Today is the final day that we will concentrate on offering commentary on the Legionary Promise. In this last section, I will focus on the theme of devotion to the Holy Spirit, since the handbook points out explicitly that the Promise is directed to the Holy Spirit, but that devotion to the Holy Spirit has never developed to the extent that one would expect in the life of the Church.
My hypothesis for why the devotion to the Holy Spirit has not appeared as one would expect in the Church's shared experience is somewhat different from that offered by the handbook. I would venture to say that devotion to the Holy Spirit is indeed present in the Church and fully developed, and yet is somewhat hidden in an analogous way to the hiddenness of the Holy Spirit. It is, after all, the Lord Jesus Himself Who compares the Spirit to the wind. You can feel it, but you cannot know where it comes from or where it goes, and so it is with everyone who is born of Him through baptism.
Devotion to the Holy Spirit is fully present in the Church through devotion to the Most Holy Mother of God. As we said in the first part of this commentary some weeks ago, although she is not God, she is the Temple of God. The One Who dwells in her is God Himself, worthy of worship. As King David says in the fifth psalm: "I bow down before your Holy Temple, filled with awe."
Furthermore, just as we see in the Old Testament that the Lord God acted in His Holy Temple, making "the Tower of David" to be the source of blessing and grace for the entire nation, so too, under the New Law, the Most Holy Mother of God, or rather, the Holy Spirit acting in her, has become the mother of every virtue in the Christian life. It is the Mother, who works assiduously to conform her other children to the Son of God, her Firstborn. We read confirmation of this in the Apocalypse of St. John the Theologian that tells us that the Dragon, when he was unable to continue to make war directly on the Son of God and His Most Holy Mother, turned his attention to the destruction of her "other children," those who believe in the name of Jesus. Nevertheless, the Woman (as she is eschatological termed in the Apocalypse, recalling to us the promise given to us by God in the third chapter of the Book of Genesis) and her children are given a safe place of rest in the desert, foretelling to us that the Church would be saved from destruction by the monastic life, and that each of us is protected and mystically formed anew through the cultivation of our interior life in communion with the Lord Jesus and His Holy Mother.
I recall the example of a married couple from long ago. Both of them had succumbed to the worst of temptations in their common life: to introduce bitterness and resentment into their relationship. Both had justified and reasonable grievances against the other. Each pointed a finger at the other and said: he or she must change. But brothers and sisters, changing other people does not work. We can only change ourselves. We must all be interiorly converted through the action of the Holy Spirit. Ultimately, I convinced them that their problems were an invitation to "work on themselves," to grow in virtue to become more like the Son of God, Who is virtue. Through the grace of the Holy Spirit and the mediation of the Most Holy Mother of God, they changed themselves interiorly, not only to the benefit of one another, but to the benefit of countless others, who experience the love of God through them.
Yes, I consider it self-evident that most of the devotion to the Holy Spirit of God in the Church is directed to the Most Holy Mother of God as the Temple in which He dwells. It the Lord Jesus Himself, Who came forth from her, Who has established and promoted this devotion when He made His Mother our mother also. The power of this devotion is transformative, in fact, deifying, because it works visible, miraculous, interior change, changing each and every human being who is docile to its action into the Son of God. So often we don't grow, we don't change, because we feel that we are justified in our state (my anger is justified; my impatience is perfectly reasonable), and we think that to grow and change would in some respect justify those against whom we have grievances. It would somehow give them a pass. In this way, we are not docile to the action of the Spirit of God. We cannot blame God for our stunted shape. But when we turn to God, when we change our hearts, cooperating with the Holy Spirit through the mediation of the Mother of God, every obstacle is removed, and Christ is formed in us to the glory of the Father.
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