In today’s readings both St. Paul and Jesus have something to say about receiving the Holy Spirit. I wondered what the Early Church Fathers might have to say about receiving the Spirit. Some use receiving the Spirit in context of a different point they are trying to make. But others have deep insight about  receiving the Spirit as a key divine event in the human person. They reflect on God entering, inhabiting, sanctifying, transforming, empowering and even beginning within us the life we will possess fully, not just now, but also in eternity.

In his Catechetical Lectures, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, is addressing adults preparing for Baptism. It is not a theological treatment on pneumatology but rather a preparation for people who expected sacramentally to receive the Holy Spirit at their initiation. Cyril strives to help the people realize that receiving the Spirit means receiving Someone. In Lectures 16 and 17, he notes that the Spirit isn’t merely an influence or divine power. Rather, the Spirit acts personally. The Spirit speaks, calls, sends, teaches and sanctifies. It is an interpersonal relation.

Cyril explicitly cites our Gospel: “How much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him.”  But what interests Cyril is what happens when this gift is received. Speaking about Christ breathing the Spirit upon the Apostles in John 20 and then Pentecost, Cyril sees degrees of capacity for receiving God’s gift: the Apostles genuinely receive the Spirit, and yet Pentecost brings a still greater outpouring. He paints a picture as the human person like a vessel being enlarged to receive more. 

So often receiving the Spirit is depicted as something that happens once, but Cyril makes the point that receiving the Spirit is something we are continually becoming capable of receiving even more deeply. We received the Spirit sacramentally in Baptism and Confirmation. But that doesn’t mean God has exhausted what the Spirit can do within us. Cyril’s image allows the prayer of Luke 11:13 to remain meaningful for baptized Christians: “Father, give me your Holy Spirit.” Not because the Spirit is absent, but because we are not yet completely open to everything the Spirit desires to do in us.

St Irenaeus, his writings, echoes Cyril to a degree when he offers that the Spirit accustoms us to God. Irenaeus describes Christians as already receiving a portion of the Spirit with a pledge of more to come. He describes this wonderfully when he writes that: “little by little [we become] accustomed to receive and bear God.” Think about what that means: the Holy Spirit is teaching us to grow and ever be more capable of bearing a greater presence of God in our lives. For Irenaeus, salvation isn’t merely God changing our legal status. It is God gradually transforming human beings so that we become capable of sharing divine life. The Spirit dwelling within us is already the beginning of that future.

In the first reading St. Paul asks: “Did you receive the Spirit from works of the law, or from faith in what you heard?” (Gal 3:2) Often that is taken primarily as part of Paul’s argument about justification, and indeed it is. But Paul already knows they have received the Holy Spirit and so he appeals to their experience.

Then in v. 5: “Does, then, the one who supplies the Spirit to you and works mighty deeds among you do so from works of the law or from faith in what you heard?”  He is making the point that something has already happened to them. Their experience, their Christian existence itself was evidence of God’s action. That is what makes rumors of their return to circumcision and Torah observance so incomprehensible to Paul. God has given you his Spirit. You have already received the thing you are trying to earn. He is asking, why are they now behaving as though God’s life must be acquired through something they accomplish?

All of this together reinforces the idea that the Spirit is gift, not achievement or reward. The Spirit is something earned by sufficient religious performance.

This is the point St. Augustine makes in his homily on Luke 11.  Augustine emphasizes that Christ would not urge us so persistently to ask unless God truly desired to give: God is more willing to give than we are to receive. When you join Augustine’s thought to that from Irenaeus, it means the Spirit gradually makes us capable of receiving what God desires to give.

Consider how that might make us think differently about today’s Gospel. We hear: “And I tell you, ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened. “Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened…” and immediately begin filling in the blank. Ask for what? And we ask about of current needs and future hopes, no doubt legitimate prayers.

But consider Jesus’ words: “How much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?” Jesus isn’t promising that persistent prayer eventually persuades God to give us whatever particular outcome we’re requesting. He promises something much greater: God gives us God in the Holy Spirit.

Maybe that’s why the answer to prayer sometimes doesn’t look like what we asked for. We ask God to remove a difficult situation but the Spirit gives us courage to live through it. We ask God to change someone else and the Spirit begins changing us. We ask God to show us exactly what to do but the Spirit gives us patience to wait. We ask God to take away suffering and the Spirit somehow enables us to discover Christ within it.

The gift isn’t always a changed circumstance. Sometimes the gift is a changed person within the circumstance.

May the real question is how much of me have I allowed the Holy Spirit to receive so as to change me. What parts of my life do I insist on keeping control? My decisions, relationships, plans fears…? 

Maybe we over-complicate our prayer. Might it be as simple as teaching me to receive and bear God? And then “buckle up” as we let the Spirit change us.