Fruits of the Holy Spirit

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

Our Lord says in St. Matthew, “You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns, or figs from thistles? Every sound tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears evil fruit. A sound tree cannot bear evil fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits” (Matt. 7:16-20).

Our Lord speaks a lot about fruit. A fruit is the final product of a plant. Not everything in a plant is fruit. There are leaves; there can be flowers.

In common language, the term includes some pleasantness to the taste. Thomas Aquinas says what we call fruit is “what a plant produces when it attains perfection with a certain sweetness” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Question 70).

So fruit is a good concept. We talk about the fruits of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit gives us His gifts, and those gifts rooted in our soul through acts of virtue give rise to the fruits. In Scripture, the word fruit always appears in a good context, even if at times it has a tone of warning.

The results of the acts of virtue are called good fruit, and they can be human or supernatural. Anything that is supernaturally good in a person can be called the fruit of the Holy Spirit.

“For he who sows,” says St. Paul, “to his own flesh will from the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to the Spirit will from the Spirit reap eternal life” (Gal. 6:8).

The context suggests to us that the greatest fruit that we can reap is the fruit of eternal life, the eternal wedding feast, the banquet, eternal happiness. That's what it's all about.

St. Paul says, “Let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart” (Gal. 6:9).

Often you could say that the Christian life is all about the fruit, yielding that abundant fruit, obtaining that fruit.

“You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you should go and bear fruit and that your fruit should abide” (John 15:16). Our Lord seems to be wanting us to be very concerned about the fruit, focused on the fruit, oriented toward the fruit.

“He who abides in me and I in him, he bears much fruit” (John 15:5).

We normally reserve the term “fruits of the Holy Spirit” for the supernatural actions that originate in the infused virtues—faith, hope, and charity—as perfected by the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

They are perfect in their order and thus they give rise to a spiritual consolation. You could say that acts of virtue done reluctantly are not really fruits of the Holy Spirit.

The fruits are not a consolation that one can feel, although sometimes God can grant us feelings, but rather the witness of one's conscience and the intimate joy that comes from fulfilling the will of God with generosity.

Our Lord was very happy when he saw the two mites of the widow. She generously put in all that she had to live on (Mark 12:41-44).

St. Paul lists twelve of the many fruits of the Holy Spirit in the soul: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, long-suffering, meekness, faith, modesty, continence, and chastity” (cf. Gal. 5:22-23).

A constant effort is required to produce good fruit. “He who sows to his own flesh will reap corruption, but he who sows in the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not grow weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap, if we do not lose heart” (Gal. 6:8-9).

So constant effort is required. Sometimes, for the fruits to appear, a certain pruning is necessary. In natural order, as we all know, one of the best ways to assure good fruit is to prune trees in the right season.

Sometimes the same thing happens in the supernatural order. Contradictions, challenges, heartbreaks, apparent tragedies, pain, difficulty, sickness—these are some of the means that Our Lord uses to prune us.

But we can always be grateful to him for those prunings, for those crosses, because they're always a sign of future fruit, a sign of divine predilection.

The saints knew how to thank God for the crosses that He sent them because it was all a sign of that future fruitfulness.

We're told in St. John, “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit” (John 15:1-2).

This divine pruning consists of suffering. We can thank Our Lord when things don't work out as we had expected, or when we wonder about the contradictions He allows us to experience. It's the cross that identifies us with Christ and unites us with Him.

In low moments—challenges, miscommunications, misunderstandings, injustice, providential injustices—all moments to look to the cross a little more, “to enter into the wounds of Christ crucified” (Josemaría Escrivá, The Way, Point 288) and to find our consolation there.

There's an eternal freshness in the wounds of Christ because the Holy Spirit is there.

We receive less blows than we deserve, and we can have the consolation of knowing that if Our Lord visits us with some contradiction, it's because it has some great apostolic purpose further down the line.

It's a very good thing to pray every day for that joy with peace, interior joy with peace that somehow sums up the abundance of the fruits of the Holy Spirit in our life.

A joy with peace, a long period of life, a period of true penance, the grace and the consolation of the Holy Spirit, and perseverance in our Christian vocation (cf. Prayer before Mass, Statement of Intention for Priests)—we can ask God for those special gifts every day.

“He who abides in me and I in him, he bears much fruit” (John 15:5). That's not conditioned by anything; no matter what the circumstances of our life, we're called to abide in Him.

That joy with peace is not meant just to be on our lips, but in our deeds and in our hearts.

Charity is the first fruit of the Holy Spirit that is mentioned, because the acts that proceed from the infused virtue of charity, perfected by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, constitute the source and the crown of all supernatural life. “The greatest of these is charity” (1 Cor. 13:13).

“God is love” (1 John 4:8,16) and “He pours out His love into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Rom. 5:5).

The Holy Spirit is the immense love with which the Father loves the Son for all eternity.

St. Paul says, “If I lack charity, it profits me nothing” (1 Cor. 13:3). A very powerful phrase. I may be able to do this or that or the other. I may be able to perform wonderful deeds. I may be able to have wonderful talents that give glory to God on many different planes.

But underneath all of that, the bottom line is that “if I lack charity, it profits me nothing.”

It may be that Our Lord sends us situations where precisely He wants us to learn to practice this virtue.

The main manifestation of that charity is love for God, which may mean going against the grain without consolations.

When the biography of St. Teresa of Calcutta was proclaimed, people were surprised to find that she went through many years of aridity, of going against the grain, of not having any spiritual consolations.

Loving God more each day is not about doing more difficult things each day but doing them with greater love each day.

In The Way, St. Josemaría says, “A little act, done for love, is worth so much! (J. Escrivá, The Way, Point 814).

And the source of the love of God is the sacraments. That's where the Holy Spirit pours His grace into our souls.

That's why we have to try and love the sacraments, frequent them more frequently, appreciate them, go out of our way to receive them.

If on some occasion we have to make a special sacrifice to get to our weekly sacramental Confession, or to get to Communion on a rainy day, or to get to Confession beforehand so that we can receive Holy Communion—that's a great penance, a penance that God must be very happy to see us practicing.

That's where our struggle is required. We show our love of God by the seriousness of our struggle, by that desire manifested in deeds to want to be better—the effort to do the norms of our plan of life a little better, with punctuality, with care, with love, with presence of God.

That love of God shown in concrete ways will necessarily lead to another love: loving others without exceptions, having no little place in our heart for people we don't like, or we have no time for.

No gardener reserves a plot in their garden for weeds. We have to pull up the weeds by their root and cast them far from us.

“Love one another…” said Our Lord. “By this will all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:34-35).

Every time that we receive the sacraments, we can ask the Holy Spirit for an outpouring of that charity.

The second fruit of the Holy Spirit in our soul is joy. It “necessarily follows charity, because the person who loves rejoices in their union with the beloved” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Question 70).

A very clear sign that we're on the right track or that a soul is close to God is their joy, their cheerfulness. It's not just a psychological joy. It's much more. It's the joy of the children of God.

A search for joy outside the love for God is condemned to failure because creatures cannot satisfy the thirst for love that is harbored in the human heart. Human material things, no matter how great they are, don't fill the hole in the heart that each one of us has. A joy separate from God is a mirage.

In Christ Is Passing By, we're told, “Joy has its roots in the form of a cross” (J. Escrivá, Christ Is Passing By, Point 43; The Forge, Point 28).

People who try to run away from the crosses in their life—they don't find joy. They only find joy in embracing the cross and thanking God for it, accepting with joy that this is the will of God for me, this particular cross, this situation, this life that he wants me to lead.

We're told in The Forge, “To give oneself to the service of others, forgetting about oneself, is so efficacious that God rewards us with a humility full of joy” (J. Escrivá, The Forge, Point 591).

We can ask the Holy Spirit for that joy. The joy that can be there in spite of sadness, in spite of sickness, or anxiety, or depression, or any of these other things that are so common in society now.

The third gift of the Holy Spirit is peace. It accompanies true joy.

St. Paul says to the Philippians, “The peace of God surpasses all understanding” (Phil 4:7), while St. John assures us saying, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you. Let not your hearts be troubled, neither let them be afraid” (John 14:27).

God gives us a true peace, “a peace that the world cannot give,” a peace that comes from the struggle for holiness, a peace that is the consequence of order.

The Book of Isaiah said, “The work of justice shall be peace” (Isa. 32:17).

The Holy Spirit gives us a joy and a peace that nothing and no one can take away from us. We don't want them to, because it's a fruit of the Holy Spirit in us.

At the same time, not all tranquility comes from peace. There can be a false security, a deceitful tranquility that is only the appearance of peace.

Another fruit of the Holy Spirit in our souls is patience.

It leads us to bear with peace, for love of God, without complaints or lamentations, the physical and the moral sufferings of this life: traffic jams, reversals of fortune, the loss of everything we ever had, a sword piercing our heart, the heartbreak.

Fulton Sheen says if God ever allows hearts to be broken, it's because He wants to enter into them a little more (cf. Fulton Sheen, Inspirational Readings).

The patient person doesn't get upset in the face of adversity, knows how to accept the blows with that equanimity, that peace and serenity, because they see in everything the loving hand of their Father God, who makes use of the suffering and the sorrows of this world in order to purify His chosen ones and to make them saints.

Everything is good. “All things turn out for the good for those who love God” (Rom. 8:28).

We don't lose our peace when faced with sickness or contradiction, or other people's defects or disappointments. St. Paul says, “Charity is patient” (1 Cor. 13:4).

In Scripture, we're told that long-suffering or longanimity is another fruit of the Holy Spirit.

It's a constant disposition of being able to bear, without discouragement or despair, the delays that are wanted or permitted by divine Providence before reaching the ascetical and apostolic goals that we may propose for ourselves.

Delays, things not working out the way we want them to, or on time, or the challenges permitted by divine Providence, maybe one thing after another; we wonder if it will ever end.

If you read the lives of the saints you'll find they're full of this fruit of the Holy Spirit. They don't give up, they hang in there, as though they're running in a marathon, because they know the great goals that God has proposed to them are worth attaining.

This fruit gives the soul the absolute certainty that the divine Will will prevail, in spite of the objective obstacles. Heaven is bent on what we are doing.

The Psalms say, “The Lord himself will give his benefits, and our land shall yield its increase” (Ps. 85:12).

It doesn't say that we will see all those benefits in this world, but that the benefits will come. In our lifetime we are probably enjoying many of the benefits of the fruits of the seeds that have been sown by other people in schools, in hospitals, in laws, in society, in all sorts of things.

St. Paul says, “Charity bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor 13:7).

That fruit of longanimity means that the soul is willing to begin and begin again, no matter how many failures, no matter how frequent. That soul insists without giving up.

It helps the soul to dream of great goals, even though the specific results may seem small. That person uses all the supernatural means with stubbornness and perseverance.

I heard an anecdote this week from a book written about the first Archbishop of Nairobi, an Irish Spiritan priest, who has now gone to his eternal reward, but was the Archbishop of Nairobi at a very crucial time for the start of many apostolic projects in education and health care.

One time he was back in Dublin, he needed some medical attention, he was in the Mater Hospital in Dublin, and the nuns, obviously with great esteem for him, said to him, “Your Grace, ask us whatever you want, and we will try and get it to you.”

Quickly he said, “I'd like you to put a Mater Hospital in Nairobi.” Well, he was certainly thinking big. The Mater University Hospital is one of the biggest hospitals in Dublin, and the most prestigious hospital in the country.

Suddenly along comes this missionary Archbishop who has no hospital in his country and asks for a hospital suddenly to be put there. They complied. There's now a Mater Hospital in Nairobi.

We have to dream of great goals that will affect and build up civilizations of love, cultures of life, build up standards that are proper for the dignity of the human person, that can spread the social teaching of the Church everywhere.

The Book of Isaiah says that for that to happen, God counts on our persevering daily effort. “My chosen ones shall not toil in vain (Isa. 65:23).

St. Paul says to the Colossians, “Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forbearing one another, and, if one has a complaint against another, forgive each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you must also forgive” (Col. 3:12-13).

Another fruit of the Holy Spirit is goodness. It's the supernatural disposition of the will that wishes well to all groups of people.

The angels announce good news, “the good news that shall be to all the people” (Luke 2:10), without distinction between relatives or strangers, neighbors or foreigners—a goodness that reaches out to all people.

A nun here in Nairobi told me recently how her father, a policeman in Dublin in the Second World War, was on duty in the docks one night and a Jewish family from Eastern Europe got off one of the boats.

The boat was supposed to go to Liverpool. It seems they asked if this was Liverpool. Their English wasn't very good. Somebody said yes, and so they got off the boat in the wrong place. They got off in Dublin.

Night was approaching. It was cold. It was raining. This policeman brought them home, a family of three or four or five, a homeless Jewish family to his house, put them up there for a couple of nights, fed them until they could get helped by some Jewish organization.

It's a beautiful, silent little detail that probably is unknown in the history books, except for this nun narrating it. You could see where her vocation came from—the goodness in the souls of her parents who reached out to this needy family in a very concrete way, shared their home, shared their roof, because they saw it as a gift of God.

With that example, they brought up a daughter who built something like twenty schools for poor children in one of the worst slums in Nairobi, and fought for those children and their rights in all sorts of ways.

She told me, at the funeral of her father, four men with beards appeared at the back of the church. They didn't know who they were, but they identified themselves as members of that Jewish family who had come to say thank you many years later. They said, “We will take care of the expenses of this funeral.”

A very beautiful anecdote of the goodness that is present in all human persons. We have to try and live and practice that goodness, give witness to it, and recognize it in other people when we see it.

The person who receives this gift of the Holy Spirit exudes goodness in all their thoughts, words, and actions.

They don't begrudge other people about their successes. There is no jealousy or envy in them. They know that if Jesus has died for all, we must love all too. Even the criminal on death row, Christ also shed His blood for Him (Matt. 27:38,44).

It's not a matter of feelings, but of knowing in our mind that we must love each person because they are children of God.

St. Paul says, “Charity is not envious…nor does it seek its own interests” (1 Cor 13:4-5).

Another fruit of the Holy Spirit is kindness.

It's the disposition of heart that inclines us to do, not just to wish, what is good for our neighbor. This fruit shines forth in all the corporal and spiritual works of mercy that the Church encourages every family to practice.

It shines forth in family life, in a refined affection, concern for brothers and sisters and parents and the unborn, in acts of service and fraternal correction.

Kindness leads us to put our hearts into works of charity. Cold, official charity is not enough.

About twenty or thirty years ago, there was a big earthquake in San Francisco. I remember the elder President Bush coming on the TV and making a rather curious statement.

Commenting on the earthquake and all the needs of the people in San Francisco, the first thing he said was: “Thank God for the volunteer effort.” That was a very humble statement coming from a President of the United States, the most powerful country in the world.

He was saying that all the machinery of government, with Army, Air Force, Police, Navy, we cannot hack it. We need all hands on deck.

We need help from every individual person to reach out to the needy. To be kind. To be considerate. To care for their neighbor.

Very often in society, we see beautiful acts of charity, unasked for, that can move our hearts in all sorts of ways.

We need to give true human and supernatural affection to people. The supernatural is built up on the natural.

That means we have to be amiable, affectionate, understanding with everybody. Kindness is a sweet, charitable fire which, thanks to the Holy Spirit, informs a person's life, leading them to be always forbearing and affable.

Kindness triumphs over rough personalities, brusque manners, sharp words, all of which can wound others and take away peace from souls.

We can ask Our Lady, that she might lead the Holy Spirit to pour out His gifts upon us so that we can manifest these fruits in all the circumstances of our life.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW