Gifts of The Holy Ghost

ABS will spend this week focusing upon the Gifts of The Holy Ghost per the teachings of the great Dom Prosper Gueranger who has been the friend and mentor of ABS for many many years.

The great man took ABS under his spiritual wings and raised ABS to a certain level of understanding about Truth and Tradition (far less than what it should be but infinitely greater than it was before he discovered this great man).

ABS loves him like a brother and respects him as a great teacher.

For some reason Holy Mother Church has not yet recognised him as a Saint but ABS has no doubt that he is a true Saint. 





The Gifts of the Holy Ghost

It is our intention to explain, during this Week, the workings of the Holy Ghost, both in the Church, and in the faithful Soul. These seven Days are given to us that we may know and appreciate the great Giftsent us by the Father and the Son. Moreover, the Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son has seven different ways whereby he manifests his presence in our souls. It behoves us, therefore, to devote this happy Week to the study and love of the Sevenfold Gift, whereby are to be wrought our salvation and sanctification.
The Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost are seven energies, which he graciously puts into the soul when he enters there by sanctifying grace. Actual graces put these divinely infused powers into motion, either all at once or separately; and hereby, acts that are supernatural and meritorious of life everlasting are produced by the free consent of our will.
The Prophet Isaias, guided by divine inspiration, has told us of these Seven Gifts. He is foretelling the workings of the Holy Ghost upon the Soul of the Son of God made Man, whom he calls the Flower of a virginal Root of Jesse.  He says: And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him: the Spirit of Wisdom, and of Understanding, the Spirit of Counsel and of Fortitude, the Spirit of Knowledge, and of Godliness, and he shall be filled with the Spirit of the Fear of the Lord. These mysterious words to not only express the qualities of the Holy Ghost; they also describe the effects he produces in the soul of man; and it is in this sense that they have been interpreted by the Holy Fathers and Theologians.
The sacred Humanity of the Incarnate Son of God is the supernatural type of our own, and what the Holy Ghost operated in the former, for its sanctification, that same, in proportion, he wills to do in the latter. He infused into the Son of Mary the seven energies mentioned by the Prophet; the same seven Gifts are prepared for regenerated man. But notice the order in which they come. Isaias begins with the Spirit of Wisdom and ends with the Spirit of the Fear of the Lord. Wisdom, as we will see further on, is the noblest prerogative of which man is capable; whereas the Fear of the Lord, is just the beginning of Wisdom, as the Royal Palmist assures us.The Soul of Jesus was created for a personal union with the divine Word, and was therefore treated with exceptional honor; the first and foremost Gift infused into it was that of Wisdom, and the Gift of the Fear of the Lord followed, necessarily indeed (because a creature is not perfect unless it have this quality), but still as a sequel and completion. With us, on the contrary, frail and inconstant as we are, the Fear of God is the foundation of our whole spiritual building, and by it we raise ourselves gradually to that Wisdom which brings union with God. It is by means of the Gifts of the Holy Ghost that man attains to perfection; but they are bestowed upon him in the order inverse of that wherein Isaias names them, when speaking of the Son of God. We receive them at the time of our Baptism; and when we have the misfortune to lose them (as we do when we lose sanctifying grace, that is, when we commit a mortal sin), they are restored to us by the Sacrament of Penance.
Let us respectfully consider how the whole work of our salvation and sanctification is marked with the mysterious number of Seven. There are seven principal Virtues which render us dear to our Maker; it is by seven Gifts that the Holy Ghost leads us to our last end; the seven Sacraments apply to us the merits of the Incarnation and Redemption; it is after seven Weeks from the Pasch, that the Holy Spirit is sent upon the earth, there to establish and maintain the kingdom of God. Can we wonder after this that Satan should have sacrilegiously mimicked the work of God, striving to destroy, by the seven deadly sins, the creatures whom God would save?