[Pearls Ep. 122: Answering atheism Tuesday]
Having just celebrated Pentecost, we’ve been looking at calling on the Holy Spirit – “Come, Holy Spirit!”
First, we noted that we call on Him because He is our perfect “personal trainer.” He is our advocate, our consoler, and our teacher. The Holy Spirit provides, literally, all that we need in this life. There is nothing that is good for us to which the Spirit cannot lead us.
Yesterday we looked a little deeper at the Holy Spirit – by moving from the perspective of what He can do for us, to knowing Him better by reflecting on the gifts He most desires for us – gifts of wisdom, understanding, knowledge, counsel, piety, fortitude, and fear of the Lord. Each one tells us something different about how God desires us to know and love Him.
Today we wrap-up with this simple consideration – when we pray “Come, Holy Spirit,” from whence does the Spirit come?
Often we have in our mind a somewhat fuzzy image of the Holy Spirit “coming down” – be it from the sky or more metaphysically from spiritual heights of some sort. And with good reason. The Holy Spirit is often envisioned as a dove; and when the Angel announces to Mary that she will conceive a Son, he says “the holy Spirit will come upon you;” and the coming of the Spirit is likened as dew fall.
But Jesus also tells us, “Whoever loves me will keep My word, and my Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our dwelling with him.” (John 14:23) This indwelling is through the Holy Spirit. As St. Paul tells us, “Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?” (1Cor 3:16)
The indwelling of the Spirit is part of why Jesus did all that He did – coming down from heaven, humbling himself to be a lowly human being, living among us, teaching and healing, suffering and dying and rising again. That is why He says, “It is better for You that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you.” (John 16:7)
It is through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit that God imparts grace and does His greatest work in us. Grace, in the broadest sense, is nothing more (or less) than relationship (there’s our favorite word again!) with God. And what greater relationship than God communing with us in our soul?
This is the purpose of mental prayer – spending time with God within us – so that God can be brought out into the world. That ordering is the key to the whole thing – it all starts in our interior. While it is true that the Holy Spirit moves and operates through all of creation – the Spirit’s true renewal of the world begins within each of us. Thus the ancient prayer, Veni Creator Spiritus:
Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of your love.
Send forth your Spirit, and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth.
St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, as her name signifies, had a deep realization of the Trinity dwelling in her soul and would implore them to “create in my soul a kind of incarnation of the Word: that I may be another humanity for Him in which He can renew His whole Mystery.” She referred to the indwelling as a “secret” that she wished to share with everybody.
The disciples who encountered Christ on the road to Emmaus exclaimed, “were our hearts not burning?” Their response to Christ was an interior response. What did they do next? They went and told everyone. You can picture them telling the story to anyone who would listen – like St. Elizabeth wishing to share her “secret.”
St. Teresa of Avila speaks of the importance of Recollection (we go into this in greater detail in 30 Days to Christian Meditation). Recollection, St. Teresa explains, is simply to take time to be aware that God is within us: “In order to speak with God, and take its delight in him, the soul has no need to go to heaven or to speak in a loud voice. However quietly we speak, he is so near to us that he will hear us …. We only have to find a place: we, need no wings to go in search of him but only to find a place where we can be alone and look upon him present within us.” (from The Way of Perfection).
Blessings on your journey with Christ –
Steve and Karen Smith
Interior Life
Postscript: Answering Atheism
OK, Tuesday is typically where we address atheism. With that – here is the endgame of atheism – transhumanism. This is what all the globalist cabal are pushing toward, whether they know it or not (the WEF, the WHO, the Davos fops, and more-and-more the elites who run most of our corporations and government agencies). Here is our definition of transhumanism – “Satan’s plan to deform humanity into something that can no longer commune with its Creator.” Through Transhumanism, satan wants to turn us into computers, or dump our brains into computers, or what-have-you – so that we no longer have a soul in which the Trinity can dwell.
The plan will never work – the utopian promises (utopia is the secular euphemism for “hell”) of transhumanism will never come to reality – God won’t allow it. But the transhumanist will inflict tremendous suffering in their attempts – as they’ve already begun to do, particularly to our children (shooting them up with endless “boosters”, gender transitioning, etc.)
What is the answer to the transhumanism? We don’t know the final answer, but we know the starting point – mental prayer – communing with God in our soul, so that He can be brought into a world sorely in need of Him.