“In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit…”
How many times have you said this over the course of your life. We're taught this prayer as the beginning and ending of nearly every other prayer we learn. As Catholics, a key part of formation is learning about the Blessed Trinity, one God in three divine Persons.
From our first introduction, most of us have some mental image of God the Father and God the Son. But what about the Holy Spirit? If you close your eyes and imagine the Holy Spirit, what do you picture? We might picture fire or a dove, but these are only symbols, not really a Person we can imagine ourselves having a conversation with. Despite the Sacrament of Confirmation is all about the Holy Spirit, a lot of Catholics struggle more with understanding and feeling connected to the Holy Spirit than with the other persons in the Trinity.
The Handy Little Guide to the Holy Spirit, by Michelle Jones Schroeder, helps us understand and know this person of the trinity. She helps us see that by accepting the Holy Spirit, living in him and allowing him to live in us, we can in some small way become an expression of God’s love for others. We can display the Spirit of God by our words and actions. We can speak the Spirit of Truth and teach people about salvation. We can encourage and help those around us to encounter God.
