Next Sunday, May 31, is the Feast of Pentecost. It is also my birthday and I will be seventy-eight years old and happy that I have had so many years filled with grace and with God's love. It is lovely to have the Feast of the Holy Spirit coincide this year with my birthday. St. Madeleine Sophie loved the Holy Spirit; in her letters of spiritual direction fidelity to the Holy Spirit was urged over and over again. In a letter to Adrienne Michel written in June of 1811 when Mother Barat was only thirty-two years old, she wrote: "Be very faithful to the Holy Spirit; you realize that he wants great things of you, and the fruit of this fidelity is beyond description; all my distress comes from my failures in this. If I could live my life over again, it would be to obey the Holy Spirit and act under his impulse only." She added that these were vain regrets for no one can be born again. At least it is possible "to begin to live today with that divine superhuman life, and the more time we have wasted so far, the more urgently we should begin." Then she tells Adrienne that she is fortunate for she is so much younger!
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