Trailblazers Retreat Conferences, Table of Contents

   April 18-20, 2008

Talk 3: Knowing the Holy Spirit; and The Motto of World Youth Day 2008

      Let’s begin by remembering where we are in this retreat. A Trailblazer is less lost and makes progress most efficiently when he sees the map.

We have had Mass on both days, and this has been the most important part of each day. We have begun to pray the liturgy of the hours. The young women here are a bit more tired than the men, yet more joyful, because they spent the night keeping company with our Lord in nocturnal adoration. We have accompanied our Lord on his way of the cross, trying to come to terms with that extremely important question in our lives: the meaning of my own suffering. We have pursued conversion through the sacrament of reconciliation. We have listened to the Pope and his exchanged with a portion of American young people in New York. We have gotten to know one another at least a bit during meal times, and we have brainstormed as a group about our practical preparations for World Youth Day. And, not least, we have enjoyed delicious meals.

Yesterday’s talk was mostly about how to do a retreat, this retreat. This morning we meditated on the three stages of the spiritual life, those of conversion, of growth and of union, which ancient Catholic authors and doctors of the Church have named the purgative, illuminative and unitive ways of the spiritual life.

Now it is time for us to enter more specifically into the motif of World Youth Day 2008, which is “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses” (Acts 1:8).

Who is the Holy Spirit? How can I come to know him and love him? How should my interior dispositions and my exterior actions be since the Spirit dwells within me? To answer these questions, and provide a few more insights, I wanted to find a specific passage, or writing of one of the ancient Fathers of the Church, like On the Holy Spirit by St. Basil, or maybe even using the Catechism of the Catholic Church. All these are great options, but my mind rested on a certain guide most apt for this coming World Youth Day.

See, from June 29, 2008 to June 29, 2009, the whole Church is celebrating a “Holy Year” of St. Paul. This is a year where special graces and indulgences are available, and the entire Mystical Body of Christ polarizes the movements of our minds and the beatings of our hearts around one theme and one goal. This year commemorates a very approximate 2000 years since the birth of St. Paul, the last of the Apostles, the Apostle to the Gentiles, and one of the greatest saints ever. The most logical thing to do, in my opinion, is to use St. Paul as our guide. If the Holy Spirit is our theme for World Youth Day, and St. Paul is our theme for the Holy Year, then let’s invite St. Paul to teach us, and the results will be guaranteed. Yet tonight we only start these reflections, and we’ll keep working on them through World Youth Day, and through the Holy Year.

I have prepared you to some degree for this by the pages called the Via. I expect you are all using the Via every week. At considerable expense and serious inversion of time and consultation, we prepared these for you, so that as we approached World Youth Day, your soul could be made more and more into that fertile ground, that good soil, where the seed of the word of the Pope will fall and bear fruit ten, fifty and a hundredfold In the Via I have included many verses of St. Paul where he speaks about the Spirit. This is so that you read it, think about it, maybe open the Bible yourself and go to those passages to see the verses which come before and after, maybe discuss with your friends what these verses say and mean.

To offer a comprehensive study of what St. Paul says about the Holy Spirit would be completely impossible tonight, and clearly beyond our scope. What interests us is not only the Holy Spirit, but what the Lord Jesus says about his effect in our souls, which in Acts 1:8 are two: you will receive power, and you will be my witnesses.

Therefore tonight we focus on three questions:

1. Who is the Holy Spirit?

2. How can I know the Holy Spirit?

3. What does Christ mean by, these words, “power” and “witnesses”?

Know the Holy Spirit

            The first point is about who the Holy Spirit is. I would like to begin quoting a “Father of the Church.” The Church Fathers are saints of ancient times, usually Bishops, and who stand out for a few reasons. First, they are closer in time to  the Apostles, so the oral traditions which the Apostles left behind were stronger among them than they are now. Second of all, they lived exemplary, holy lives. Third, they were teachers blessed with unusually depth and clarity regarding the teachings of the Church.

            One Father of the Church is St. John of Damascus. He is the last of those who carry that title. Damascus is a city today in Syria, not far from Lebanon and Palestine  – we know it from the Acts of the Apostles, whither St. Paul travelled to persecute Christians (cf. Acts 9). This city fell to the Muslim Arabs in 635, and St. John Damascene lived there in the late six hundreds and early seven hundreds. He eventually became a monk at St. Sabbas Monastery near Jerusalem.

He wrote much, to the glory of God, and even to the glory of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Some of his passages are about the Holy Trinity. In these, he offers some images and explanations to help us know the Holy Spirit more. We read:

[First, he gives us positive points of comparison.] Think of the Father as a spring of life begetting the Son like a river and the Holy Ghost like a sea, for the spring and the river and the sea are all one nature. Think of the Father as a root, and of the Son as a branch, and of the Spirit as a fruit, for the substance in these three is one. The Father is a sun with the Son as rays and the Holy Ghost as heat. The Holy Trinity transcends by far every similitude and figure.

[Next, he gives us negative teachings, what he is not.] So, when you hear of an offspring of the Father, do not think of a corporeal offspring. And when you hear that there is a Word, do not suppose Him to be a corporeal word.  And when you hear of the Spirit of God, do not think of wind and breath. Rather, hold your persuasion with a simply faith alone. For the concept of the Creator is arrived at by analogy from his creatures.(1)

St. John of Damascus further explains the Holy Spirit, on several occasions, by using the phenomenon of speech. He will describe God the Father as the source, yet  “God is not without a Word.” God, in fact, talks a lot! The entire Bible is his word, and his Spirit speaks to us through the Bible, and through Sacred Tradition, now until the end of time. So when one says a word, there are two things: the word that is said, and the breath that comes with it and projects it. It is the breath, in Latin, spiritus, of the Word. He also says:

Our speech, in proceeding from our mind is not entirely distinct from it. For, in so far as it comes from the mind, it is something distinct from it; whereas, in so far as it reveals the mind itself, it is not entirely distinct from it. Actually, it is identical with it in nature, while distinct from it in its subject.(2)

            St. John then offers us a few ways of approaching the Holy Spirit, of knowing who and what this Spirit of God is. In summary:

1. The Holy Spirit so exceeds the capacity of our minds, being God, that we can only find comparisons to say, “He is like this,” and then after that, to add, “But he is not like this.”
2. Every comparison we find is only by analogy, and will always fall short. But that should not deter us from trying to penetrate into the mystery of God with our minds and hearts.
3. If God were water, the Holy Spirit would be the sprawling and infinite sea. (The Father, a spring; the Son, a river.)
4. If God were a tree, the Holy Spirit would be the fruit of that tree. (The Father, the root; the Son, a branch.)
5. If God were light, the Holy Spirit would be the heat of the sun. (The Father would be the sun itself, and the Eternal Son would be the rays of light.)
6. If God were communication, the Holy Spirit would be the breath of the Father which carries the word, who is the Son.

Now for the second point: how can I know the Holy Spirit? Having read St. John of Damascus, we see what it is for a saint to spend many hours, nay, days of his life meditating on the Holy Spirit to say such profound and perfectly correct things about God. Yet we only learn about the Holy Spirit. That is not enough: our hearts wish to know God directly, person to Person. How can we do that?

The answer is found in the Person of Jesus Christ. Often in scriptures we find that Jesus calls himself the revelation or manifestation of God the Father. We read in the Gospel of St. John as follows:

(Jn 14:8-10)

Philip said to [Jesus], “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.”

Jesus said to him, “Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works.”

This, as other passages of the Scriptures, show us that Jesus manifests the Father to us. If you know Christ, the Son of God, you know God the Father as well. And here is  the key, the answer to our question, “How can I know the Holy Spirit?”. Jesus also manifests the Spirit to us.

Pope Benedict XVI has something to say here. On November 15, 2006, the Pope taught about the Holy Spirit to those who attended the Papal Audience, the public, weekly, catechetical session where he speaks to anyone who wishes to attend. He spoke about St. Paul’s teachings regarding the Spirit, and his words are amazingly insightful.(3)

This is important to us because a Holy Year of St. Paul is approaching. It will start on June 29, 2008 and finish a year later, June 29, 2009. Pope Benedict proclaimed this Holy Year to commemorate a very approximate 2000 years since the birth of St. Paul. When we will be in Sydney, Australia, the Holy Year will have begun, and we will be in the midst of it. So let’s invite St. Paul to teach us about the Holy Spirit. What does he have to say? And what does the Pope contribute? The Pope quotes St. Paul and writes:

For this very reason, St. Paul spoke directly of the “Spirit of Christ” (Rom 8:9), of the “Spirit of the Son” (cf. Gal 4:6) or of the “Spirit of Jesus Christ” (Phil 1:19). It is as though he wanted to say that not only is God the Father visible in the Son (cf. Jn 14:9), but that the Spirit of God also expresses himself in the life and action of the Crucified and Risen Lord!”

            This Spirit of the Son teaches us to be children of God, as St. Paul also writes:

“For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set me free from the law of sin and death… you did not receive the Spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the spirit of sonship. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’, it is the Spirit himself” (Rom 8:2,15) who speaks in us, because, as children, we can call God “Father.”(4)

            The Holy Spirit, therefore, isn’t like one of three alternative Gods to whom we may have a devotion: either the Father, the Son or the Holy Spirit. He is the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, and with them “he is worshipped and glorified” (Creed).

            So let’s get more down to earth and practical with this question, “How can I come to know the Spirit?” We know that He is the Spirit of the Son, and the Son is the perfect revelation of God. And therefore, we can apply this principle to every passage of the Gospel: I can come to know the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Christ, through Jesus the Lord.

            But how? Here is where those analogies of St. John of Damascus come in handy.

            He compares God to water. Jesus is like a river, springing from the fountain, who is the Father. If you had never seen a sea or lake, but you only saw a river, indeed, the greatest of all rivers, could you not come to know something about what the sea is like?

            Or again, he compares God to a tree. When you want to know what fruit is on the tree, you don’t look to the roots: you can’t see them. Where do you look? To the branch, and there you find what pours forth from the branch, namely, a fruit.

            Or again, he compares God to light. On a chill spring day, if you want warmth, where do you go? To those places where the rays of light fall, and those rays communicate to you warmth.

            Therefore, in the passages of the scriptures, when Jesus speaks and acts, he shows what he has inside: and this is the Holy Spirit. [He has a human soul, too, which is also revealed in his action; the Holy Spirit does not take the place of his human soul.] Jesus brings forth a fruit, and this fruit is supernatural love: and this Divine Love is the Holy Spirit. Jesus communicates warmth to your soul, which are the seven gifts and twelve fruits: and this is the Holy Spirit’s doing.

            So take any passage from the four Gospels you like, and apply these questions, and you will be amazed how you come to know God, personally, interiorly, when you strive to find the answers:

1. What do Jesus’ words and actions on the outside show about his Spirit on the inside?
2. What fruits of the Spirit do Jesus’ words and actions produce?
3. How do Jesus’ words and actions cause the Spirit to change my own soul?

The last point to consider in this talk is about those two words, “Power,” and “witnesses.” See, this Holy Spirit will give you power, and make you witnesses. After all we have seen, this makes perfect sense.

Power is the potential to move something. Different contemporary sciences apply this word in different ways, such as “horsepower,” or “five to the eighth power.” The type of movement proper to the Catholic faith is moving from sin towards grace, from creature to creator, from egotism to love.

The Pope is therefore calling to your minds that you are the ones to whom God has given the power to help poor sinners, to help those attached to the things of this world, to help those who are slaves of egotism, to eventually become saints. That, indeed, is the purpose of everyone’s life on earth: to become a saint, and get to heaven. There is no other purpose to life. But how can you help your neighbor get to heaven? That’s impossible; so Christ gives you his Spirit, and by this Spirit you will be able to help others convert and get to heaven. (Provided, of course, that you start with yourself.)

That is why the Lord then says the words, “you will be my witnesses.” For “faith comes through hearing.” As St. Paul says:

(Rom 10:17-18)

So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ. But I say, surely they have never heard, have they? Indeed they have; “Their voice has gone out into all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.” (cf. Ps 19:4)

Paul in this Passage reproaches his own people, the Jewish nation, for having rejected Christ. This is not true of all Jews, for the Apostles and first saints in the Bible were almost all Jews. Yet he longs for their conversion, and that is what every Catholic wishes for them: not to stop being Jews, but to keep being Jews, but Catholic Jews.

Our point is not the Jews, however; our point is that faith in God brings salvation, and it comes through hearing. The Pope now turns to you, young people, and wants you to spread the good news. He doesn’t turn to us older adults or elderly: he turns you you, for “you are strong” (1 Jn 2:14).

Perhaps, then, this talk will end in a very open ended way, because it ends with a question: what are each one of you going to do, so that you can help as many people as you can to get to heaven? What are you going to do? Both in deed, and in word? Will you respond to the Holy Spirit? If the Holy Spirit takes you to the cross, will you suffer for the salvation of others? If the Holy Spirit raises you up from the tomb of your sins and weaknesses, will you spread that new life which he has given you? What are you going to do? And when are you going to do it?