Confirmation allows us to experience a ‘personal Pentecost’ that leads to new life in the Spirit
By Father Randy Stice
In last month’s column, I looked at how the sacrament of confirmation fulfilled Bishop Mark Beckman’s prayer for a new Pentecost and his desire to equip our young people. Confirmation is a personal Pentecost, in part because it imparts the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit invoked in the prayer based on Isaiah 11:2–3. St. John Paul II and Pope Francis offered catecheses on these seven gifts, and I want to share comments from both popes on each of the seven gifts.1
The first gift is wisdom. One who possesses wisdom, says Pope Francis, “‘knows’ about God, he knows how God acts, he knows when something is of God and when it is not of God.” It is, says Pope Francis, “the grace of being able to see everything with the eyes of God. It is simply this: it is to see the world, to see situations, circumstances, problems, everything through God’s eyes.” But wisdom goes beyond knowledge. “The truly wise person is not simply the one who knows the things of God,” says St. John Paul II, “but rather the one who experiences and lives them.”
The next gift is understanding. This gift, says St. John Paul II, both “sharpens the understanding of divine things” and “renders ever more clear and penetrating the understanding of human things.” Pope Francis says it is particularly active when we read the sacred Scriptures. “One can read the Gospel and understand something, but if we read the Gospel with this gift of the Holy Spirit, we can understand the depths of God’s words. And this is a great gift, a great gift for which we all must ask and ask together: Give us, Lord, the gift of understanding.” In addition, St. John Paul II says that through this gift “[o]ne can even arrive at prophetically interpreting the present and the future: signs of the times, signs of God!”
Counsel is the third gift of the Spirit. This gift, says St. John Paul II, enlightens “the conscience in moral choices which daily life presents.” Pope Francis expands on St. John Paul II’s teaching. The gift of counsel “enables our conscience to make a concrete choice in communion with God, according to the logic of Jesus and His Gospel,” directing the soul, “especially when it is a matter of important choices (for example, of responding to a vocation) or about a path to be followed among difficulties and obstacles.” In addition, says Pope Francis, counsel has a communal dimension, for through the gift of counsel “the Spirit makes us grow interiorly, He makes us grow positively, He makes us grow in the community, and He helps us not to fall prey to self-centeredness and one’s own way of seeing things.”
St. John Paul II describes the fourth spiritual gift, fortitude, as “a supernatural impulse which gives strength to the soul, not only on exceptional occasions such as that of martyrdom but also in normal difficulties: in the struggle to remain consistent with one’s principles; in putting up with insults and unjust attacks; in courageous perseverance on the path of truth and uprightness, in spite of lack of understanding and hostility.” Pope Francis echoes the saint: “Sometimes we may be tempted to give in to laziness, or worse, to discouragement, especially when faced with the hardships and trials of life. In these cases, let us not lose heart, let us invoke the Holy Spirit so that through the gift of fortitude he may lift our heart and communicate new strength and enthusiasm to our life and to our following of Jesus.”
Knowledge is the gift, says St. John Paul, that enables us “to know the true value of creatures in their relationship to the Creator.” Pope Francis expands on this insight. “It is a special gift which leads us to grasp, through creation, the greatness and love of God and His profound relationship with every creature.” When the Spirit illumines our eyes through the gift of knowledge, he says, we are able “to contemplate God, in the beauty of nature and in the grandeur of the cosmos . . . to discover how everything speaks to us about Him and His love.” The fruit of this gift, concludes Francis, is “great wonder and a profound sense of gratitude.”
The sixth gift, piety, “indicates our belonging to God and our profound relationship with Him,” says Pope Francis, “it is our friendship with God, granted to us by Jesus, a friendship that changes our life and fills us with passion, with joy.” Through the gift of piety, says St. John Paul II, “the Spirit heals our hearts of every form of hardness and opens them to tenderness towards God and our brothers and sisters.” Pope Francis says that piety can “make of us joyful witnesses of God and of His love, by worshiping the Lord in truth and in service to our neighbor with gentleness and with a smile, which the Holy Spirit always gives us in joy.” Piety “is, therefore,” says St. John Paul II, “at the root of that new human community which is based on the civilization of love.”
The final gift, fear of the Lord, is not a fear that causes us to flee from God. Rather, says St. John Paul II, it “is a sincere and reverential feeling that a person experiences before the tremendous majesty of God.” Pope Francis says that this gift is also “an ‘alarm’ against the obstinacy of sin.” When, for example, one “lives only for money, for vanity, or power, or pride, then the holy fear of God sends us a warning: be careful!” This gift “allows us to be aware that everything comes from grace, and that our true strength lies solely in following the Lord Jesus and in allowing the Father to bestow upon us His goodness and His mercy.”
Fear of the Lord is the gift to which all of the other gifts are oriented, as St. Ambrose explained: “Holy fear is shaped by wisdom, instructed by understanding, directed by counsel, empowered by strength [fortitude], ruled by knowledge, and adorned with piety.” Thus, the ultimate purpose of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit is the right ordering of our relationship with God, rooted in the fear of the Lord and enabling us “to lead a life worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to Him” (Colossians 1:10).
1 This column is adapted from Understanding the Sacraments of Initiation: A Rite-Based Approach, Randy Stice (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2017), pp. 153-163.
Father Randy Stice is director of the diocesan Office of Worship and Liturgy. He can be reached at frrandy@dioknox.org.
Comments 1
This is the best explanation of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit I have found! I needed this. I am going to save it in my documents so I can refer to it again. Thank you!