The Litany Project: Litany of the Holy Ghost, Part 8

Gift of God, the Most High, have mercy on us.

God sends the Holy Spirit into our souls as His great gift of love. Since the Holy Spirit is the Love of the Father and the Son, so strong and vibrant that He is the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, the gift of the Holy Spirit is the gift of divine love. 

We should pay special attention to the idea of gift. God does not have to give us anything. He does so freely and out of His great love. We do not earn His gifts. There is no way we can. Yet God gives us the greatest gift of all: Himself. 

Spirit Who fillest the universe, have mercy on us.

At the beginning of Genesis, we read, “the Spirit of God moved over the waters” (1:2). He moved, and the world was created. Light and dark, the sun and moon and stars, day and night, waters and dry land, plants and animals and birds all came to be. Then God breathed His Spirit into the first human being, created in His image and likeness. 

But God does not just create everything and let it run on its own. Rather, He sustains all life with the life-giving love of the Holy Spirit. God moves in the world and in our lives. He is always present. He fills the universe with His Love, and that Love is the Holy Spirit.

Spirit of the adoption of the children of God, have mercy on us.

Through a series of covenants, God has expanded His family bit by bit over the centuries of salvation history. In these last days, Jesus made that family the world-wide Church when He inaugurated the New Covenant, which gives us an even deeper relationship with God the Father. When we are baptized, when the Holy Spirit enters into us, filling us with sanctifying grace and divine life, we become children of God, sons and daughters in the Son. 

St. John writes in his first letter, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when He appears we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is” (3:2). We are God’s covenant family. We are His beloved children. “And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of His Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’ So through God you are no longer a slave but a son, and if a son then an heir” (Galatians 4:6-7). We are heirs to God’s kingdom, already in the Church and forever in Heaven.