First of all, the soul must be opened to the full impact of the Holy Spirit so that he may, like a great gust of fresh air, expel from it the polluted, lower atmosphere which so insidiously stifles one’s personal relationship with God.  Indeed, one can be so acclimatised to this atmosphere as not to realise it is there; and even when one does, there is the temptation to resist the Holy Spirit’s disturbing influence.  For what God is bent on is to effect a complete spiritual upheaval, to turn our souls inside out until all trace of enthusiasm for our own interests and unworthy attachments has disappeared.

To throw our souls open to the Holy Spirit means bidding farewell to fondness for money; farewell to the bearing of grudges and the harbouring of resentment; farewell to bad thoughts and desires; in fact farewell to all that spiritual smog which is an offence to God and suffocates the soul.  And when we have allowed the cleansing breeze of the Holy Spirit to sweep all that away, then there must burst into flame the fire of love and enthusiasm for God.

And we must be careful that it really is for God.  It is possible, for example, to be filled with enthusiasm for the Church as an organisation to which one belongs and which one may help to run, and yet leave God out of it altogether.  It is the temptation to treat the Church as a purely human association with purely human aims and objectives – something that exists primarily to cater for the interests of its members.