When we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit and the Spirit comes into us, then we recognize that the Spirit is the Spirit of God’s love, which calls us to wholeness. Sin breaks us apart. What God comes to do is to reconcile us, not only to each other, but to reconcile us to ourselves. In a sense, the Holy Spirit is like a catalyst. Without the Holy Spirit, all people do is keep hitting each other. They never learn how to get joined. But with the power of the Holy Spirit . . . He’s a catalyst. He Himself doesn’t change, but by coming into our lives, He changes us. He allows these disparate parts of us to come and work together, to get joined, so that we have the right balance about who we are and what God calls us to be. Then we can break the hold that sin has on us, because then we’re going to live in the righteousness of God.

When we talk about the Holy Spirit coming among us, we talk about those seven gifts that come to us. Those gifts, like so many other things, are there, not for ourselves individually, but for all of us. When we learn how to open ourselves up to the Spirit, not only does it touch our lives, but it has an effect on others. So when we talk about piety or fear of the Lord or counsel or knowledge, these are always spiritual gifts. They are gifts that help us understand what it means to be human, what it means to be able to put these things together so that we can be the people God wants us to be.

When we come to understand that God calls us to more, then we begin to value our lives and the lives of others. That’s what we mean by love—that God has loved us and has said, “You are worthwhile.” When we begin to understand that we are worthwhile, then the other person is worthwhile. Then we begin to operate with care. Then we begin to relate to people with real concern. It doesn’t mean we’re always going to do it perfectly. We still have to also balance out that freedom and free will that God has given to us, because, no matter what, we’re still going to bump into people. We’re still going to have bad things happen to us. We are going to have to deal with what I want and what other people want and the demand that makes on us. We’re going to have to deal with the fact that we want “something more,” but our body says, “I can’t do it.”

When you read the lives of the saints, you discover they had tremendous callings but not every one of those callings was answered. St. Anthony, the one who is patron of lost articles, wanted to be a foreign missionary. He wanted to be a “substitute,” to go and stand in for Christian prisoners captured by the Moslems. That is something he had a great desire to do, but he was never allowed to do that. Instead, he was called to preach missions throughout Italy and to teach. But his aspirations were something more, and he had to learn to deal with that.

Therese, the Little Flower, always wanted to be a missionary. In her heart, she had a desire to be a priest. She said, “If I could be a priest, I would learn to study the very languages that Jesus spoke so that I could know the very words that He used.” She never did, yet now she is patron of missions! She never left her convent, never took the faith to a pagan baby somewhere, and yet she was able to reconcile that. She was able to say, “This is what my heart is calling me to do. But this is where I’m at. This is where my body is, in this convent in France, and I’m not going to the missions. And it’s OK. It’s OK.” She was able to reconcile it, able to bring it together, because she operated out of God’s love, the power of the Spirit at work in her life.

When we are unable to reconcile our reality of our aspirations with the reality of our abilities, we are tempted to give up rather than look to a hero like St. Anthony or St. Therese. It’s all part of that existential dilemma—it doesn’t matter. That’s what our society is saying—“it doesn’t matter.” We don’t need God, we don’t need heroes, because it doesn’t matter. Life is a waste of time. But if we don’t want to believe that, if we want to live differently, then either we’ve got to find heroes or we’ve got to be heroes. We’ve either got to point out people and say, “This is the kind of person you imitate,” or we say, as St. Paul does, “Imitate me as I imitate Christ.”

Are we willing to do that? Are we willing to allow the power of the Holy Spirit to fill our lives so that sin and evil do not overwhelm us in this world? Because we can be overcome. All we have to do is look around and say, “You know, I think people are right. Life is a waste of time. It is meaningless. All the good guys get the shaft and all the bad guys get the glory. So why try? Why put up a fight when it is going to mean nothing in the end.” That can happen. That can happen to us if we choose, by our freedom, not to walk with God. We have that freedom. The sad thing is that many people today are walking that path. We have to make a decision that says, “I will not join them. I will not be a part of that.”

When we look at the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we will pray for those gifts, so that in our piety we will be faithful to God. Not because God is going to punish us, not because God is angry with us, but because we love God. We love God! And we want to do the things God wants us to do, not because He gets mad at us, but because He loves us, too. We want to have fear of the Lord, not because we’re afraid He’s going to strike us down and send us to hell, but because He is so good that why would we want to hurt Him by our behavior?

We want understanding, to know what it means to be able to bring these various disparate parts of us together, so that we can work reconciled and as a whole, because that’s what God is asking of us. But we do need understanding. We do need to know why we do the things we do, why we let these take a hold, why we feel angry, why we respond in such a way. God, we need Your understanding so that we can say, “This doesn’t have to be me.”

We can learn how to take our aspirations and our bodies and bring them together and say, “It’s OK where I’m at.” Because if this is where God calls us, then we can be everything God wants us to be here. Yes, we may still hold on to these aspirations, we may still want this, and to our ability we may work towards it, but we may also come to understand that our own human person puts some limitations on that, and it’s OK. We don’t have to abandon everything because we can’t get everything.

We’ve got to have courage. Can we be strong in the face of opposition? Can we understand that we can live in a way that reveals the heroism in our own life? That we can be a model for others? Even though we may never be famous, others may look at our life and say, “I know what they did. I know what kind of life they lived.”

I was reading a book the other day that said, “There are no monuments to this man, but there was a young German soldier who was sent to the Netherlands. He was ordered by his captain to line up Jews, women and children, and to get a firing squad and kill them all. They young soldier looked at his captain and said, “Sir, they are human beings. They have done nothing. They are not a part of this war and I will not kill them.” The captain looked at him and said, “If you don’t, then I will send you out there with them.” The soldier took off his hat, laid down his gun, and walked out there and stood with them. . . and was killed along with all the women and children. That’s integrity. That’s courage. That’s a hero.

Do we have wisdom? Do we have the wisdom to understand what it means to walk the walk of Christ and not to let sin and the evil that is in the world to dominate? To understand what it is that God is calling us to? To have real insight about the spiritual life and what it means to be faithful?

Do we have the gift of counsel, so that as we live out our lives we can help others? That we can give them the wisdom and insight to live good lives? How many parents teach their children to do good because, if they don’t, they’ll be punished instead of teaching them to want to do good? Just to want to do because it is the right thing to do. Not because you’re going to be punished, not because God will get after you, but because it is what we are about as human beings. To want to do good and not to want to do evil. Do we have the gift of counsel so that we can help people live as God calls us to live, and not to give in to sin?

Do we have the gift of knowledge? To really know the things that matter? The things that are worthwhile? The things that make up who we are and the things we can set aside? Do we have a real knowledge of this love that God has for us? Do we have a knowledge of sin, a knowledge of evil, so that we don’t give in to it, that we are not tricked by it, that we’re not sucked in because society tells us, “This is the way we need to behave”?

The gifts of the Holy Spirit are given to us so that we can be moral people. I don’t mean that we are people that merely “do good.” Anybody can “do good.” A moral person, in my sense of the word, is a person who knows what it means to love God, to love self, and to love others, and through that gift of God’s love, through the power of the Holy Spirit, to live it at all times. To do the truly moral thing, not merely the good thing, but the thing God calls us to do at that moment.