By Fr. Roy Cimagala
WE should be most aware of this truth of our faith. The Holy Spirit is constantly prompting us what to think, say and do. And that’s because God, being at the very core of our existence, cannot abandon us and is constantly intervening in our lives, guiding us to where we should be.
A passage from the Book of Isaiah can validate that truth: “Can a mother forget the baby at her breast and have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you!” (49,15)
We should just have to learn how to perceive and respond properly to these promptings. That’s why we need to develop a certain spirit of recollection so that we can let our spiritual faculties, with the help of God’s grace, to detect God’s presence and interventions in our life. In the end, this spirit of recollection would develop in us a life of intimacy with God.
We have to realize that intimacy is the ideal condition of our life which will always be a matter of developing and keeping relationships. But we have to be intimate with God first before we can be intimate with everybody and everything else in the proper way.
That’s because as “image and likeness” of God, as we have been created, God as shown to us in Christ through the Holy Spirit is the very pattern of our humanity. How God is should also be how we ought to be. We have to do everything to have intimacy with God all the time because that is the best and proper condition for us to be in this life. And we can achieve it because the Holy Spirit precisely prompts us always.
We can somehow know that we are following the promptings of the Holy Spirit when we enjoy what St. Paul called as the fruits of the Spirit of God: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. (cfr. Gal 5,22-23)
In contrast, we can say that we are not following the Holy Spirit’s promptings when we fall into what St. Paul also called as the works of the flesh: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, selfishness, dissension, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing. (cfr. Gal 5,19-21)
We would somehow know the kind of spirit we have—either the Spirit of God or worldly spirit—by the kind of thoughts, desires and loves we have. If we look more closely at how our consciousness works, what its usual contents are, what we are most aware of, we would have an idea of the kind of spirit we have. All we have to do is to see if our thoughts, desires and loves are those of the fruits of the spirit or the fruits of the flesh.
This is also true when we examine the kind of dreams we have in our sleep where we are supposed to be unconscious. Our state of unconsciousness is when we disengage ourselves for a while from our bodily mechanisms. It is in that state where the spirit that animates our life is revealed. In a sense, it’s when we are unconscious that the kind of spirit we have can be known.
We know, of course, that with our wounded, sinful human condition at present, our spirit is not yet totally that of the spirit of God. In fact, it may somehow be dominated by the spirit of the flesh, of the world, if not, God forbid, of the devil itself.
That is why we need to struggle. The ascetical struggle is a constant feature in our earthly life which will always be an arena between the forces of good and evil. We have to get used to this fact of life and train ourselves adequately for it.
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
