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Fortitude, Climbing the Mountain of God: Gifts of the Holy Spirit (part 6 of 8) Associate Pastor's Column Sunday, June 4, 2006, Solemnity of Pentecost
A bit of context. We have already discussed what is a gift of the Holy Spirit. They are permanent qualities of the soul, we said earlier, that make a soul more obedient and docile to the Holy Spirit who acts in us. I differentiated the virtues from the gifts of the Holy Spirit, by saying this: while both lead us through the waters of life to the shore of salvation, the virtues are like oars, which we need to work with toil and sweat, whereas the gifts are like sails, which the Holy Spirit fills up, making us speed towards spiritual perfection on God’s strength rather than our own. Previous articles addressed the gifts of Fear of the Lord, Wisdom, Knowledge and Understanding, all of which build the virtues of faith, hope and charity. Now let’s look at the marvelous and beautiful gift of Fortitude, which builds the virtue of the same name. What is the Gift of Fortitude? Fortitude brings a certain firmness of soul to do good things and to endure bad things. We differentiate the virtue of fortitude which all men, male or female, can obtain, from the Holy Spirit’s infused gift of fortitude. By the virtue, one does not fail to do what is good in spite of difficulty, of any arduous deed or any of evil that would need be endured. The gift of the Holy Spirit moves one’s soul to achieve the end or goal of every work started, and to avoid whatever peril. It pertains not to easy things, but “arduous” ones, ones that are not easy. Fortitude, furthermore, overcomes all fear. Examples. This gift is most easily seen in the lives of the saints and martyrs: it is not by mere human virtue that they lived such exemplary lives, nor died for their Lord. Rather, the achieved heaven, the real goal of their lives, not falling into any impediment to getting there. Jesus Christ, of course, showed supreme fortitude when he was to take on the sins of the world. We see it when, in the Garden of Gethsemane, even after he experienced human fear before the prospects of suffering all the suffering of the whole world, he embraced the Father’s will. And when the soldiers came to take him away, and said they were looking for Jesus of Nazareth, he boldly proclaimed, “I am he.” He was attaining his difficult or arduous goal, of redeeming sinful man; he overcame fear; it was not easy; he endured great physical evil (pain, moral suffering and death). Another great example of fortitude is St. Maximilian Kolbe. In a Nazi prison camp in World War II, when he saw a Jewish man break down in anguish when the guards chose him to be killed, St. Maximilian stepped forward and basically said, “Take me instead.” They starved him to death with a handful of other men. St. Maximilian showed courage; he died for love of his neighbor; he endured great suffering; he fulfilled his goal in life, that proper to a priest: the salvation of souls; and he did a difficult thing with a certain divine “ease” that proves the motion of the Holy Spirit within him. How to cultivate the gift of fortitude. The first and most important way is to ask the Holy Spirit for this gift, as for each of the other six. Ask, and you shall receive. Then when God gives the gift, we need to use our freedom to collaborate with it. Both St. Augustine (On the Sermon on the Mount, 1, 4) and St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologiae II-II, 139, 2) say that when one hungers and thirsts for justice, he is living out this gift of the Holy Spirit. Let us remember that to hunger and thirst for justice is not the equivalent of social activism; in some cases, it might even be the opposite! Justice is what St. Paul discussed: holiness of life, which consists in the love of God above all things, and the love of neighbor as oneself. If justice is giving each man his due, let us give God and neighbor their due: our love. And striving to do this will enable us to cultivate both the human virtue of fortitude, and fortitude as a gift of the Holy Spirit. |
