Your soul is a picture of the angelic life; Angels: Day 357

Arguing for the divinity of the Holy Spirit, St. Gregory of Nyssa says that you know from your own experience that the Spirit is divine. Your own soul is intellectual and invisible, like the angels, and like the angels you cannot come near to God except by the Holy Spirit’s help.

Whoever agrees with us that the things above us are also ordered by the power of the Spirit with the Father and the Son has the support of clear evidence from his own life.

The nature of man is compounded of body and soul, and the angelic nature has for its portion life without a body. So if the Holy Spirit worked only in the case of bodies, and the soul were not capable of receiving the grace that comes from him, then we might perhaps infer from this, if the intellectual and incorporeal nature which is in us were above the power of the Spirit, that the angelic life too was in no need of his grace.

But if the gift of the Holy Spirit is mainly a grace of the soul, and the soul is similar to the life of the angels in its reason and its invisibility—well, then, anyone who knows how to reach a conclusion would agree that every intellectual nature is governed by the ordering of the Holy Spirit.

For since it is said that the “angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 18:10), and it is not possible to behold the person of the Father except by training the sight on it through his image; and the image of the person of the Father is the Only-begotten, and to him again no one can draw near whose mind has not been illumined by the Holy Spirit—what else do we learn from this but that the Holy Spirit is not separated from anything that is done by the Father and the Son? –St. Gregory of Nyssa,  On the Holy Trinity

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .

Like me, the angels are spiritual beings. Unlike me, their spirit is unwavering. Do I strive with my angel’s help, to live with an angelic consistency in the choices I make each day?

CLOSING PRAYER

Guardian Angel, help me to make my soul a reflection of your purity.

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