Spiritual Receptivity

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.

“The most fundamental question of Christian life is this: How should we receive the grace of the Holy Spirit? How can we keep ourselves ever open to his action?” (Jacques Philippe, Fire & Light: Learning to Receive the Gift of God).

One writer says, “The true aim of our Christian life consists of the acquisition of the Holy Spirit of God” (Seraphim of Sarov, On the Acquisition of the Holy Spirit).

“Union with the Holy Spirit is not a luxury that belongs to the summit of spiritual life. Rather, it is the first act, the first necessity” (Marie-Eugene of the Child Jesus, I Want to See God).

Without the grace of the Holy Spirit, we would not be able to do anything good or lasting. Our Lord tells us in St. John, “Apart from me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5).

Psalm 127 says the same: “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain. Unless the Lord watches over the city, the watchman stays awake in vain” (Ps. 127:1). Then the Psalmist adds, with a bit of humor, “It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil, for he gives to his beloved sleep” (Ps. 127:2).

This doesn’t mean that we should spend our days in an armchair asking the Holy Spirit to do our work. The Spirit’s action is no substitute for our human faculties, but it supports and directs them.

One of the primary conditions for receiving the Holy Spirit is generosity in service and giving of ourselves; it is in giving that we receive” (Francis of Assisi, Prayer for Peace).

The Psalm reminds us, though, of something fundamental: if our mental reflections and our activities are not guided and sustained by divine grace, they are at high risk of remaining sterile. Sometimes we can exhaust ourselves with projects that produce nothing fruitful or long-lasting, because we act according to our own ideas and our own strength instead of being led by the Spirit.

There are lots of other reasons why opening up to the Spirit is so important. Only the Holy Spirit leads us to true freedom. We’re told in St. Paul, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor. 3:17).

Only the Holy Spirit makes us ceaselessly discover and deepen our true identity, that of children of God. “And because you are sons,” says St. Paul, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!” (Gal. 4:6).

Some people feel that to be Christian means doing a number of things and the more we do, the better Christians we are. But this does not reflect the Gospel.

What is important in the Christian life is not to rush into a multitude of exterior works, but to discover and to practice the attitudes and behaviors that open us up to the work of the Spirit. All the rest will flow from that, and we will be in a position to accomplish the “good works,” says St. Paul, “which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Eph. 2:10).

The spiritual life, then, is not so much about doing as letting things be done—letting God act in us and work through us.

Sometimes the Holy Spirit’s action in our lives is perceptible; we feel its presence, its anointing. But often it is hidden.

Sometimes, too, the Spirit enriches us with particular gifts: charisms, graces, inspirations, and the like. But sometimes it impoverishes us, makes us aware of our radical insufficiency.

We must not measure the presence and action of the Spirit according to superficial criteria. It is sometimes perceptible, sometimes hidden, sometimes happy, sometimes sorrowful.

But it matters little whether the Spirit’s action is visible or not, consoling or challenging, for it is always fruitful. What counts is that we practice the attitudes that make us receptive to the Spirit’s action.

The Christian vocation calls us to give a lot. But to give a lot (without falling into fatigue and bitterness or disillusion), it is necessary to learn to receive. “The merit doesn’t consist in doing nor in giving a lot, but rather in receiving, in loving a lot,” says St. Thérèse of Lisieux (Thérèse of Lisieux, Letters, Volume II).

We need to learn to receive. This is the most important, yet also sometimes the most difficult, part of the Christian existence. We can have difficulty giving because we’re trapped in our own avarice, egoism, and fear. But we also often fail to receive. Even on a human level, it’s sometimes easier to give than to receive, to love than to let ourselves be loved.

Giving can stoke our pride: ‘I am the generous person who gives to others, who spends on them.’ Sometimes receiving is more difficult. It requires a kind of humility—recognizing that ‘I need the other person’—and also demands confidence in others and openness to them, qualities that don’t always come spontaneously.

All of this is to say that “to receive” isn’t always as easy as we think. Yet it is the most fundamental act of the spiritual life, because we are creatures, and we depend totally on the Creator.

We are also people who need to be saved and depend entirely on God’s mercy. Sometimes we have difficulty admitting [this]. In truth, we would all more or less consciously like to take the place of God as the source of what we are and what we accomplish by ourselves.

We need to understand that what is most necessary and most fruitful in human life is just the opposite: a welcoming attitude of receptiveness—even, I would say, of passivity.

It’s vitally important, then, to learn to receive, to receive one’s very own self along with everything from God. To the extent we learn to receive everything from God, we can give to others the best of ourselves.

I will now describe the characteristics that seem to me the most important in guaranteeing a constant receptivity to the grace of the Holy Spirit. There are eight. This figure is of course somewhat arbitrary, because we can’t divide the various aspects of the spiritual life into distinct slices, and someone could treat what I now propose to say differently.

Number one is perseverance in prayer. Listen to the beautiful words of Our Lord in St. Luke’s Gospel: “Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.

“What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent? Or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” (Luke 11:9–13).

The first condition for receiving the Holy Spirit is, quite simply, to ask for it in prayer. And this prayer must be driven by a great desire and great persevering. But it permits us to obtain what is necessary to carry out our Christian vocation.

Possibly the most consoling words in all of Scripture are the words of Our Lord when He says, “Ask, and you will receive.” Confronted with our needs, our difficulties, Our Lord invites us not to worry, but simply to ask the Father for what we need, and He will give it. God hears the cry of the poor (cf. Ps. 34:6,17-19), especially when asked for this essential grace, which is the grace of the Holy Spirit.

Besides this prayer of asking, we should also faithfully practice silent prayer, which is essentially a prayer of receptivity. When we take time for personal prayer, for adoration—and this is absolutely indispensable, especially today—it’s not time spent talking a lot, doing a lot, thinking a lot, but truly time given to welcoming God’s presence in faith and love. The deepest and most fruitful prayer is the prayer of pure receptivity.

Beyond the particular times that we consecrate to personal or community prayer, we do well to make our entire existence a conversation with God, following St. Paul’s urging: “Pray at all times” (Eph. 6:18).

St. John of the Cross says, “Take God for your bridegroom and friend and walk with him continually; and you will not sin and will learn to love, and you must work out his will properly for you” (John of the Cross, The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross).

All aspects of our life can be nourished by this conversation with God: giving thanks to God for the beautiful things, calling on Him in the face of difficult things, and asking pardon for our faults. We should make everything fuel for the fire: for everything can feed and deepen our relationship with God, the good as well as the bad.

The second point is trust. Trust is clearly an attitude of openness. We are welcoming and receptive insofar as we have trust. On the other hand, unbelief, doubt, suspicion, mistrust—these are closed-minded attitudes.

The first thing that God asks of us is not that we be perfect. It’s that we would have confidence in Him. What pains God the most is not our falls, but our lack of trust. The more we have confidence in Him, the more we receive the Spirit.

Our Lord said to St. Faustina, “The graces of my mercy are drawn by means of one vessel only, and that is—trust. The more a soul trusts, the more it will receive. Souls that trust boundlessly are a great comfort to me, because I pour all the treasures of my graces into them. I rejoice that they ask for much, because it is my desire to give much, very much. On the other hand, I am sad when souls ask for little, when they narrow their hearts” (Faustina Kowalska, Diary of Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska: Diine Mercy in My Soul).

Trust and faith have an immense power to attract the grace of God. As St. Thérèse of Lisieux well understood, God has a father’s heart and can’t resist the filial trust of His children, particularly when it’s a matter of granting them the forgiveness they so often need.

She wrote to a correspondent once, saying, “I would like to try to make you understand by means of a very simple comparison how much Jesus loves even imperfect souls who confide in him:

“I picture a father who has two children, mischievous and disobedient. When he comes to punish them, he sees one of them who trembles and gets away from him in terror, having, however, in the bottom of his heart, the feeling that he deserves to be punished.

“His brother, on the contrary, throws himself into his father’s arms, saying that he is sorry for having caused him any trouble, that he loves him, and to prove it, he will be good from now on. And then this child asks his father to punish him with a kiss.

“I do not believe that the heart of the happy father could resist the filial confidence of his child, whose sincerity and love he knows. He realizes, however, that more than once his son will fall into the same faults, but he’s prepared to pardon him always, if his son always takes him by his heart.

“I say nothing to you about the first child. You must know whether his father can love him as much and treat him with the same indulgence as the other” (Thérèse of Lisieux, Letters, Volume II).

A decisive question about trust in God is: On what do we base our trust? Do we rely on ourselves (our works, our accomplishments, our achievements), which in the end is nothing other than trust in oneself? Or does our confidence instead rest exclusively on God and His infinite mercy? This means that even in poverty, in failure and falls, trust remains firm.

Genuine trust, which is founded in God whose love never changes, is practiced not only when all is well, when we are satisfied with ourselves, but also when we are faced with our limitations and poverty. St. Thérèse of Lisieux said, “If I had committed all possible crimes, I would always have the same confidence” (Thérèse of Lisieux, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, Her Last Conversations).

The third point is humility. Humility is also powerful in drawing to us the grace of the Holy Spirit. Listen to what Peter says in his first Epistle: “Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud but gives his grace to the humble. Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that in due time he may exalt you” (1 Pet. 5:5–6).

Humility is an essential condition for receiving the fullness of the gifts of the Spirit. We’re told in St. Luke, “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 14:11).

Humility has several aspects. It consists first of all in recognizing our faults. Repentance is very powerful in attracting the Holy Spirit. It is recognizing that we are nothing by ourselves, that everything is given to us. Everything we are and everything we accomplish is a free gift of God’s mercy.

Being humble also means being reconciled to our own weakness, recognizing and accepting our limits. Remember these words of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, when speaking about pleasing God.

She said, “In my little soul, what pleases him is that he sees me loving my littleness and my poverty. Let us remain, then, very far from all that sparkles, let us love our littleness, let us love to feel nothing, then we shall be poor in spirit, and Jesus will come to look for us, and however far we may be, he will transform us in flames of love” (Thérèse of Lisieux, Letters, Volume II).

Humility in the end means to lower oneself out of love, like Jesus, who washed the feet of the disciples and said: “I am among you as one who serves” (Luke 22:27).

Humility involves an attitude of openness in our humanity. If I am humble, I accept advice, even reproaches; I allow myself to receive from others. Pride, on the contrary, is a closed attitude: ‘I’m self-sufficient, I’m always right, I don’t need anyone.’

In a relationship with God, this is even more the case: the more we recognize that we are nothing by ourselves and depend totally on the bounty of God, the more we are in a position to receive His grace.

Often our lack of humility prevents God from filling us with graces as much as He would like. One writer wrote: “God asks for nothing more than to fill us with himself and his graces, but he sees us so full of pride and esteem for ourselves that it stops him from communicating with us. For if a soul is not rooted in true humility, it is unable to receive the gifts of God.

“Its self-love devours it, and God is obliged to leave it in its poverty, in its shadows and sterility, remaining in its nothingness, so much is an attitude of humility necessary” (Catherine Mectilde de Bar, Adorer et Adhérer).

Let us rejoice then that all progress in humility, everything that lowers us and humbles us, exteriorly or interiorly, opens us more to the gifts of the Spirit and makes us more capable of receiving them.

The fourth point is obedience. “And we are witnesses to these things,” we’re told in the Acts, “and so is the Holy Spirit, whom God has given to those who obey him” (Acts 5:32).

It’s clear that the more we desire to do God’s will, the more we receive the grace to do it. God gives His Spirit to those who are resolute in obeying Him. God refuses nothing to those who refuse Him nothing.

Obedience, which of course must not come from fear but be inspired by trust and love, is therefore an important form of spiritual receptivity.

It can come in different forms: obedience to the Word, to our superiors in the Church, or to legitimate human authority. It is also expressed by submission to one another in love, something that St. Paul insisted so much upon: “Be subject to one another,” he said, “out of reverence for Christ” (Eph. 5:21).

Each time we renounce our own will, freely and out of love for someone, we open ourselves to the grace of the Spirit.

Internal obedience to the movements and inspirations of the Spirit is another kind of Christian filial obedience. Faithfulness to one grace attracts other graces. Each time we obey a divine inspiration, our heart grows and becomes capable of receiving more.

I want to insist upon something that might be called obedience to life’s events. This doesn’t involve falling into fatalism or passivity but welcoming in trust the situations we encounter, in the certainty that the Providence of the Father will arrange everything for our good.

This kind of obedience is centrally important. The more I accept the events of my life with confidence, the more I receive the grace of the Holy Spirit.

God doesn’t permit something to happen without at the same time granting us the necessary grace to live it out in a positive way (cf. 2 Cor. 9:8).

In accepting it, I welcome the grace that comes with it. Consenting to all the various aspects of life is a fundamental receptivity to the Spirit. Life takes on coherence and beauty when we accept it in its entirety.

Speaking to Peter during His apparition on the shore of Lake Galilee after the Resurrection, Our Lord speaks also about obedience: “Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go” (John 21:18).

These words apply to the martyrdom of Peter, but we can also understand them in a much more general way. Life sometimes leads us down paths we haven’t chosen but which we must consent to out of love. This consent then becomes a source of grace, a way of union with God, and an experience of the Holy Spirit.

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

From Fire & Light: Learning to Receive the Gift of God, Chapter 1 by Jacques Philippe (Scepter, 2016).