, we vanish as if we’ve never even existed?

Several years ago, someone told me the fictional account of a man whose home was caught in a flood. As the floodwaters rose, a rescue truck arrived and its driver begged the man to come along or else he might drown in the rising waters. But, the man told the rescuer, “God will protect me.”  The man stayed with his house as driver of the rescue truck drove away to save other people.

The floodwaters steadily increased.  So, the man took refuge upstairs in his second-floor bedroom.  Rescuers in a boat saw the man peering out of the window.  Motoring up beside the house, the rescuers begged the man to come with them to safety.  The man thanked the rescuers for their concern but, he said, “God will protect me.”  So, the rescuers motored away to save other people, leaving the man to stay with his house.

As the floodwaters continued rising, the man finally was forced to take refuge on the rooftop.  A pilot in a helicopter spotted the man and lowered a rope to help him to safety.  But, the man waved off the helicopter pilot shouting through all of the bluster, “God will protect me.”  So, the helicopter flew away and the rescuer looked for other people in distress because and the man chose to stay with his house.

Sadly, the house was washed away and the man drowned.

Appearing before God to account for his life, the man told God how disappointed he was that God hadn’t protected him.  The man explained that he based every decision he made in life upon his firm belief that God would protect him from the floodwaters.  But, in this instance, God hadn’t.  Looking the man square in the eye, God said, “You fool. I did everything I could for you.  I sent a rescue truck.  I sent a boat.  I even sent a helicopter.  Yet, you refused each one. Disappointed with me?  I’m terribly disappointed with you!”

When trials and hardships besiege us, we may wonder whether God has abandoned us and conclude that it’s a simple fact of life that we need to trust only in ourselves.  We may even conclude, as Mark Twain did, that our lives ultimately mean nothing.  But, like the man caught in the rising floodwaters, God reaches out to us and offers His hand, if only we can see God manifesting His divine presence in our lives.

In today’s gospel, the Risen Lord appears to his disciples and promises that he will not abandon them.  The Risen Lord tells his disciples that they will be given an “Advocate to be with you always.”  This Advocate, “the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot accept….remains with you, and will be in you,” just as the bishop told our youngsters when they were confirmed a few weeks ago.

God entrusts all of the confirmed―including Adam as well as you and me―with the Advocate who infuses in our souls the graces of wisdom and understanding, of counsel, fortitude, and knowledge as well as of piety and fear of the Lord in order that we might save people from the rising floodwaters of sin besieging them.  Whether as spouses, parents, teachers, preachers, or just plain old good friends and neighbors, God has given the confirmed the gifts of the Holy Spirit so that Jesus’ disciples in this generation―ordinary women and men like Adam as well as you and me―will manifest God’s abiding presence by uttering God’s word, by making God’s gesture, by offering God’s ear, or by issuing God’s challenge so that people will know that God has not abandoned them.

The challenge God issues to those of us―like my student, Adam―who get confirmed is to be confirmed. The author of the Book of Chronicles described God’s challenge this way:

Be firm and steadfast; go to work without fear or discouragement, for the Lord God, my God, is with you. He will not fail you or abandon you before you have completed all the work for the service of the house of the Lord.
 

And St. Peter described God’s challenge in today’s epistle this way:

Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope, but do it with gentleness and reverence, keeping our conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who defame your good conduct in Christ may themselves be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if that be the will of God, than for doing evil.
 

Rather than leaving others to confront their trials and difficulties alone and by themselves, God infuses His confirmed with the gifts they need to be His saving presence in the lives of people besieged by trials and difficulties. Having given the Holy Spirit to the confirmed, God then acts through the confirmed to warm and enliven hearts broken by sin.  God can only do this, however, if those who get confirmed, like Adam as well as you and me, use their power of will to be confirmed.

To be confirmed, then, God entrusts us with the task of manifesting God’s abiding presence to His people.  Through us, God guides and consoles them. And, in our ministry as Jesus’ disciples, God offers His people what is truly meaningful in life.

This is the “great commission” God entrusts to the confirmed who, like St. Philip in today’s first reading and, hopefully one day, Adam as well as you and me, make it their will to be God’s healing presence in a broken world.