A few years ago, I attended a Catholic Charismatic Renewal Conference in New Orleans.  There were thousands of people there from all over the Southeast.  Now, the Charismatic Renewal has never been my cup of tea, particularly.  I’m not entirely comfortable with the style of worship or the way in which some concepts are expressed.  Nevertheless, I went – partly out of curiosity, but also because I knew that some day I might be called upon to minister to Catholic Charismatics.

 I attended a general session on the first evening, where two or three thousand people were gathered in a large auditorium.  As we came to the end of the session, the leader asked if anyone had yet to receive the gift of speaking in tongues.  Those who had not were asked to raise their hands.  People around them would then gather close and pray over them for the gift.  I watched what went on.  Now I myself had never spoken in tongues and was very curious about it, but the whole thing made me very nervous. Frankly, no power on earth would have induced me to raise my hand.

 Many did, however.  After a while, the leader asked if any doctors, nurses, or healthcare workers wanted to be prayed over to receive the gift of healing.  Again, some folks raised their hands, and others gathered around them to pray over them.  After a while, the leader asked everyone to return to their places.  Then she asked everyone to be quiet, close their eyes, and ask the Lord for a “word.”  That means to ask in prayer for a spiritual message from God just for you.  “Here is something that I can do,” I thought.  So I did.  I closed my eyes, I asked for a word, and almost instantaneously, a thought blazed across my mind: “You’re afraid of me.”  The thought barely formed in my mind before I reacted to it and asked myself, “You’re afraid of God?”  Instantly, a voice rang out from somewhere in that crowded auditorium of 2 or 3 thousand people – I never knew who it was – and said, “My child, my child, why are you afraid of me?  Do you think that I would give you anything that is not good?”

 The skeptic in me would say that this was a safe thing to say in such an environment.  Undoubtedly, many there besides me were nervous.  Ah, but the timing: the timing was too perfect.  God had spoken directly to me.  He had spoken to me interiorly, in my mind, in a voice not my own (the term for that is a “locution”), and He had spoken to me through the voice of some other human being (the term for that is “prophecy”).  God had spoken to me.  My insides were roiling, and I was shaken and, if I thought I was nervous before, I was really nervous now.  I had to leave the convention center, go down the street to the Olive Garden, and have a glass of wine.

Brothers and sisters, that was my first experience with the dramatic side of the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit.

 The gifts of the Spirit are real.  This stuff we read about in the Bible is real: expression of wisdom, expression of knowledge, faith, gifts of healing, mighty deeds, prophecy, discernment of spirits, varieties of tongues, interpretation of tongues.  These things are real.

 I know that the modern, scientific, rationalistic world scoffs at such things.  I know that it doesn’t seem as if these spiritual gifts belong in a world of cell phones, iPods, spaceships, chemotherapy, and open-heart surgery.

 I know too that these gifts are often “faked,” in order to take advantage of people.

 I know that they seem to be the quaint expression of desires from a world that no longer exists – a world without our modern conveniences and marvels, a primitive world, an unscientific world.

 I used to think that way myself.  Even though I believed in God, in Jesus, in the Holy Spirit, in the Church, in all of it.  All of it, that is, except these rather primitive notions.  They were quaint, I thought.  I even believed that they were real, but they were for a different time.  It was not the way things worked now.

 But they are real, very real.  They were real then, and they are real now.  That evening in the New Orleans suburb of Kenner, Louisiana in the year 2000 taught me that.

 And we all have them.  Every one of us who is baptized has some combination of these gifts.  And when we are Confirmed, they are “solidified” in us.  We just don’t always know what they are, or how to access them and use them.

 Part of the reason for that is most of us don’t really believe in them.  These gifts don’t have to be as dramatic as speaking in tongues, or hearing locutions, or bilocating, or healing people.  They can be much more seemingly mundane things: “the expression of wisdom,” for example.  Elsewhere in his writings, St. Paul also identifies teaching, and even administration, as gifts of the Spirit.

 The gifts of the Spirit are real, and they serve a purpose – we heard it in the Second Reading: “To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit.”

 Each of us has spiritual gifts, gifts to be used to build up the Body of Christ.  Some of us have very dramatic ones.  Some of us have ones that are less dramatic.  But we all have them.

 Know your gifts.  Believe in your gifts.  And don’t hide them under the bushel basket.