Our Venerable Father Pachomius the Great.
Abstention from meat and foods that contain these ingredients.
Acts 19:1-8; John 14:1-11.
Read Acts 19:1-8
There is a strange thing about the men at Ephesus. They were not pagans in the usual sense. They were not sneering men, not the sort who had solved God by ceasing to think about him. They were religious men. They had been baptized with John’s baptism. They had repented. They were, one might say, decent men with their faces turned in the right direction.
And yet something was missing.
Paul saw it. Perhaps he heard it in the way they spoke. Perhaps he saw in them that peculiar sadness of men who have come close to the truth but not yet into it. So he asked the question no committee would have approved:
“Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you believed?”
They said they had not even heard that there was a Holy Spirit.
Paul did not congratulate them for being sincere. He did not form a discussion group on sincerity. He told them about Jesus. John was not the destination. John was the signpost. So they were baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus, and Paul laid hands on them, and the Holy Spirit came upon them.
Something like this happened with Kateri Tekakwitha. She too had come near. She had seen Christians. She had heard the missionaries. She had been touched by some rumor of a country she had not yet entered. Grace had already made her restless, which is one of grace’s better tricks.
Then she asked for baptism.
The world did not become easier. In fact, it became harder. But she had received the thing itself: Christ, the Spirit, the Father’s house, the strange new belonging of the baptized soul.
That is the point. Baptism is not a religious polish applied to a respectable life. It is not therapy with candles. It is death and birth. It is entrance into Christ. It is the Spirit of adoption, by whom a lonely creature learns to say, “Abba, Father.”
There are still such people near the door.
So ask them.
Not accusingly. Not triumphantly.
Ask as Paul asked.
“Have you received the Spirit of adoption?”