An old beggar lay on his deathbed. His last words were spoken to his young companion who had been begging with him and whom he considered as a son. “Dear son,” he said, “I have nothing to give you except a cotton bag and a dirty golden bowl which I got in my younger days from the junk yard of a rich lady.” After his companion’s death, the boy continued begging, using the bowl he had given him. One day an old gold merchant dropped a coin in the boy’s bowl and he was surprised to hear a familiar clinking sound. “Let me check your bowl” the merchant said. To his great surprise, he found that the beggar’s bowl was made of pure gold. “My dear son,” he said, “why do you waste your time begging? You are a rich man. That bowl of yours is worth at least thirty thousand dollars.”
We Christians are often like this young beggar who failed to recognize and appreciate the value of his bowl. The Holy Spirit dwells within us (2Tim 1,14), however we fail to appreciate the infinite worth of the Holy Spirit living within each of us.
We do not appreciate the infinite value of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit within us because we do not enjoy His presence, and even worse, we do not use Him. As St. Thomas says: “we are said to possess only what we can freely use or enjoy” (I,43,3), so if we do not use and enjoy His presence, it is as if we do not really possess the Holy Spirit, which means we have failed to recognize the value of His presence.
Using His presence means recognizing His movements in our soul and following them. He dwells within us in order to move us but we need to recognize those actions and allow Him to move us, since He moves us in order to make us holy.
Fidelity to the promptings of the Holy Spirit is essential and indispensable to progress on the path of union with God. We should be very concerned about being faithful to the workings of the Holy Spirit within us. From this fidelity to His action follows the joy for the work that the Holy Spirit accomplishes through us—and also because such fidelity allows us to experience His presence, from which joy naturally arises.
