I am posting
this late Thursday afternoon as I am heading into poustinia this evening for a
day of silence, prayer, and fasting. But we’re on a schedule with the seven
gifts of the Holy Spirit this week, so I can’t skip a day!
The sixth
gift is that of understanding. The
best way to understand it is by contrasting it to knowledge.
That gift pertains to seeing creation
from God’s perspective, to knowing what created things are, and are for, from
His own perfect knowledge of them.
If knowledge
is about understanding creation, then understanding is about knowing the
Creator. Specifically, the gift of understanding is God’s own gift to us to
enable us to penetrate the truths of Scripture, the doctrines of our faith, to
‘get’ the sacraments and what they are and do, to have a deep and beautiful
knowledge about spiritual life, its verities and principles and practices.
This gift of
understanding has not one thing to do with academic learning or even
intellectual capacity. I always like to mention, when talking about this gift,
of a man I knew in my first year as a priest who confided in me after some
months of acquaintance that he was illiterate. He had left school early to work
on his family’s farm, and somehow reading and writing just hadn’t taken with
him.
This man had
the most penetrating insights into God, the Bible (he had a greatly developed
oral memory), the sacraments, the virtues and spiritual life. He was a deeply
devout and (I would say) holy man, and the gift of understanding operated in
him at a high level indeed.
St. Therese
of Lisieux would be another example of someone with minimal formal education
and yet a depth of insight into God and the things of God, and particularly the
path to God of littleness and simplicity, that has made her a Doctor of the
Church. So it is
nothing whatsoever to do with being a theologian in the modern academic sense.
I wouldn’t say that formal education is bad for the gift of understanding, exactly
– just that it is unrelated to it.
With both
knowledge and understanding, we can see something that eludes us often in our
confused times. In our era of post-modern fragmentation and relativism, we can
often conclude that truth is just
something so fraught with difficulties, so unknowable perhaps, and if known so
prone to make the one who knows the truth arrogant, intolerant, even violent
that… well, it’s just best to leave the subject alone. Truth – what is that?
Pontius Pilate said it, and we’re all living in a Pilate world now.
But that
doesn’t make sense, does it? Why would God not want us to know the truth of
things, and the truth of Himself? Truth is not a weapon to be wielded or a
comforter to wrap oneself up in, or a pedestal to climb on so as to look down
one’s nose at others more efficiently.
Truth is
communion. Truth is when the ‘what’ of the other, or the Other, resides in my
own intellect. When I say ‘I know you’, and I say this rightly, it means that,
in a sense, you live in me. You and I are in communion. And we are meant to
have this kind of communion with all creation, and with God above all.
It is the Holy
Spirit then, both in knowledge and understanding, who gives us this gift of
communion. Of course this communion exceeds our intellectual grasp and
conceptual expression of things and of God—it is much deeper than what our poor
little minds can say. But it does shape and illuminate and purify and heal and
strengthen our poor little minds so that they are not quite so poor, not quite
so little.
These gifts
enrich us—knowledge by giving us a great and properly ordered understanding and
hence love of all creatures and especially of that creature our neighbour,
understanding by giving us a properly ordered knowledge of God, from which we
cannot help but love Him as we should. ‘To know Him is to love Him.’
God does not
want us to grapple blindly in the dark, not really knowing much of anything and
prone to terrible errors that can cause such great injury to ourselves and
others. He wants us to know the truth, not to make us proud and arrogant, but
so we can love rightly. And that is what both of these ‘intellectual’ gifts of
the Spirit are about.
Come, Holy
Spirit.
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