160. Sixth Friday of Easter

Meditations no. 206 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

Preparing to receive the Holy Spirit.

I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Counsellor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. The Incarnate Word of God has now completed his mission on earth. After his departure the Holy Spirit, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, will come.

Ten days must go by before the promise of Jesus is fulfilled. In the company of our Mother and the Apostles, we are preparing our hearts for Pentecost. In the Old Testament, this feast was regarded as very great and holy, and now, following the descent of the Holy Spirit on the same day, it constitutes one of the greatest feasts of the liturgical year, another great paschal celebration after the joy of our Lord’s Resurrection. We will be present at the founding of the Church. People’s lives will be flooded with light and grace; love will triumph in the hearts of the faithful, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

We have to be ready to receive all that strength and grace and make room in our soul for the Holy Spirit. Starting from today, we begin to pray: Veni Sancte Spiritus / et emitte caelitus / lucis tuae radium: Come, Holy Spirit, send from heaven a ray of your light. Ours is the joy of the Apostles on returning to Jerusalem, because together with the Holy Spirit, the Counsellor, we will receive the spirit of sonship. When we cry, “Abba, Father!” it is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.

From this moment on, as we turn our daily work into prayer, we prepare for our encounter with the Spirit of God. Be devout: don’t fail to keep up a constant relationship with the Great Unknown and the Great Solitary One. This is what I call the Holy Spirit and Christ humbled and hidden in our tabernacles. Through the Holy Humanity of Christ you will meet the Paraclete, who comes as the fruit of the Cross. You will reach the Father: our whole life, in which the divine and the human are intimately united, will be a lasting dialogue with the Blessed Trinity.

Increasing our desire for holiness.

If the sanctifying action of God is so necessary, why is the Holy Spirit truly called the “Great Unknown”? The Paraclete is unknown to the extent that holiness is unknown. And so it is our desire to be holy that leads us to know and love God’s Spirit. By the Holy Spirit, our actions, which could have been like those of an animal, become those of a Christian, namely supernatural. These words of our Father can help us begin the ten days’ devotion to the Holy Spirit, from which we hope to receive so many graces.

We heard our Founder say a thousand times: My children: the children of God in Opus Dei have to have one exclusive concern. And it is this: to be holy. Realize that our Lord has invited all Christians to holiness. But he has said it to us in a special way: elegit nos in ipso ante mundi constitutionem, ut essemus sancti et immaculati in conspectu eius. He chose us in himself before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his presence. There is nothing greater than this! This particular choice which God has made of each one of us has a specific purpose: for us to be holy.

While this exclusive concern should be shown always and in every circumstance, we have to increase our desire for holiness especially during these days leading up to the coming of the Holy Spirit, from whom comes all the holiness we long for. To live according to the Holy Spirit means to live by faith and hope and charity - to allow God to take possession of our lives and to change our hearts, to make us resemble him more and more. A mature and profound Christian life cannot be improvised, because it is the result of the growth of God’s grace in us. In the Acts of the Apostles we find the early Christian community described in a single sentence, brief but full of meaning: and they continued steadfastly in the teaching of the Apostles and in the communion of the breaking of the bread and in prayers.

This is how the early Christians lived, and this is how we too should live: meditating on the doctrine of our faith until it becomes part of us; receiving our Lord in the Eucharist; meeting him in the personal dialogue of our prayer, without trying to hide behind impersonal conduct, but face to face with him. These means should become the very substance of our attitude. If they are lacking we will have, perhaps, the ability to think in an erudite manner, an activity that is more or less intense, some practices and devotions. But we will not have an authentically Christian way of life, because we will lack that personal relationship with Christ which is a real and living participation in the divine work of salvation.

This is a teaching that applies to any Christian, because we are all equally called to sanctity. There are no second-class Christians, obliged to practise only a “simplified version” of the Gospel We have all received the same baptism, and although there is a great variety of spiritual gifts and human situations, there is only one Spirit who distributes God’s gifts, only one faith, only one hope, only one love.

We need to examine our souls during these days to see if we are in danger of setting limits to our sanctification, or subordinating it to other intentions. We must decide to turn our backs on everything opposed to our sanctity. You should hate in yourself whatever is your own work, St Augustine reminds us, and love that which is the work of God. As our Father used to tell us: “Blacksmith, either do your job or get off the bench.” In this case, to “do your job” means to make the firm, operative and unconditional decision to be holy, and to prepare generously to respond to the action of the Paraclete.

The Holy Spirit will heal our defects if we are docile to his action.

God is the one who sanctifies. He respects our freedom in such a way that we can choose, assisted by his grace. Thus, while the path of our sanctification is always begun by God, there is a decisive moment for all of us when we consciously and freely decide to serve him with our entire life. To maintain our desire of holiness is a grace from God, and is ordinarily shown by our beginning again and again, humbly and wholeheartedly, as often as necessary - which means always. Neither our daily experience, nor what we have come to know of ourselves, nor our well-founded mistrust of our own strength, should discourage us, because God is all-powerful, able to accept our penance and to cover our errors with his kind judgements.

The Gospel shows us crowds of hopelessly-ill people who find their cure in Jesus Christ. This makes it clear that no experience, no matter how difficult it may be or how negative it may seem, can justify what would really be a lack of confidence in the Holy Spirit’s action; for in him, St Cyril of Jerusalem says, we have from God a great helper and protector; a great teacher of the Church; a great combatant who fights for us.

The Holy Spirit will enlighten us with a ray of his light if we do not place obstacles in the way of his action, but are sincere with ourselves, in order to be sincere in the Confidence. We have come to the Work to be saints, and we shouldn’t be surprised to discover that we are a long way from being so. And so we acknowledge our weaknesses, without trying to gloss over them in a self-righteous way, and this helps us avoid pride, which is so terribly blinding and makes us see everything the wrong way round. My children, be sincere with yourselves, be objective. That way we’ll make our dedication effective. It’s hard: we have to be humble, to open our heart completely in spiritual direction in order to lay bare every corner of our soul.

Our asceticism has the simplicity of the Gospel. We shouldn’t complicate our souls, and leave our hearts in darkness. We cannot hinder the Holy Spirit’s action, causing a gap in our life which deprives us -even for a short time - of simplicity of heart and sincerity before God.

Let us ask our Lady for that simplicity of heart which will make us docile to the light of the Holy Spirit, and help us understand that only one thing is necessary: holiness.