The Gift of Understanding

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.

“But when the Advocate has come, whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness concerning me. And you also will bear witness, because from the beginning you were with me” (John 15:26-27).

Our Lord speaks about the Spirit of truth. These days we're preparing for that Spirit of truth to come on the great feast of Pentecost.

We're hoping and asking Him to come with all His gifts and His graces: wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, piety, fortitude, fear of the Lord—all great spiritual treasures that help us to be spiritual millionaires.

We receive all these gifts with the graces that come in each of the Sacraments of Holy Communion, of Confession. It's good to have the desire to receive those graces and those gifts so as to actualize our intention.

In this meditation, we're talking about the gift of understanding.

In the Psalms, we're told, “Give me understanding, that I may keep your law and observe it with my whole heart” (Ps. 119:34).

This gift is necessary for leading a fully Christian life, because through it we have a deeper knowledge of the mysteries of faith.

Every page of Holy Scripture shows us how God cares for us and leads us gently toward holiness.

In the Old Testament, God is seen as the true light of Israel, without which the people would lose their way and stumble in the darkness.

Time and again throughout the Old Testament we find all the outstanding figures turning to Yahweh so that He might guide them at difficult moments. “Show me your ways” (Ex. 33:13) was the prayer of Moses as he led people towards the Promised Land. Without God's guiding light, he himself felt completely lost.

And King David asked, “Give me understanding, that I may keep your law and observe it with my whole heart” (Ps. 119:34).

Our Lord promises us the Spirit of truth whose mission is to illumine the whole Church (cf. John 16:13).

He “completed and perfected Revelation,” we're told in the Second Vatican Council, “and confirmed it with divine guarantees. He did this by the total fact of his presence and self-manifestation, by words and works, signs and miracles…and by sending the Spirit of truth” (Vatican II, Dei Verbum, November 18, 1965).

It was only later that the apostles fully understood the words of Our Lord. They needed that gift of understanding that came with the descent of the Holy Spirit.

St. Paul VI has said, “The Holy Spirit is the soul of the Church. It is He who explains to the faithful the deep meaning of the teaching of Jesus and of His mystery” (Paul VI, Apostolic Exhortation, Evangelii nuntiandi, December 8, 1975).

We can ask the Holy Spirit for a deeper amount of that gift of understanding so that we can penetrate in a deeper way the beautiful and wonderful mysteries of our faith that God has made known to us.

Dei Verbum of the Second Vatican Council says the Holy Spirit brings us to an initial understanding of the truths of faith and then “constantly perfects faith by His gifts, so that Revelation may be more and more profoundly understood.”

The Holy Spirit may give us a certain light to understand certain things, but that's not the end. He is continually leading us forward to a deeper understanding.

All through our life we can get a deeper grasp of the mysteries of our faith. It's one of the reasons why ongoing formation is very important.

We don't know in what talk or spiritual reading or meditation or recollection or retreat that we're going to get some new light from the Holy Spirit,, that may be an incredible insight into some mystery that we have not seen before.

We always have to have an antenna up, ready to catch the wind of the Holy Spirit as it comes. That is why in the Church also there is what's called “theological progress.”

There may have been truths and ideas that the early Christians and Fathers of the Church taught and believed, but over time, over the centuries, God has given us the grace to understand those aspects of faith with greater clarity.

And so, you may find that after many centuries we have new dogmas of faith being defined by the Church. This is what happened with the Immaculate Conception and with the Assumption.

Through this gift of understanding, we come to have a fuller grasp of the truths of faith.

We can understand better why the Pope and the bishops have said certain things, or why the doctrine of the Church is this or that, or why this particular document expresses this idea in this particular way. Our formation can be always growing.

The Holy Spirit then illumines our mind with a most powerful light, so that we see things in a greater way, which before we possibly only saw dimly.

One writer says it often happens that “we know some mystery for quite a while; we have heard something and thought about it; but all of a sudden, we see it in a new light. It's as though we had not understood it all at all until then” (Alexis Riaud, The Action of the Holy Spirit in Souls).

Under the influence of the Holy Spirit a Christian has a greater certainty in believing. Through this gift, everything is much clearer.

Lord, give us a greater understanding. Under this light, supernatural truths can give us indescribable joy, a joy which is a foretaste of heaven.

Deep in his soul and heart, a Christian can have this profound joy, because we see the truth and the beauty and the richness of the truths of our faith.

Thanks to this gift, St. Thomas Aquinas says, “God is glimpsed here below” (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Question 69). This happens to those who are pure and docile to the inspirations of the Holy Spirit.

“Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God” (Matt. 5:8). We see things clearer, but at the same time, all the mysteries of faith are covered in a cloak of mystery or a certain obscurity.

To reach that deep knowledge, the ordinary light of faith is not sufficient. We need the special outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which we will receive in the measure in which we respond to grace.

Lord, help us to have greater desires. May the Holy Spirit lead us along truly spiritual pathways. Help us to use this coming Feast of Pentecost to make a great jump in the quality of our spiritual life, to tell Our Lord, ‘No more messing. I want to take the life of my soul seriously and my eternal destiny, my apostolate, and my Christian vocation with all its aspects.’

This gift of understanding helps us to see all things with supernatural vision. When we see things with just a human vision and human mind and human outlook, often we don't get the full picture. There's another side to things.

When we look at them from a supernatural perspective, that's when we see them as God sees them.

Understanding helps us to reverence the greatness of God, to pay him filial affection, and judge certain things rightly.

One spiritual writer says, “Little by little, in the measure in which love grows in the soul, a person's mind reflects more and more the splendor of God” (M. M. Philipon, The Gifts of the Holy Spirit).

We're reminded that “God is love” (1 John 4:8,16). The Holy Spirit is love.

Love is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, and our mission as an ordinary Christian in the middle of the world is to reflect that love everywhere we go, with everyone we meet.

We could take a little look these days at how seriously we want to be purified and to see whether that desire is expressed in a concrete way to use well the sacrament and the graces of Confession.

Do I go regularly? Do I sometimes go out of my way to get to Confession when we have to travel a little bit, or it's raining, or it costs an effort? That's a great penance, a great sign to Our Lord that we really want the sacrament.

Every time we go to Confession, we could ask the Holy Spirit to help us to be more contrite, to foster desire to avoid all sin and all deliberate faults.

Understanding helps us to know those revealed truths, and God wants us to have greater desires to do that.

Lord, help us to want to know that truth and the beauty of everything about you a little better. Give us that interior urge to want to know more, to read more, to understand more.

Give us this special gift in our intelligence so that we have that intuition. The word intellect comes from intus legere, which means ‘to read within,’ to penetrate, to understand thoroughly.

With this gift, the Holy Spirit, who “sees into the depths of God,” says St. Paul (1 Cor. 2:10), communicates to the believer a glint of such a penetrating capacity, opening the heart to the joyous understanding of God's loving plan.

We come to see God's finger behind things, digitus Dei, the finger of God. We come to recognize there's something divine here. God is at work, there's some great divine plan, some great apostolic plan.

Even in the middle of apparently human tragedies, there can be great spiritual messages. This gift helps us to understand those messages.

The experience of the disciples on the road of Emmaus is renewed. They recognize the risen Lord in the breaking of the bread. They said, “Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?” (Luke 24:32).

This supernatural intelligence is given not only to individuals, but also to the community: to bishops who, as successors of the apostles, are heirs to the specific promise made to them by Our Lord (cf. John 14:26; 16:13): “I will be with you always, even until the end of the world” (Matt. 28:20); and also, to the faithful who, thanks to this ‘anointing’ of the Spirit (cf. 1 John 2:20,27), possess a certain sensus fide, a “sense of the faith” which guides them in their concrete choices.

The light of the Spirit, while it sharpens our understanding of divine things, helps us to have a deeper understanding also, more clear and more penetrating of human things, so that we can see the divine in the human.

“There is something divine hidden in the most ordinary human realities” (Josemaría Escrivá, Conversations, Point 114). That helps us to see better the many signs of God which are written in creation. God speaks to us through people, places, events, through the beauty of nature, the trees, the stars, and the sky.

St. Thomas Aquinas says we go to God through the things that He has created. We find that God is always speaking to us through all these things.

That can lead us to deeper acts of faith, of thanksgiving, of atonement, of love. We discover the not merely human earthly dimension of events of which human history is woven.

The whole history of the Church is the history of the Holy Spirit acting in the world. We have great lessons to learn from that.

Lord, help us to read the signs of the times as you've told us to, the signs of God in our life.

A very good prayer to pray these days—any prayer to the Holy Spirit is a good prayer—but the Sequence of Pentecost Sunday is a particularly beautiful prayer. You'll find it in many missals and hymn books:

Veni Sancte Spiritus

Come, Holy Spirit, come!
And from your celestial home
Shed a ray of light divine!

Come, Father of the poor!
Come, source of all our store!
Come, within our bosoms shine.

You, of comforters the best;
You, the soul’s most welcome guest;
Sweet refreshment here below;

In our labor, rest most sweet;
Grateful coolness in the heat;
Solace in the midst of woe.

O most blessed Light divine,
Shine within these hearts of yours,
And our inmost being fill!

Where you are not, we have naught,
Nothing good in deed or thought,
Nothing free from taint of ill.

Heal our wounds, our strength renew;
On our dryness pour your dew;
Wash the stains of guilt away:
Bend the stubborn heart and will;
Melt the frozen, warm the chill;
Guide the steps that go astray.

On the faithful, who adore
And confess you, evermore
In your sevenfold gift descend:

Give them virtue’s sure reward;
Give them your salvation, Lord;
Give them joys that never end.
Amen. Alleluia.

Very beautiful, very rich.

The gift of understanding is a gift given to us by God to all Christians, but its development demands that we live in the state of grace. We strive earnestly for that personal holiness.

It's a gift that helps us to go deeper into the depths of revelation. St. Teresa says, “It is like one who, without having learned anything, and without having taken the slightest trouble in order to learn to read, finds himself in possession of all existing knowledge; he has no idea how or where it came from, since he's never done any work, not even so much as was necessary for the learning of the alphabet.”

“This last comparison,” she says, “I think, furnishes some sort of explanation of this heavenly gift, for the soul suddenly finds itself learned, and the mystery of the Holy Trinity, together with all the lofty things, is so clearly explained to it that there is no theologian with whom it would not have the boldness to contend in defense of the truth of these marvels (St. Teresa, Life).

We can see what a great treasure this gift of understanding is. It helps us to grasp the deeper meaning of the Scriptures, the life of grace, the presence of Christ in each sacrament, and in a real and substantial way, in the Blessed Eucharist.

Understanding gives us a certain instinct for what is supernatural in the world. We sense the supernatural. We see it. We touch it. We glory in it. We thank God for it.

For the eyes of one of Christ's faithful, illumined by the Holy Spirit, there is a whole new universe to be discovered—beautiful realities that lead us to lift up our heart and soul and mind in thanksgiving to God—to treasure the spiritual things, to take care of our plan of life and of its norms, to take care of our formation.

The mysteries of the Blessed Trinity, the Incarnation, the Redemption, and the Church become living realities affecting our day-to-day life and our family.

They have a decisive influence on our work, on our family life, and our friendships.

We begin to reflect these truths in all sorts of unconscious ways. Prayer becomes deeper and easier.

John Paul II says the Holy Spirit breathes prayer into the soul of man, because “we do not know how to pray as we ought” (Rom. 8:26).

Those who are docile to the Holy Spirit are purified in soul, awakened in faith, and can discover God in all creative things, in the daily events of ordinary life.

Come, Holy Spirit, and open my eyes to all these beautiful realities.

A lukewarm person, on the other hand, doesn't heed these touches of grace because their soul is closed to the divine. They've lost their sense of faith and of its demands.

This gift of understanding helps us to contemplate God in the midst of ordinary events, whether they're pleasant or sorrowful.

In the painful or sad moments of our life, we also find that God is here. He's working this moment that can lead us to joy. St. John says, “Your sadness will be turned into joy” (John 16:20).

The way to achieve the fullness of this gift of understanding is through personal prayer in which we contemplate the truths of faith; by a joyful, loving struggle to maintain presence of God throughout the day; little aspirations with looks at images of Our Lady or at the crucifix; little acts of thanksgiving or of faith.

Or also, with little acts of contrition when maybe, we have forgotten to thank God or neglected Him in our moving around the place.

The gift of understanding is not something extraordinary given only to exceptional people. It's given rather to all those who want to be faithful to God wherever they find themselves, signifying their joys and sorrows, their toils and their rest—and often, trying to communicate good ideas or give a good example to people that we may find around us.

If we want to make progress along the road of holiness, we have to foster an interior recollection. This means not having our senses restless, not being curious about everything going on around us, not being oblivious to God in the ordinary day.

We need to mortify our internal senses—our imagination, our memory, keeping useless thoughts at bay. In our external senses, we have to struggle to be conscious of God, seeing the hand of God behind the ups and downs of life.

We also need to purify our hearts, because only the pure heart can see God. “Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God” (cf. Matt. 5:8).

If we have a lack of purity, if we’re too attached to the goods of the earth, if we give our body all it wants, then we dull the soul's interest in the things for God.

We should try and keep ourselves in good shape. The spirit of mortification is an important thing to foster all through our life.

St. Paul says, “The unspiritual person does not receive the gifts of the spirit of God, because they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).

The spiritual person is the Christian who carries the Holy Spirit in his soul in grace and has his heart and mind fixed on Christ.

His pure, sober, and mortified life is the best preparation for being a worthy dwelling place for the Spirit, a place where the Paraclete can dwell with all His gifts.

“We are temples of the Holy Spirit,” we are told in Friends of God (J. Escrivá, Friends of God, Point 186).

When the Holy Spirit finds the soul well disposed, He takes it over and leads it along paths of deep prayer.

That’s one of the requests we could make of the Holy Spirit these days: Lead me along deeper spiritual pathways, deeper pathways of prayer.

“We start,” he continues, “with vocal prayers which many of us have been saying since we were children. … First one brief aspiration, then another, and another…till our fervor seems insufficient, because words are too poor…then this gives way to intimacy with God, looking at God without needing rest or feeling tired. We begin to live as captives, as prisoners.

“And while we carry out as perfectly as we can (with all our mistakes and limitations) the tasks allotted to us by our situation and duties, our soul longs to escape. It is drawn towards God like iron drawn by a magnet. One begins to love Jesus, in a more effective way, with the sweet and gentle surprise of the encounter” (Ibid., Point 296).

Notice how St. Josemaría talks about “one brief aspiration, then another, and another.” It can be an easy way to teach little children how to pray.

Little phrases. Little things we see in the readings of the Mass or in the liturgy that we discover on a regular basis. We teach little children these words when they lift their soul—a soul that has been inspired by the graces of the Holy Spirit at Baptism.

We form that soul, especially during those early years, and have the Holy Spirit work with great ease in that soul.

He says, “Our heart now needs to distinguish and adore each one of the divine Persons. The soul is, as it were, making a discovery in the supernatural life, like a little child opening his eyes to the world about him. The soul spends time lovingly with the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and readily submits to the work of the life-giving Paraclete, who gives himself to us with no merit on our part, bestowing his gifts and the supernatural virtues!” (Ibid., Point 306).

We are reminded that Our Lady, who had the fullness of grace, and also, the fullness of the gifts of the Holy Spirit—we could ask her to teach us to come close to her and to love the Paraclete always, but in a special way during these days of preparation for Pentecost.

Mary, don’t allow us to remain stuck halfway along the road that leads to holiness, the goal that we are called to.

We can use the intercession of Our Lady to invoke the Holy Spirit. She is the listening Virgin, who, in the light of the Spirit, was able to read tirelessly the deep meaning of the mysteries which the Almighty had worked in her (cf. Luke 2:19, 51).

The contemplation of the wonders of God will also be for us the source of inexhaustible joy.

Mary “treasured all these things carefully in her heart.” She must have got great joy from going over and over in her mind the wonderful mysteries of God that led her to proclaim in the Magnificat:

“My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior” (Luke 1:46).

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