“THE gift of counsel is absolutely indispensable in the spiritual life if we are to persevere. We have to guide our spiritual life: it is not enough for that to have a strong nature, built for temperance and justice. We must have a directing faculty for the whole thing: conditions of life change, plans are altered, our own personal life does not remain the same, we vary with the age, we change, we advance, we fall back. We have to adapt these powers of strength, justice, temperance, to a material essentially malleable, difficult to mould in the art-pattern of saints. By ourselves we shall not know how to succeed.
“Moreover, we are short-sighted, we do not see far within ourselves, and we possess a tool well-fitted to cover up our eyes — self love, which hides from us the ways of prudence. Life, people and things, turn endlessly around us. We do not see well, or if we do see well we have not the firmness necessary to impose on ourselves our own judgment. Sometimes we squint, if the right course seems too hard; in order to take care of our attachments, our habits we use stratagem against the inspirations of the love of God. Such is often our psychology in the ruling of ourselves.
[…]
“The Holy Spirit makes the light of our conscience twice as bright by his inspirations. Now in a soft manner: a whisper, a murmur, but persuasive and insistent. At other times, a hard reproof, when we do not listen and are obstinate. He works in such a way that we are illumined in all circumstances. The gospel teaches in a general way. The Holy Spirit makes the gospel counsels come to life before us at the right moment, in face of difficulties.”
— The Holy Spirit in Christian Life, by Père Gardeil, O.P (Blackfriars, 1953)
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