A gift that keeps on giving
We remember today the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles. What comes to your mind when you pray to the Holy Spirit? If prayer is a dialogue with God, the best way to do that is to imagine that we are faceto-face with Him.
It is easy to visualize Jesus in that manner because He became like one of us. As St. John writes: "We proclaim to you the One who was from the beginning, whom we have heard, we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched" (1 John 1:1). In various places, films, television, and the internet, pictures, and images of Jesus abound.
It is also easy to have an image of God the Father while praying because we all have a father. Perhaps the only prayer Jesus taught us is the "Our Father" because of His wonderful experience with St. Joseph.
But honestly, I find it difficult to visualize the Holy Spirit when I pray. I am often tempted to conjure up the image of an ethereal, mysterious being, a sort of an infinite Life force that has no face. Even St. Thomas Aquinas alludes to the difficulty of addressing the Holy Spirit in prayer. He writes: “The procession of love (from God) does not have a proper name.”
The great Dominican theologian, Yves Congar, lamented the fact that, due to our inordinate desire to “personalize" our relationship with the Holy Spirit, we have tended to transfer many functions of the Holy Spirit to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Many roles ascribed to Mary — as one who sanctifies, inspires, forms Christ in believers, serves as a link between us and Christ — are actions of the Holy Spirit as found in the Bible.
As a consequence, Mary has been called intercessor, mediatrix, and dispensatrix of graces, helper, advocate, defender, protector, consoler, and counselor — functions that Biblically belong to the Holy Spirit (John 14:16 and 26; 15:36; 16:7). In the patristic period, St. Irenaeus called Mary the “Advocate” (the word in Greek is Paracletos, a title ascribed to the Holy Spirit). This word figures prominently in the hymn Salve Regina which became popular from the
12th century until now.
Humble as she is,
Mary would be the first to object to being treated like a goddess or a substitute for the Holy Spirit. As a human being, Mary is venerated through the ages because she taught us through her sublime example what it means to be truly human and to respond in unconditional obedience to the action of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
Our Catechism teaches us that the Holy Spirit is not some mysterious and abstract being but a real Person in the Holy Trinity, infinitely holy, infinitely wise, infinitely mighty, and infinitely tender. In the Bible, we see the various roles He plays in the plan of salvation, but perhaps the best and most sublime role of the Holy Spirit is to be God's presence within, between, and among us, as Pope Benedict XVI writes in his book Introduction to Christianity.
When we were baptized, the Holy Spirit makes His dwelling in us, renewing us on the inside, and the fruit of what He's doing is seen in the way we live and relate with others and the world around us (2 Cor. 5:17, 21; John 14:17, 26; Acts 1:8; Gal. 5:22-23).
One poet calls the Holy Spirit "the gift that keeps on giving." This phrase is often used negatively, as when someone refers to COVID-19 as a gift that keeps on giving because once you get the disease, it continuously gives you lots of complications that may lead to more serious and life-threatening illnesses.
Positively though, the Holy Spirit can be considered as a gift that keeps on giving because after Jesus had bestowed this gift on the Church, the blessings and graces from the Holy Spirit has since led to a web of further blessings and graces, allowing us to say like St. Paul: “We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed" (2 Corinthians 4:8-9).