We all need, on a regular basis, to get our fire back. The Fire of the Holy Spirit! Jesus sent us His Holy Spirit to dwell with us, to remind us of all Jesus taught us, to be our Advocate - the lawyer for our defense, to lovingly fill us to overflowing with spiritual gifts. Jesus sent us the Holy Spirit to teach us how to pray - how to open ourselves more and more deeply to God's presence within us, as Father or Mother, as Friend or Lover. .But we still think of the Holy Spirit as a Wind blowing our hair or a Flame hovering over our heads. We don't think of the Holy Spirit as being in charge of an an Inside Job - Inside Us. That's the major problem! Yes, we dwell/live in God, but God also dwells/lives in us!
In the Incarnation of Jesus, God/Spirit became one with matter/the human body. Yet the Incarnation is more than Jesus' divine nature being united with human nature in a human body. Incarnation - the Divine united with the human - is the Divine Pattern for all humanity. God/Spirit continues to be united with our matter/our bodies. No matter how preoccupied, fragmented, and dysfunctional we feel like, God lives united with our deepest selves as the Unifying Factor, the only One Who works daily inside us to heal us and make us spiritually Whole. Lives so united with us that sometimes when God speaks to us, we think that it's only our own thoughts.
Fr. Richard Rohr comments that when God speaks to us, God wants to communicate intuitive truth to us, to tell us the truth about ourselves, sometimes the truth about others. Does that frighten you? It shouldn't! I mentioned before that God is the One Whose greatest desire is to make us Whole again.
God wants to free us from self-absorption, cynicism, self-doubt, shame, and self-blame. Free us to see any real guilt we have, to hear God's forgiving Voice, to forgive ourselves, to forgive others. But sometimes when we pray and we think we hear God's Words to us, what we hear seems too much like our own voices to be God's Voice. And so we live with the illusion that we shouldn't bother praying because God never talks back to us. Rohr says,
"Intuitive truth, that inner whole-making instinct, just feels too much like our own thoughts and feelings, and most of us are not willing to call this 'God,' even when that voice prompts us toward compassion instead of hatred, forgiveness instead of resentment, generosity instead of stinginess, bigness instead of pettiness.
"But think about it: If the incarnation is true, then of course God speaks to us through our own thoughts! When accusers called Joan of Arc (1412–1431) the victim of her own imagination, she is frequently credited with this brilliant reply: “How else would God speak to me?”
Rohr says further about the Voice of God within us:
"Rather than consuming spiritual gifts for yourself alone, you must receive all words of God so that you can speak them to others tenderly and with subtlety. If any thought feels too harsh, shaming, or diminishing of yourself or others, it is not likely the voice of God but the ego. Why do humans so often presume the exact opposite—that shaming voices are always from God and graced voices are always the imagination? That is a self-defeating (“demonic”?) path.
"If something comes toward you with grace and can pass through you and toward others with grace, you can trust it as the voice of God. One holy man who recently came to visit me put it this way: 'We must listen to what is supporting us. We must listen to what is encouraging us. We must listen to what is urging us. We must listen to what is alive in us.'”
Our relationship with God, like all our relationships, takes a lifetime to grow to the fullest. And it takes constant Divine Jump Starts. During our life journey, it's God speaking in the depths of our being Who encourages us, over and over, to allow Him to set us on Fire again, to fill us with a fiery enthusiasm for living and giving, for getting up off the floor to engage in the constant spiritual battle against our own small negativity. A fiery enthusiasm to start believing in God and ourselves again, to start dreaming again, to start trusting in and boldly speaking and pursuing what the Holy Spirit puts in our hearts over and over again.
Fr. Richard Rohr says,
"On the inner journey of the soul, we meet a God who interacts with our deepest selves, who grows the person, who allows and forgives mistakes. It is precisely this give-and-take, and knowing there will be give-and-take, that makes God so real as a Lover.
"What kind of God would only push from without and never draw from within? Yet this is precisely the one-sided God that many Christians were offered and that much of the world has now rejected. God unfolds our personhood from within through a constant increase in freedom—even freedom to fail. Love cannot happen in any other way. This is why Paul shouts in Galatians, “For freedom Christ has set us free!” (5:1).
"God loves you by becoming you, taking your side in the inner dialogue of self-accusation and defense. God loves you by turning your mistakes into grace, by constantly giving you back to yourself in a larger shape. God stands with you, not against you, whenever you are tempted to shame or self-hatred. If your authority figures resorted to threat and punishment, it can be hard to feel or trust this inner give and take. Remember, the only thing that separates you from God is the thought that you are separate from God!"
But, you know, God can't do this mighty work in us unless we ask Him to. God respects the freedom He's given us so much that, even if God lives inside us, God stays quiet and politely waits for us to ask Him to be in relationship with us. That's why prayer every day is so important! The prayer that says, "Yes, God, I want to be in relationship wth you! Yes, God, send me the Gift of Your Holy Spirit to jump start my prayer all over again!"
Bishop Robert Barron says,
"Jesus promises to send us the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the fuel of the Church, the energy and life force of the Body of Christ. And we can’t get him through heroic effort. We can only get him by asking for him. That’s why, for the past two thousand years, the Church has begged for this power from on high.
"Jesus told us that the Father would never refuse someone who asked for the Holy Spirit. So ask! And ask again! Realize that every liturgy is a begging for the Holy Spirit. Fr. Hesburgh of Notre Dame once commented that the one prayer that is always appropriate—whether one is experiencing success or failure, whether one is confident or afraid, whether one is young or old— is "Come, Holy Spirit!"
"He’s right, for this is the fundamental prayer of the Church. Mind you, we pray it, as the first Apostles did, in the presence of Mary and with her support. In the Hail Mary, we say, "Pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death." What are we asking her to pray for but the Holy Spirit?"
"The Holy Spirit gives Christians the courage and the strength needed to engage in a loving dialogue with God that is like the dialogue of a child with his or her father," Pope Francis said. “Do not forget this: The protagonist of all Christian prayer is the Holy Spirit. We can never pray without the strength of the Holy Spirit; it is he who moves us to pray well."
Pray daily. Ask God the Holy Spirit to come to you, to activate and deepen your prayer. Speak to, listen to God - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - within you. The more you pray, the more you speak words of love to God, the more you listen to God's words to you, the more trained you will become in recognizing God's personal Voice. God's Voice is always encouragement and urging: "Get your Fire back - the Fire of My Holy Spirit! Bask in the Fire of My Love so you can better love yourself, Me, and others. Your life is not over until I tell you that it's over and it's time for you to come to Me. Speak to Me daily, listen to My Voice, build your relationship with Me, so that when I summon you, you are ready, filled with joy at the thought of spending eternity with your Father/Mother, Friend and Lover."
Come, Holy Spirit. Fill us, fill Your entire Church, with the Fire of Your Divine Love!