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The Solemnity of Pentecost (this year, June 9) is the Church’s annual reminder to us that God does not intend for us to live a good human life.
That’s right—you read me correctly. God does not want us to be good human beings.
Oh, all right—let me clarify that for you. God does not intend us to be merely good human beings.
Pentecost, and the gift of the Holy Spirit we celebrate on this day, is the perpetual reminder from God that he didn’t do all that He did—send his Son to become a man, die on the Cross, rise, ascend into heaven—only so that we could live a morally good life.
Oh, no. He made us for that, for sure, but for so much more. The Holy Spirit comes at Pentecost, comes to each of us personally at Baptism, and abides with us so that we can begin, even here and now in this life, to live a divine life.
This is hard to wrap our minds around, true. Our normal experience of things is … well, so very human. Many of us may feel that we’re doing quite well most days to make it across the threshold of virtuous behavior at all. Dare we hope to have more?
It is our faith to hope for more. The Holy Spirit is here, now, in you, in me, and his whole action is to empower us to live divinely, which simply means to live as Christ lived and lives, to live the life of the Beatitudes and the great commandment of love, here and now, in an intimate communion of love with the Father.
No, of course we cannot do this with our own power. This is the role of the traditional seven gifts of the Holy Spirit in our lives. The Holy Spirit gives us gifts beyond numbering of course, but these seven, taken from Isaiah 11: 1-3, are given to each and all.
And their role in our lives is to make us available to the Spirit, so that he can make us available to Christ, so that our lives can be transformed into a perfect sharing in his life.
Each gift of the Spirit takes some part of our humanity—good in its original creation by God—heals what has been broken by sin, and elevates it so it can enter this divine sphere. And each gift of the Spirit bears fruit in our lives in the various Beatitudes found in Matthew 5.
All of the gifts taken together give us a beautiful picture of just how much God loves us, how much God wants to give each of us, and has given us by giving us the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
I want to spend the rest of this month’s article and next month’s article going through all seven gifts and showing just how this is so.
May these reflections help us to be more aware of the gift of the Spirit in our lives, and more open to allowing him to transform us into Christ’s love in the world.
Fear of the Lord
Now this is not the fear of a harsh, punishing God—that is called servile fear. This gift is the attitude that accompanies our love of God. If you think “fear” and “love” don’t go together, think again.
Think of anyone you have ever loved in your life, at all. Of course where there is love, there is fear.
Fear of the Lord is a horror of anything that would remove us from the One we love. It is also a horror of anything that would hurt him. We know that we can’t really hurt God, but God desires so much for us, so much happiness and joy. Fear of the Lord seeks not to deny God anything he wishes to do in us.
So, by the gift of fear of the Lord we flee from sin, of course. But this gift makes us even flee from imperfections of character, those little habits or foibles that may hardly rate as sin, but which hamper us, nonetheless.
By his gift of holy fear, the Spirit heals us of the attraction to evil, the allure sin has for us due to our fallen condition.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom (Prov 9:10). It is the beginning of wisdom because the first truth of wisdom is that God is God and I am not God. God is my life and my goodness and my happiness.
Fear of the Lord knows this and acts on it, to flee from anything that will remove me from life and goodness and happiness.
The Spirit’s gift of fear elevates our natural human passion of fear—that in us which makes us flee from evil, by putting it into right order, showing us what we should fear, what we should flee from, and to what (or rather, to Whom) we should cling for dear life.
The beatitude which crowns this gift is blessed are the poor in spirit.
Fear of the Lord teaches us to know our utter and absolute need for God. Because of that knowledge, everything else is gladly thrown on the fire if it takes us from him.
Our treasure is in heaven—what is precious to us, our treasure, is what we think about, act towards. In poverty of spirit, we know that our one treasure is God, and we act accordingly.
Fortitude
Fortitude is another word for strength or courage. This gift heals the wound of weakness that is a fruit of original sin, our readiness to give up in the face of obstacles or opposition. Fortitude is persistence, the ability to withstand any threats, dangers, hardships, to the point of death.
Now there is a human virtue of fortitude, and it strengthens us to achieve the reasonable good, the good that we are aiming at. We need the virtue of fortitude to succeed at any task that is of any difficulty.
But sometimes there is no reasonable good to aim for. Sometimes the success of our efforts is not given to us to see. Sometimes, and especially in the spiritual life, the true success of our efforts is only shown to us in the blessed life of heaven.
And so the natural virtue of fortitude is perfected by the supernatural gift of fortitude, which strengthens us with the very strength of God, to persevere to the end in the life of charity, and to endure anything God asks of us, no matter how foolish it may seem.
Fortitude gives us an assurance that God will not allow our lives to fail, to be fruitless, that even if we have seemingly little to show for all our efforts to live the Gospel, God will see the work through to completion and success.
This is a gift seen most dramatically and beautifully in the martyrs. It is the gift of take up your cross and follow me.
The beatitude which is the fruit of fortitude is: Blessed are you when men shall revile you and persecute you and falsely speak all sorts of evil against you for my sake.
Persecution—to be willing to be persecuted, mocked, reviled, slandered, for Christ—this is only possible with the help of the Spirit, with the courage and strength the Spirit gives us by means of this gift. And with both poverty of spirit and persecution the reward is the kingdom of heaven.
Piety
This gift heals the wound, begotten in us by sin, of self-centeredness. Piety orients our attention to God as our Father and orients our will to serve and honor him and give him all that is due him. This perfects the virtue of justice in us, by which we are concerned to give everyone what is due to them.
By the gift of piety we give God what is due to him—all honor, glory, and worship, all our love. It is a gift of the Spirit because it is the Spirit who makes us cry out, “Abba, Father!” (Rom 8: 15).
It is the Spirit alone who reveals to us that God truly is our loving Father, which is the very heart and meaning of piety.
Two beatitudes flow from this gift. First, blessed are the meek. Meekness is the virtue that modifies our aggressiveness. It gentles us. This flows from piety because piety makes us totally centered on the Father, on our life as sons and daughters of the Father.
As such, all people are our brothers and sisters. We have no enemies, no one to hate, no one to attack. (What a beautiful way to live!) This is the fruit of piety which centers us on God.
Also, blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. This is the fervent desire to do all that God desires of me.
Piety, which really means falling in love with God, leads us to fall in love with his will, his plans for us, and to sincerely desire them, to really want to do God’s will, not grudgingly, but to hunger and thirst for it.
The reward of this beatitude is that we get to do it (for you will be satisfied). We can actually fulfill God’s plan for us, which at times can seem pretty impossible.
So those are the first three gifts of the Spirit. Stay tuned to the July-August issue for the last four.
In and through all of these gifts, it is all about God wanting us to be, not good human beings only, but bearers of his love into the world.
May the Spirit bring us all closer to that goal.
