Patrick Comerford
Easter is a 50-day season that beginning on Easter Day (4 April 2026) and that continues until the Day of Pentecost (24 May 2026), or Whit Sunday. This week began with the Sixth Sunday of Easter (Easter VI, 10 May 2026).
Before today begins, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:
1, reading today’s Gospel reading;
2, a short reflection;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
John 15: 26 to 16: 4 (NRSVA):
[Jesus said:] 26 ‘When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf. 27 You also are to testify because you have been with me from the beginning.
1 ‘I have said these things to you to keep you from stumbling. 2 They will put you out of the synagogues. Indeed, an hour is coming when those who kill you will think that by doing so they are offering worship to God. 3 And they will do this because they have not known the Father or me. 4 But I have said these things to you so that when their hour comes you may remember that I told you about them.’
Today’s Reflections:
The Café Slavia in Prague was once the traditional hangout of Czech writers, artists, intellectuals, and political dissidents. Although those days are long gone, the Café Slavia – or Kavarna Slavia – opposite the National Theatre and overlooking the Vltava River has been a national institution since it first opened in August 1884.
The café has changed in appearances over the years – from Art Nouveau to Social Realism – leaving us with the Functionalist interior with Art Deco wall decorations of today. The walls café are lined with photographs of the writers, artists, revolutionaries and intellectuals who once came here.
The café became a cultural place where writers, poets and intellectuals met to talk and debate. The original regular clientele included the composer Bedřich Smetana, the actor Jindřich Mošna, the poet Jaroslav Seifert, and the writer Vítězslav Nezval, Josef Čapek and many others. The list of guests and visitors has been described as ‘a who’s who of Bohemian culture at the time.’
The interior was changed to the popular style Art Deco style but has remained unchanged since then, with Tonet chairs, dark wood tables and green marble walls that evoke the 1920s. During the communist era, the café became state property, but continued to draw artists, writers and intellectuals, even after the Prague Spring and the invasion by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968, and it became the meeting place for dissidents.
Regular guests during the Velvet Revolution in 1989 included the poet, playwright and human rights activist Václav Havel, who later became the Czech president, and the poet and artist Jiří Kolář. More recent guests have included Hillary Clinton and the writer Arnošt Lustig. The café closed in 1992, but re-opened in 1997 with a glittering ceremony that also marked the eighth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution.
President Havel sent a message saying the re-opening of Cafe Slavia was a victory of ‘reason over stupidity.’ He said its reopening was a step towards renewing the natural structure of Czech spiritual life, stressing the café’s role as a meeting place for different artistic streams and currents of opinion.
The owners of the Café Slavia have tried to recapture the atmosphere of the 1930s, when the café was in its hey-day, and in the evenings, a live piano player helps to create a romantic atmosphere in the evening.
The café is also known for ‘The Absinthe Drinker,’ a copy of the large painting by Viktor Oliva (1861-1928). The original hangs in the Zlata Husa Gallery in Prague, but this copy has been on the wall of the artist’s favourite café since 1920. Viktor Oliva was part of the ‘Parisian Bohemians’, a group of Czech artists who lived in Paris in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it was there that he discovered the comforts of the absinthe, the anise-flavoured, green, highly alcoholic spirit often known in literature as la fée verte ‘the green fairy’. It has often been portrayed as a dangerously addictive psychoactive drug and hallucinogen, giving rise to the term ‘absinthism’.
In among the chairs and tables of Café Slavia, a man sits alone sipping a glass of absinthe, with an open newspaper to one side. In the background, a waiter is approaching to serve him. But the man’s eyes are fixed on the figure of an alluring but transparent young green woman perched on his table.
Is she his muse?
Is he reminiscing about a past or lost love?
Or, has he fallen in love with the ‘green fairy’ – another name for the strong hallucinating drink?
What is your comforting spirit? Where do you seek or find inspiration? Is any talk of the Holy Spirit as irrelevant to you as talk about green fairies’?
The Gospel reading at the Eucharist today (John 15: 26 to 16: 4) continues our readings from the ‘Farewell Discourse’ at the Last Supper in Saint John’s Gospel. Christ continues to prepare his followers for his departure, and repeats once again his promise of the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost: ‘When the Advocate comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who comes from the Father, he will testify on my behalf’ (verse 26).
Our thinking about the Holy Spirit is often made difficult by traditional images of a dove that looks more like a homing pigeon; or tongues of fire dancing around meekly-bowed heads of people cowering and hiding in the upper room in Jerusalem, rather than a room that is bursting at the seams and ready to overflow.
But the Holy Spirit is not something added on as an extra course, as an after-thought after the Resurrection and the Ascension.
Last year we marked the 1,700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea and the agreement on the Nicene Creed, in which we say: ‘We believe in the Holy Spirit’. Do we really believe in the Holy Spirit as ‘the Lord, the giver of life,’ in the Holy Spirit as the way in which God ‘has spoken through the prophets’?
The gift of the Holy Spirit does not stop being effective the day after confirmation, the day after ordination, the day after hearing someone speaking in tongues, or the day after the Day of Pentecost.
God never leaves us alone. This is what Christ promises the disciples, the whole Church, in today’s Gospel reading. We need have no fears, for the Resurrection breaks through all the barriers of time and space, of gender and race, of language and colour.
If the Holy Spirit is the Advocate and is living in me and you, then who am I an advocate for? Who do I speak up for when there is no-one else to speak up for them?
Pentecost includes all – even those we do not like. Who do you not want in the Kingdom of God? Who do I find it easy to think of excluding from the demands the Holy Spirit makes on me and on the Church?
Pentecost promises hope. But hope is not certainty, manipulating the future for our own ends, it is trusting in God’s purpose.
‘Little Gidding,’ the fourth and final poem in the Four Quartets, is TS Eliot’s own Pentecost poem. ‘Little Gidding’ begins in ‘the dark time of the year’, when a brief and glowing afternoon sun ‘flames the ice, on pond and ditches’ as it ‘stirs the dumb spirit’, not with wind but with ‘pentecostal fire.’
At the end of the poem, Eliot describes how the eternal is contained within the present and how history exists in a pattern, and repeating the words of Julian of Norwich, he is assured:
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
I have no doubts that the Holy Spirit works in so many ways that we cannot understand. And no doubts that the Holy Spirit works best and works most often in the quiet small ways that bring hope rather than in the big dramatic ways that seek to control.
Sometimes, even when it seems foolish, sometimes, even when it seems extravagant, it is worth being led by the Holy Spirit. Because the Holy Spirit may be leading us to surprising places, and, surprisingly, leading others there too, counting them in when we thought they were counted out.
Whether they are persecuted minorities in the Middle East, immigrants threatened with deportation to a third country, cowering asylum seekers isolated in hotels and subjected to barracking baying from flag-waving activists, or people who are marginalised at home, or those we are uncomfortable with because of how they sound, seem, look or smell, God’s generosity counts them in and offers them hope.
And if God counts them in, so should the Church. And so should I.
Christ is risen!
The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia!
Today’s Prayers (Monday 11 May 2026):
The theme this week (10-17 May 2026) in ‘Pray With the World Church’, the Prayer Diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel) is ‘Parenting with Purpose’ (pp 54-55). This theme was introduced yesterday with a Programme Update from Ella Sibley, former Regional Manager for Europe and Oceania.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Monday 11 May 2026) invites us to pray:
Lord, we pray for the Positive Parenting Programme and all its facilitators. May each parent, child, and community leader experience guidance, trust, and understanding that builds stronger, safer families.
The Collect:
God our redeemer,
you have delivered us from the power of darkness
and brought us into the kingdom of your Son:
grant, that as by his death he has recalled us to life,
so by his continual presence in us he may raise us
to eternal joy;
through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord,
who is alive and reigns with you,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
God our Father,
whose Son Jesus Christ gives the water of eternal life:
may we thirst for you,
the spring of life and source of goodness,
through him who is alive and reigns, now and for ever.
Additional Collect:
Risen Christ,
by the lakeside you renewed your call to your disciples:
help your Church to obey your command
and draw the nations to the fire of your love,
to the glory of God the Father.
Yesterday’s Reflections
Continued Tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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