CONFIRMATION

17.01.2016

Saint Agnes: Today I will talk to you about the Holy Spirit. About who He was for us and what place He now occupies in your faith. It seems that He has been moved away from human hearts as incomprehensible and inconceivable. And in our times, receiving Him was the second fundamental sacrament necessary at all to be a Christian. Without the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we would have been a frightened handful hoping to survive. Only with the Holy Spirit we were Christians in the full sense of the word. The Holy Spirit accompanied all our meetings. We prayed to Him in every difficulty. He was precisely God with us, who taught us to get to know Jesus and to act according to His Will. When we received the Holy Spirit, we became united with Him through this sacrament. Not only at the time of the sacrament, but forever. It is as if He was descending from Heaven to accompany us forever on our way to Heaven. He was like a good mother watching over the development of the child and a guide on a lonely and unknown path.

The care and the guidance of the Holy Spirit manifested themselves on many planes of our lives, not only through the extraordinary graces that we experienced, but through His courage and strength with which He filled us. Sometimes it seems to me that what has been obvious to us, for you became unbelievable. Even though you receive the same sacrament and the same Spirit, through the lack of faith you do not gain such graces and you do not behold such signs as we have been witnesses of. The signs of the Holy Spirit aroused our faith, but without faith there would be no sings; and so today the world lacks both faith and signs. Back in the day, before receiving this sacrament, we prepared for it in a particular way.

These were not just teachings, for the Holy Spirit, by coming, instructed us Himself and gave us the understanding of many Godly affairs. The preparation consisted in opening ourselves to the reception of the Holy Spirit. In order to open ourselves properly, we used fasting and fervent prayer accompanied by mortification. The entire community prayed for those who were to be the recipients of this sacrament. For it is not enough to prepare the mind. One should rather prepare the heart. It is in it that the Holy Spirit will dwell when He will come, and from it He will act upon the mind, the soul, and the whole body of man, and even on the personality that sometimes undergoes an explicit change after the reception of this sacrament. Fainthearted and nervous people became full of courage and peace.

For us, the Holy Spirit was a companion on Earth, a companion of all our prayers and sacrifices. He was not an inaccessible God in Heaven, but precisely the One who descended to us, in order to look after our community and every Christian individually. It was He who led us in action and warned us against the dangers. He gave us dreams and spoke through the elect. He brought us joy and bravery. He dwelt with us and lived with our life, so that we would not remain alone and would not get lost. And today you strive to get to know God without the help of the Holy Spirit. His role and His love are not properly understood. Lord Jesus has sent to us His Spirit so that He might remind us of everything and make us His tools in the plan of the Salvation of the world. Without the Holy Spirit, we can only be seekers of God, but not guides for others. The Holy Spirit gives everything. If you want to have a greater faith, ask precisely the Holy Spirit, because He is the creator of human souls. He transforms them and makes them ripen in grace, so that one day they may bloom with the fullness of His gifts, or rather Him alone, when through His gifts we will accept Him alone in fullness. Pray to the Holy Spirit and you will transform the face of the Church, which will become again a witness and an apostle full of fervor and bravery. May God bless you and support you through His Spirit in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen.

–

Translated from: Życie sakramentalne pierwotnego Kościoła według św. Agnieszki, na podstawie Orędzi na Czasy Ostateczne które własnie nadeszły, Grzechynia 2017, p. 36-41