Power of divine counsel sets clear course to God

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The following are excerpts of a sermon given yesterday by the Rev. Mark White at St. Raphael Catholic Community church in Rockville.

"The disciples were filled with joy and the Holy Spirit." There is a monk in a monastery up in Pennsylvania who bids farewell to everyone he meets with the exhortation, "Do good and avoid evil." He reminds everyone of the fundamental law that the Lord has written in indelible ink in our hearts: We were made to do good and avoid evil. Doing evil and avoiding good is an option, but we are not supposed to exercise it. What is not always so obvious is the precise application of this fundamental principle to particular circumstances.

A young father might ask himself: Should we use our extra money to try to move to a bigger house in a better neighborhood, or should we save the money for a rainy day, or should we give it away to people who need it more than we do? A young woman might ask herself: Should I befriend such-and-such a person who seems to need a friend and a good influence, or should I keep my distance because the person says and does things that go against my religion and could lead me astray?

And, of course, there are countless other possible examples.

Now, the good Lord has endowed us with the use of reason; He has given us the natural knowledge of basic ethical principles; He has even gone so far as to spell these principles out for us by giving us the Ten Commandments. But, in spite of all these advantages, we sometimes simply do not know what to do. We live in a world weighed down by sin, and our own minds are darkened by it. ...

Thankfully, the Lord has a response to this problem. Let's each think back to the day when we were confirmed. Perhaps you will recall that the consecratory prayer of the sacrament of Confirmation tells us that with it, we receive the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.

The prophet Isaiah lists the gifts in the course of his description of the Christ: "The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon Him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and piety, and His delight shall be in the fear of the Lord." These seven gifts make us docile to the inner promptings of the Holy Spirit. They raise our limited natural powers to the level of personal communion with God. They sustain us in our quest to do good and avoid evil.

The Lord uses all seven gifts to make us holy. By the gift of counsel, He answers our prayers for guidance and directs us throughout life. The spirit of counsel does not nullify our obligation to be prudent and deliberate in our actions; it does not turn us into robots who automatically do the right thing and no longer need to think things through and ask other people's advice. No, the gift of counsel elevates the human prudence we acquire by our efforts and experience, and it directs us in accord with supernatural motives that God plants in our hearts. ... In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas, the gift of counsel directs man as if he were being counseled by God Himself.

But how do we know what it means in practice? The answer, of course, is to look to Christ. The Lord Jesus always acted to please the Father. ... If we stay close to Him, confessing our sins and receiving His body and blood faithfully in a state of grace, we can be sure that He will stay close to us. He will give us a share in the same spirit of counsel that guided Him throughout His pilgrim life on earth.

The Lord taught us many things about how to live, which we do well to study and remember. But He gave us one word that, according to the Church's traditional teaching, corresponds directly with the gift of counsel, namely: "Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy." ... As St. Paul wrote: To be full of pity, or mercy, is always profitable.

To sum up: Right now we are sailing across the sea of this pilgrim life, heading toward the further shore of heaven. Our ships are outfitted with both sails and oars. The oars are our natural powers, by which we think through decisions and seek the advice of wise people we know. The sails are the gifts of the Holy Spirit. All we can do on our own is to row as best we can, pulling on the oars with all our strength and endurance to move our ship forward. If we do this, then just when we think that we are getting too tired to keep rowing, just then the divine wind will blow.