(LifeSiteNews) — When I was a young man, I received a phone call from Father Kenneth Campbell, a Franciscan priest whom I first met after a talk he gave on the Holy Land. He was born on the Island of Eriskay in the Outer Hebrides but spent many years working in Palestine and Jordan. He had arranged a pilgrimage for Gaelic-speaking Catholics from the Outer Isles to visit Judea and Galilee. However, the Israeli government suddenly asked Fr. Kenneth to escort the Canadian Foreign Minister, a Catholic, and show him around the Holy Places. Could I therefore act as a stand-in because he could not get back in time to meet the pilgrims at Luton airport? If I could, then after the formalities, I could board the plane with the pilgrims and so have a free holiday in the place I always dreamt of visiting.

On the first day, I did the grand tour of all the major shrines in style with Fr. Kenneth and the Canadian foreign minister. There are more Gaelic speakers in Canada than there are in Scotland and, as the foreign minister was one of them, he and Fr. Kenneth spoke to each other in their common tongue knowing full well that the official car was bugged. When for my sake, he reverted to English whenever we left the car, I was amazed to hear the evidence for the authenticity of the Holy Places. After the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in AD 70, they built their own pagan shrines over the place where Jesus was crucified and over the tomb from which He had risen from the dead to try and obliterate their memory. However, their action did exactly the opposite, guaranteeing their preservation until they were returned to Christianity when Constantine became the first Christian Emperor in AD 312.

It was the church of the Holy Sepulchre that impressed me most, not its architecture, but because it was built over the place where Jesus died and over the tomb from which He rose from the dead. The whole atmosphere of the place touched me more deeply than I could have imagined.  Fr. Kenneth, who had lived and worked in the Holy Land for most of his life, seemed to have a key to every place that you really should see–and even to places that you should not! On the night before we left, his famous key opened a door that seemed closed to everyone else and opened to me an experience that has affected me deeply to this day. Although the doors to the Holy Sepulchre are closed every night and cannot be opened until the next morning no matter what, I was given permission to remain inside for the whole night, with a room to myself in the Franciscan friary within. I spent little time in that room. Instead, I spent my time before the midnight office at Calvary, and the time after, alone in the empty tomb.

I was so overcome to realize that I was totally alone, the only person praying, within a matter of metres from the place where Jesus had died and from where St. John and Our Lady had stood. There was a New Testament open before me at St. John’s account of Christ’s death. The passage that told of the water pouring from the side of Jesus was underlined in red, for this was the key moment in his narrative. Once glorified He could immediately send the Holy Spirit whom He promised to send at the Last Supper. An outpouring of this mystical life and love has long since been likened to an unprecedented effusion of living water by both the prophets in the Old Testament and by Jesus himself.

Not long before His life came to its abrupt and agonizing end, Jesus celebrated the Feast of Tabernacles with His disciples in Jerusalem. On the final day, they were gathered at the pool of Siloam outside the city gate for a key moment in the ritual. A priest walked from the temple with a golden bowl full of water. Then, while it was being poured out into the pool in memory of the rock struck by Moses to give water to his people in the desert, a prophecy was read out. It promised a new and massive outpouring of the Holy Spirit when the Messiah would come. This was the moment when Jesus chose to cry out in a loud voice, “If any man is thirsty let him come to Me. Let the man come and drink who believes in Me.” However, St. John, who witnessed the whole event, said, “He was speaking of the Spirit, which those who believed in Him were to receive; for there was no Spirit yet, because Jesus had not yet been glorified” (John 7:37-39).

On that day the promised Kingdom of God finally came. The Holy Spirit burst out, onto and into the world like an unstoppable supernatural sea of love. Like a spiritual tsunami, He would sweep out over and into all things, drawing all who would not resist Him, back through Christ into the ocean of God’s infinite loving. In the Risen Christ, in His glorified but human body, they would be drawn into the life and loving that flowed between the Father and the Son from all eternity.

Since the first Pentecost day, the love of the Holy Spirit has been, and still is, endlessly flowing between the Father and the Son, drawing all who are in Christ into that loving. He is the means by which we are adopted into the family of God. By family, therefore, I mean that we have been taken up into Christ together with all those others, who like us, have been drawn up into the life of the Three in One.

When the friars came into the Church for the midnight Office, I joined them but when they left I went to the Holy Sepulchre itself to spend the rest of the night in prayer.

I was so overcome by the realization that I was praying in the very place from which Jesus had risen from the dead that I began to wish I could spend the rest of my life in that friary. This would enable me to return again and again, night after night, to what must be the holiest place on earth.

Then suddenly, in a matter of moments, I had a spiritual experience that changed everything. In one sense it was nothing spectacular, but in another sense, it irrevocably changed my whole attitude to the Resurrection that I had believed in since I was a child, but which had never really touched me in the way it touched me that night. I do not claim that the words came directly from God; they most certainly came from my subconscious, but I’m sure God gave them a bit of a push. The words were these:

You are looking for Jesus of Nazareth who was cru­cified. See, here is the place where they laid him. He is risen now. He is not here. He has gone before you into Galilee.

I changed instantly. I no longer wanted to live in that friary for the rest of my life. The empty tomb suddenly lost its importance but not its significance. The meaning of the Resurrection struck me as never before. It was as if some­one had said ephphatha, and my eyes were opened to a truth that I knew with my head but had never fully pen­etrated my heart. Although my spiritual understanding had not substantially changed, it was totally transformed in a way that I find difficult to put into words. It was as if I had spent years looking at the Resurrection from the outside, as framed in a stained-glass window, then suddenly seen it again, this time from the inside with the sun shining through it.

The Resurrection meant that Jesus had been swept up out of the world of space and time in which He had lived before, not to leave us alone, but to be closer to us than ever before, and, as He prom­ised, “even to the end of time” (Matthew 28:20). Before the Resurrection Jesus was limited by the physical body into which He had freely chosen to enter. His choice meant that He could only be in one place at a time, so meeting Him would have been as difficult as meeting any major celebrity in our time. But that has all changed now because the same other-worldly love that raised Him out of this world on the first Easter day enabled Him to re-enter it on every day. So now He can enter into us as He promised, so that He can make His home in us and we can make our home in Him, as he promised at the Last Supper. All this could be possible, not in some distant pipe dream, but here and now.

The outpouring of God’s love through Jesus did not just happen in the past, two thousand years ago; it is happening continually, but we can only receive and experience it here and now in the present moment. What happened at His Resurrection was that the Jesus who was once limited by the space and time world in which He chose to enter was limited no more. Now His glorified human being continually radiates like the sun that the early Christians used to symbolize His ever-loving presence. He radiates, not so much with light as with love, but unlike the sun that only shines in the day, His love radiates both day and night, for there is no time when His love cannot be received by those who believe in Him.

Although it is true that this present moment, and every present moment, is the only time and place when we can open ourselves to receive the outpouring of the love that Jesus continues to send, love, most particularly God’s love, is not magic. Not even God can force His love on us. Forced love is simply impossible as we should know from our own experience. We cannot force our love on anyone else, nor can anyone force their love on us. Forced love is simply impossible. So, if we do not take the practical steps to turn and open ourselves to receive the divine love that is endlessly being poured out to transform and transfigure us then we will remain the same.

These were the thoughts that were occupying my mind when, at six o’clock, the small Franciscan community came into the empty tomb where I was praying to do what Christians had been doing since Jesus rose from the dead. It was the most moving Mass in which I had ever taken part. When at the end of the great Eucharistic prayer the celebrant said, “Through Him, with Him, in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is Yours, almighty Father, forever and ever,” the ‘Amen’ resounded with such power that you could almost feel our offerings mingling with Christ’s and rising to God the Father. At that moment I understood as never before how our offering becomes like a spiritual passageway that not only enables our love to rise through Christ to the Father but enables the Father’s love to descend into us through Christ. The profound mystical at-one-ment that then takes place is consummated in Holy Communion when we receive Christ and tangibly experience Him entering into us

Although I was born a Catholic, I had never seen so clearly before the meaning of the faith into which I was baptized as a child. Nor had I seen so clearly the absolute importance of the personal daily prayer to which I now committed myself. It was here that I would try daily to open myself to receive the help and strength from God that I needed to love Him in all I said and did each day, as Jesus himself did before me. Without doing this I would have nothing to offer when next I went to Mass, nor would I receive what I needed to make my whole life into the Mass.

I stayed on in prayer after that Mass in the Holy Sepulchre, reflecting on the truths that I have just shared with you. I had just had the most important experience of my life, an experience that has, in many ways shaped the rest of my life.