Signs of Life

Reflection for May 24, 2026 – Pentecost Sunday

In today’s Gospel reading, the risen Jesus appears to the disciples while they are inside a locked room. He gives them the Holy Spirit and, thus, the power to forgive sins.  Find Today’s Reading Here

If you’re asthmatic, you know the phrase “as natural as breathing” doesn’t always make a lot of sense.

Maybe that’s because breathing isn’t always natural. Sometimes, it’s supernatural.

I come from a family of asthmatics. In my earliest childhood memories, my sister’s nose and mouth are covered with a bulbous plastic mask connected by clear tubes to her transportable nebulizer. The machine whirs loudly as it vaporizes the medication that will open her lungs. In these memories, I watch my sister — her little eyes wide, her chest contracting and constricting with great difficulty — and wonder what it feels like.

Because I don’t have asthma, and I don’t think about breathing, unless I’m climbing a flight of stairs or chasing down one of my kids. It’s such a utilitarian thing, breathing. It’s unimpressive, unremarkable. Literally anyone can do it.

Until they can’t.

Dead men don’t breathe. That’s what I think as I read the words of John’s Gospel: “He breathed on them.” (John 20:22) So much of what Jesus does in his resurrected Body is extraordinary and superhuman, making it unmistakable that here is a Body no longer playing by the rules of the physical world. He’s passing through locked doors. He’s in two places at once.

But today, he’s just breathing.

So we have to ask ourselves: why? His Blood no longer requires oxygen. If he were asthmatic, neither bonfire nor damp night air could cause his lungs to constrict. His Flesh has been perfected.

But here we see a reality that is as spiritual as it is physical: where there is breath, there is life.

In Genesis, God breathes into dust and creates man. In today’s Gospel, He breathes His Spirit onto man, and creates a Church.

©LPi