The Fire of the Holy Spirit

A Transforming Fire Burns in Deep Chambers of the Heart

Mary, the Mother of God, allowed the Holy Spirit to come upon her and she found herself overshadowed by the power of the Most High. This trusting surrender to God, this confidence in his benevolence toward our humanity characterizes the inner attitude that every Christian should have before the Holy Trinity. The Mother of God, the God-bearer, reveals the only proper way to welcome the coming of Christ into the frailty of our humanity.

The present battle over blessings highlights a certain arrogance that is hostile to the Christ-child. This arrogance seeks to use sacred blessings to appease the powerful and self-satisfied and ends in confusion and division of hearts. Such an attitude can only see ecclesial power and authority as a means to political purpose, and it understands development in the life of the Church as no more than conforming to the spirit of the age. Such hostility to Christ lives in the rejection of the world that God created for us as a gift, as the place where He has chosen to meet us. This hostility also rejects the way God has chosen to be present in the limitations and frailties of his creatures, the way He has chosen to bear away sin, and the way that He orders reality away from sin and to Himself.

The trust of the Virgin Mary before the power of God invites the Church into a richer conscious attitude before the Thrice-holy One. This understanding is not about conformity to a worldly spirit, but a transformation in the Holy Spirit. This attitude implicates us in a divine mission to bear away sin through and with God — to allow our own hearts to be pierced so that the secrets of many might be laid bare. Such is what it means to be joined to the great Mother of God in the Mystical Body of her Son. Her confidence in a blessing that she did not understand was, in fact, evoked because her obedient faith contemplated what the arrogant and powerful do not see.

In our hearts, Uncreated Fire blazes with the eternal freedom of the Holy Spirit. So many spirits of sin and self-sufficiency need to be cast into this Fire — so many limited and broken loves need to be cast into this limitless and sacred Love. It is the breath of the Father and the Son into the depths where we are willed into existence by a sheer act of love - because the Father conceived us in His Son and chose us to be filled with His Divine Breath. To receive this great gift with the obedience of faith, as did the Virgin Mary, is our great task. Just as this Holy Fire overflowed her whole being until what God conceived in her heart, He conceived also in her womb, so to God will conceive in our whole way of life what we have allowed unleashed in our Deepest Center.