United States Catholic Catechism for Adults

Chapter 9. Receive the Holy Spirit • 109

• The life of the Blessed Virgin Mary shows us the power of the Holy Spirit. She was made by the Holy Spirit into a witness of grace from the moment of her conception. It is also by the power of the Holy Spirit that Mary conceived Jesus, the Son of God. • By the anointing of the Holy Spirit at his Incarnation, the Son of God was consecrated as Christ ( Messiah ). • At Pentecost, Peter said of Jesus that “God has made him both Lord and Messiah” (Acts 2:36). From this fullness of his glory, Jesus poured out the Holy Spirit on the Apostles and the Church. • The Holy Spirit builds up, animates, and sanctifies the Church. He prepares us to go out and bring others to Christ. He opens our minds to understand Christ’s death and Resurrection. He makes present for us the mystery of Christ, especially in the Eucharist, and brings us to communion with God that we may bear much fruit (cf. CCC, no. 737). MEDITATION In the life of faith there are always two movements: God in search of us and we in search of God. The poet Francis Thompson described God’s attempts to reach us in terms of his being the “Hound of Heaven.” Thompson said he felt God coming after him and yearning to give him love. But the poet was not ready: At the same time, God has stamped in our souls a longing for him self. We are born with a longing for the divine that cannot be satisfied by anyone or anything short of God. We are created to be seekers for the absolute love, which is God. Thompson not only experienced God as the hound pursuing him; he also felt his own hunger and thirst for God. One day he stopped running, turned, and rushed toward God: Naked, I wait Thy love’s uplifted stroke! My harness, piece by piece, Thou hast hewn from me, . . . I am defenseless, utterly. I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind. . . . I hid from him.