Live in the Spirit
The Holy Spirit, as the Fruit of the Love of the Father and the Son, is the Gift God gives with His Divine Life. He becomes as a fountain of living water welling up in the heart of the Christian (Cf. Jn. 7:38-39), the Temple of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 3:16; 2 Cor. 6:16), and grows into a great river, with many trees on each bank: every kind of fruit tree with leaves that never wither and fruit that never fails. Their fruit is good for food, and their leaves for medicine. Wherever the water flows all that dwells within it lives; it makes salt water fresh, and brings health and plenty. (Cf. Ez. 47) Having completed their course, these waters return to the Ocean of sweet, pure water, which is God.
“God is Love” (1 Jn. 4:8, 16), and love is His first gift, containing all others. “God’s Love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit Who has been given to us” (Rom. 5:5)…The Communion of the Holy Spirit (2 Cor. 13:14) in the Church restores to the baptized the divine likeness lost through sin. He, then, gives us the “pledge” or “first fruits” of our inheritance: the very life of the Holy Trinity, which is to love as “God has love us” ((1 Jn. 4:11-12; cf. Rom. 8:23; 2 Cor. 1:21). This love (the “charity” of 1 Cor. 13) is the source of the new life in Christ, made possible because we have received “power” from the Holy Spirit (Acts. 1:8; f. 1 Cor. 13). By this power of the Spirit, God’s children can bear much fruit. (CCC 733-736)
As the mutual love of the Father and the Son, the Holy Spirit resides at the very center of the Christian Life, and, indeed, is operative in producing eucharistia in the heart. “He makes present the mystery of Christ, supremely in the Eucharist” (CCC 737). Just as the Holy Spirit overshadowed the Virgin Mary, and she conceived the Son (cf. Lk. 1:35), so He creates in the hearts of the faithful a kind of “new Incarnation of the Word” (Prayer of Saint Elizabeth of the Trinity), through which Communion of Life with Christ in His Eucharist is established.
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