God the Holy Ghost: the Divine Gift "par excellence"

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JMJ

Pentecost Sunday

Pentecost is the plenitude of God's gift to men. On Christmas Day, God gives us His only-begotten Son Jesus Christ, the Mediator, the bridge connecting humanity and divinity. During Holy Week, Our Lord, by His Passion, gives Himself entirely for us, even to death on the Cross. He bathes us, purifying and sanctifying us in His Blood - our ransom for our deliverance from the slavery of the devil. At Easter, Jesus Christ rises, and His Resurrection, as well as His Ascension, is the pledge of our own glorification. He goes before is to His Father's house to prepare a place for us, for in Him and with Him, we have become a part of the divine Family; we have become the children of God, destined for eternal beatitude. But the gift of God to men does not end there; having ascended into heaven, Our Lord and Savior, in union with the Father, sends us His Spirit, the Holy Ghost. 

The Father and the Holy Ghost loved us to the point of giving us the Word in the Incarnation; the Father and the Word so loved us as to give us the Holy Ghost. Thus the Three Persons of the Most Holy Trinity give Themselves to man, stooping to a poor nothing to redeem him from sin and the dominion of Satan, to sanctify him - to purify and empty his heart of everything that is not God, and to bring him into Their own intimacy. Such is the excessive charity with which God has loved us; and the divine gift to our souls reaches its culminating point in the gift of the Holy Ghost, Who is the Gift ​par excellence​: "Altissimi Donum Dei" (Gift of the Most High God).

By his descent upon the Apostles under the form of tongues of fire, the Holy Ghost shows us how He, the Spirit of charity, is given to us in order to transform us, so that ​the inward man is renewed day by day ​(2 Cor. 4.16), ​​unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ ​(Eph. 4.13), until Christ be formed in [us] (Gal. 4.19): ​And I live now, not I; but Christ liveth in me ​(Gal. 2.20). The Holy Ghost therefore is given to us to help us in our infirmity (cf., Rom. 8.26) so that we may be able attain to this summit of the program of Christian perfection. 

Life Himself (the Uncreated Grace) is communicated to us, that is, the participation of His Divine Life. Since God's nature is pure life (​I Am Who Am​ , Ex. 3.14), by participating therein we cannot help but share in the divine life, in eternal life itself which resides in the Father and was manifested to us for the precise purpose of being communicated to us. And possessing divine life, we ought also to possess the divine operations conformable to it - that is, a most perfect degree of charity manifested by Our Lord in His Passion and Death on the Cross - that we may proceed as the true sons of God, like Our Lord and Savior in His submission and obedience to the pleasures of His Heavenly Father ​even to the death of the Cross (​Phil. 2.8). However, in this supernatural Christian operation of a most perfect charity which consists in the supreme sacrifice of our whole mind, heart, body, and soul to God (cf., "Christian Love: Love of the Cross") - in union with the supreme sacrifice of Our Lord of His life and self which is being sacramentally renewed on His high altar (cf., "My Sacrifice and yours...") - the Holy Ghost is the Supreme Conductor and Director, the Supreme Master, for ​by the Holy Ghost, [Jesus Christ] offered Himself unspotted unto God​ (Heb.9.14). The Holy Ghost is communicated to us that we may reach this perfect transformation of love without which we cannot enter Heaven - the abode of God and His angels and His SAINTS.

A blessed Feast to all! 

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Related post: "The Divine Spirit and the 'spirit' of Vatican II on Homosexuality"