“But what is the Spirit of Our Lord? It’s a spirit of perfect charity, filled with a marvelous esteem of the Divinity and an infinite desire to honor it in a worthy manner, together with a knowledge of the greatness of His Father, in order to admire and extol them unceasingly. He has such a high esteem of this that He paid homage to Him for all the things that were in His Sacred Person and that passed out from it; He attributed everything to Him; He was unwilling to say that His teaching was His own, but referred it to His Father: My teaching is not my own; it comes from God who sent me (Jn 7, 16). Is there any greater esteem than that of the Son, who is equal to the Father, and yet who acknowledges the Father as the author and sole principle of all the good that’s in Him?” (CCD XII, conference 196).

Vincent de Paul

Reflection:

1. Mr. Vincent offers us here some key lines of his theological thought. He begins with a simple question: “what is the spirit of Our Lord?,” and ends with another no less profound: “Is there any greater esteem than that of the Son, who is equal to the Father, and yet who acknowledges the Father as the author and sole principle of all the good that’s in Him?”
2. To the first, Mr. Vincent answered in a clear and, to some extent, convincing way: “It’s a spirit of perfect charity, filled with a marvelous esteem of the Divinity and an infinite desire to honor it in a worthy manner, together with a knowledge of the greatness of His Father, in order to admire and extol them unceasingly.” An affirmation (“perfect charity”) that is concretized in two dimensions (“full of esteem” and “infinite desire”) with a purpose: “to admire the greatness of the Father.”
3. The position of Jesus Christ should serve as an example for any of his followers. And what is this position? To show such a high esteem of God the Father that we not only pay homage to Him in all things, but also attribute all our work and our thinking to Him. The imitation of Jesus Christ appears, in this case, as the inspirational source of being a Christian and, as an application, of the missionary being so that, at some point, we can affirm: My teaching is not my own; it comes from God who sent me.
4. A final reflection leads us to comment on the purpose of all this mystical compendium, that is none other than the “knowledge of the greatness of His Father,” real starting point of Vincentian spirituality; greatness manifested in the Son, towards whom our gaze should be continually directed on the path of perfection. “Imitating Christ,” as we said before, becomes the key strategy of spirituality.

Questions for dialogue:

1. What does the spirit of God manifest in us?
2. Do our communities imitate Christ and do they try to be a witness in His follow-up?
3. What do those whom we evangelize see in us?
4. To what extent is our work inspired by the action of Jesus Christ?
5. Do our works extol the unfinished creation of God?

Mitxel Olabuenaga, C.M.