Day Nine: God the Spirit and Love, Part Two

“Students will be able to explain why the Holy Spirit is necessary for us to develop a relationship with God.”

Going back to St. Augustine of Hippo, I remind my students that in his theology, the Holy Spirit is best understood as the Love between the Father and the Son. Their Love is so perfect that it is its own Person. Paraclete, a term that refers to the Holy Spirit, means “advocate”, “defender”, or “counselor”. Of course, God is Love and Love is seen often in how He advocates for, defends, or counsels us. The Holy Spirit “surprises” us with gifts that help us to develop a relationship with God.

My Corner of the Classroom, Regis Jesuit High School (P. Smith)

I use the Pit Analogy and the story of Adam and Eve to demonstrate how greatly we need the Holy Spirit to help us grow in relationship with God. As a result of the Fall, we are essentially in a Pit. The Truth of our Authentic Self is obscured by our own fixation on material Truth. Our Authentic Self, the Truth of how to Love and how to be Loved, is outside the Pit, and as we are at the bottom of the Pit, we cannot see what is on the surface. All we can see is the Material Truth of what is at the bottom of the Pit, but those material Truths are not the fullness of Truth. The Holy Spirit “throws us ropes” from outside the Pit, and those “ropes” are surprise gifts that can lead us to God if we choose to grab hold of them. Out of pure Love for us, God desires us to encounter the Truth of who He is and of who we are. The Holy Spirit and those “ropes” He throws to us are evidence of that Love. My students can usually figure out that when we talk about “ropes”, we are really talking about Grace.

St. John Francis Regis Overlooking the Rockies, Regis Jesuit High School (P. Smith)

Of course, there are specific Graces or Gifts that the Holy Spirit provides us. Or, rather, Scripture tells us of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit (Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Piety, and Fear of the Lord. But as I will constantly be reminding my students, nearly everything in existence can, in fact, be a “rope” for us. In the next part of the class, I will explain to my students that for all of time, the Holy Spirit has been at work and will continue to be at work in “throwing ropes” to us.