Day 6: The Gift of Knowledge

The sixth day of the Holy Spirit Novena turns to the Gift of Knowledge. The Catholic tradition distinguishes Knowledge from Wisdom and Understanding: where Wisdom tastes the things of God in their savor and Understanding sees the truths of faith in their inner connections, Knowledge sees created things in their proper relation to God. The Gift of Knowledge is the gift by which the Catholic soul recognizes created realities (work, family, money, leisure, the body, the natural world) as goods given by the Lord and ordered to His glory.

Today's invocation

Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Your faithful and kindle in them the fire of Your love. Send forth Your Spirit, and they shall be created. And You shall renew the face of the earth. Amen.

Today's meditation

The Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of Knowledge among the seven gifts at paragraph 1831. The Catholic theological tradition (drawing principally on Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II-II, q. 9) treats the Gift of Knowledge as the Holy Spirit's interior light by which the soul rightly orders its relation to created realities. Saint Augustine, in On Christian Doctrine, articulates the foundational principle: created things are to be used (with proper respect and gratitude) for the love of God; God Himself alone is to be enjoyed (loved for His own sake). The Gift of Knowledge is the Spirit's continuing instruction of the soul in this proper ordering.

The principal danger to the Catholic soul in regard to created things is not their use but their idolization. We make money, work, family, sex, food, leisure, or our own reputation into idols when we love them as ultimate ends rather than as gifts of God ordered to His glory. The Gift of Knowledge gradually purifies the heart of this idolization, not by despising created things (which would be a Gnostic error) but by loving them rightly, with thanksgiving, and as means of communion with the Giver.

Today's intention

Today, ask the Holy Spirit for the Gift of Knowledge in regard to the particular created realities of your life. Holy Spirit, show me where I have been disordered in my love of created things. Help me to use them with thanksgiving in proper relation to You. Bring to the Spirit the specific area where you suspect (or know) that a created good has become disordered: the work that has consumed the time owed to family, the money that has displaced charity, the device that has stolen the time owed to prayer, the relationship that has displaced God in the heart's affections.

Reflection

The Catholic spiritual tradition is realistic about the difficulty of Knowledge in our age. The modern Western world is structured around the constant intensification of our relations to created goods (consumer culture, digital media, the relentless commercial appeal to appetite). The Gift of Knowledge is, in this context, particularly important: it is the gift by which the Catholic soul learns to use the goods of the modern world with discernment and to refuse the slow idolization that the surrounding culture would impose.

A particular fruit of the Gift of Knowledge is the right ordering of suffering. The Catholic faithful who have received the Gift see suffering not as a meaningless evil but as a created reality that, joined to the Cross of Christ, becomes a means of grace. "I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church" (Colossians 1:24). The soul that has Knowledge knows how to suffer, and how to offer the suffering, in a way that natural reasoning alone cannot teach.

The Gift of Knowledge is the foundation of the Catholic doctrine of stewardship. We are not owners of our possessions, our time, our bodies, or our gifts; we are stewards entrusted with them by the Lord for a season, and we will give an account. The novena's sixth day is, in part, a renewal of this stewardship disposition.

Closing prayers

Pray seven times each: the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be.

Holy Spirit, Spirit of Knowledge, teach us to use the things of this world for the love of God.