Let the Holy Spirit take control of your life! :Commentary Fr. Jorge Miró

Father Jorge Miró shares with Exaudi readers his commentary on today’s Gospel, Sunday, May 19, 2024, titled “Let the Holy Spirit take control of your life!”

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Today we celebrate the day of Pentecost. Fifty days after Easter, the Church receives the gift of the Holy Spirit, God’s highest gift to man. The Holy Spirit is given to us for our sanctification: so that we may live totally identified with Christ, and so that, abiding in Him, we may bear abundant fruit.

The Holy Spirit gives us his gifts to sustain and encourage our Christian life, and our path of holiness. These gifts are permanent interior attitudes that make us docile to follow the impulses of the Spirit. These seven gifts are wisdom, intelligence, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety, and fear of God.

They are gifts that we cannot obtain with our effort, but rather we receive them freely in our baptism: sanctifying grace grants us the power to live and act under the motion of the Holy Spirit through his gifts (cf. Catechism 1266.).

If we accept these seven gifts in our hearts, and live animated by the impulse of the Spirit following Jesus Christ as the only Master and only Lord, the gifts of the Spirit produce in our lives twelve fruits, which are the work of the Spirit in our life. These twelve fruits, according to the Tradition of the Church, are: charity, joy, peace, patience, long-suffering (firmness, perseverance), goodness, kindness, meekness, fidelity, modesty, continence and chastity (Gal 5, 22-23).

“Let the grace of your Baptism bear fruit in a path of holiness. Let everything be open to God and to do so choose him, choose God again and again. Do not be discouraged, because you have the strength of the Holy Spirit to make it possible, and holiness, deep down, is the fruit of the Holy Spirit in your life” (cf. Francis, GE 15).

Therefore, the Word of God that we proclaim today invites you to live according to the Spirit and not according to the flesh.

Living according to the Spirit is recognizing that everything is a gift, that everything is grace. That you do not give life to yourself, that you need the gift of the Spirit every day to be able to live. And this Spirit gives you a new life: the new life of the children of God, the new life illuminated by the light of Christ, the new life that leads you to communion with other brothers in the Church, the new life that brings you to sing the new song: praise, which is the echo of the action of the Spirit in the believing heart.

To live according to the flesh (cf. Rom 8, Gal 5) is to believe that you are god. That you give life to yourself. It is trying to live with your criteria and with your strength. It is living looking at yourself instead of contemplating the Lord and opening yourself to the action of the Spirit. Likewise, it is wanting God to do your projects instead of opening yourself to God’s will. And then, one ends up tired and overwhelmed, living life more as a burden than as a gift, more as a demand than as a gift. And so many times, instead of praise, what arises is murmuring and resentment. Because we need to welcome the action of the Spirit who does not remove problems, but rather transfigures them, who makes everything new.

It is also the time to ask yourself what you are doing with the charisma, gifts that you have received from the Holy Spirit, and that you have received to put them at the service of others in the Church. You cannot keep this charisma for yourself: they are not yours. You have received them so that they may bear fruit for others.

Cheer up! Open your heart to the Holy Spirit! Let Him take control of your life!

Come Holy Spirit! (cf. Luke 11, 13).