Jean Khoury
Summary: The Christian vocation can be understood as a progressive participation in the very life of God. Ezekiel’s vision of the dry bones provides a remarkable biblical starting point: God does not merely restore life to the dead; he promises, “I will put my Spirit in you, and you shall live.” The Hebrew word ruaḥ means spirit, breath and wind, allowing the text to describe divine life as something breathed by God into his people. This reaches its New Testament fulfilment when the risen Christ “breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit’” (Jn 20:22).
The deepest fulfilment of the first commandment is therefore not simply to make a heroic human effort to love God, but to become so transformed by the Holy Spirit that we can love God with the love with which God himself loves us. St John of the Cross describes this transformation in The Living Flame of Love: the Holy Spirit becomes so intimately united with the transformed person that the person’s love becomes a participation in God’s own love. The soul can even “give God to God”, because what it gives is the very divine Gift that it has received.
This transformation is intrinsically apostolic. The person who has become a living flame does not keep the fire within himself. The Spirit communicates himself through the transformed person to others. This has an especially profound significance for the priest. Holy Orders gives the priest a sacramental configuration to Christ, enabling him to act in persona Christi Capitis from the moment of ordination. But his humanity must then progressively become conformed to the Christ whom he sacramentally bears. Priestly formation therefore has a precise goal: the progressive convergence between sacramental configuration and personal conformity to Christ. When this occurs, the priest’s prayer, preaching and celebration of the Eucharist become increasingly transparent to the action of the Holy Spirit.
Introduction
There is a remarkable path from Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones to the deepest levels of Christian mystical theology. At first sight, Ezekiel 37 appears to concern the restoration of Israel. The people are in exile; their hope has disappeared; they describe themselves as dead bones. Yet within this extraordinary vision lies a theology of divine life that reaches far beyond the restoration of a nation. God promises not merely to reassemble what has been broken, but to put his own ruaḥ into his people: “I will put my Spirit in you, and you shall live.”
This image of divine breath opens a path towards understanding the Christian vocation itself. God does not merely give us something which enables us to live for him. He gives us his own Spirit. The Christian life is therefore participation in divine life. The Spirit becomes the principle of our life, our prayer, our love and eventually our mission.
The movement reaches a decisive point in the Gospel of John. The risen Christ stands before his disciples, breathes upon them and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Greek verb used by John, enephysēsen, means “he breathed on” or “he breathed into”, while pneuma can mean spirit, breath or wind. John is therefore deliberately presenting the gift of the Spirit in terms of breath and new creation.
From here, the question becomes much greater: what happens when this divine breath is not merely received but progressively becomes the principle of a person’s whole existence? What happens when the human spirit is transformed by the fire of the Holy Spirit to such an extent that the person begins to love God with God’s own love and to communicate that divine life to others?
This brings us directly to the fulfilment of the first commandment and, at the same time, to the deepest meaning of Christian ministry and priestly formation.
1. “You shall know that I am YHWH”: God makes himself known through his action
The repeated formula in Ezekiel 37 is one of the keys to understanding the entire vision: “And you shall know that I am YHWH.” The Hebrew is vidʿatem kî-ʾănî YHWH. The divine Name is not simply Elohim, “God”; it is YHWH, the covenant Name. The verb yadaʿ, “to know”, is also important. Biblical knowledge is not merely the acquisition of information. It includes recognition, encounter and experiential knowledge. God is saying, in effect, that Israel will come to recognise who he truly is through what he does. The sequence is striking. God speaks to the bones. The bones come together. Sinews appear, flesh covers them and skin covers the flesh. Then God commands the ruaḥ to come from the four winds. The breath enters them and they live. Finally, God says that they will know that he is YHWH.
The knowledge of God therefore emerges through an encounter with God’s effective action. He speaks, and his word produces reality. He acts, and his people discover who he is. The climax of the passage is God’s declaration: “I have spoken and I have acted.” This certainly includes the sovereignty and omnipotence of God, but it is more intimate than a mere affirmation of divine power. Israel discovers that YHWH is the God who can bring life where there is death, hope where there is despair and communion where there has been separation. The people say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope has perished.” God responds by saying, in effect, “You are still my people.”
That expression is essential. God repeatedly calls them ʿammî, “my people”. They are in graves, but they are still “my people”. Their condition does not define their identity. Their exile does not cancel the covenant. Their apparent death does not cancel God’s claim upon them. The God who raises them is not merely the God who possesses power over death. He is YHWH, the God who has bound himself to his people.
2. “I will put my Spirit in you”: the intimacy of divine life
The climax of the passage comes in Ezekiel 37:14: “I will put my Spirit in you, and you shall live.” The Hebrew is wenātattî rûḥî bākhem wiḥyîtem. The possessive pronoun is extraordinarily significant: rûḥî, “my Spirit”; and the prepositional phrase is bākhem, “in you”. The Hebrew ruaḥ can mean wind, breath or spirit. Ezekiel deliberately allows these meanings to resonate with one another. The dead bodies need breath; the wind comes from the four directions; the breath enters the bodies; and God finally declares that he will put his own Spirit in them.
The movement is therefore not simply from death to biological life. It is from death to participation in the life communicated by God himself. This is why the image of breathing is so intimate. Breath is not something external to the living person. It proceeds from within the living person and is necessary for life. Scripture is therefore using one of the most intimate bodily realities available to human experience to speak about the communication of divine life.
We must, of course, avoid understanding the Holy Spirit as merely a metaphorical “breath” of God. The Holy Spirit is a divine Person. Yet Scripture uses the relationship between breath, spirit and life to reveal something about the manner in which God communicates himself. God does not merely give us something belonging to him; he gives us his Spirit. This allows us to formulate the Christian vocation in a radical way. Christian life is not merely living for God, nor merely living with God. Through the Holy Spirit, it is living from God and participating in God’s own life.
3. From Ezekiel to John: Christ breathes the Holy Spirit
The connection with the risen Christ is extraordinary. In John 20:22, Jesus “breathed on them, and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.’” The Greek text uses the verb enephysēsen, “he breathed on” or “he breathed into”, followed immediately by pneuma hagion, “Holy Spirit”. The gesture evokes the language of creation. In Genesis, God gives life by breathing into man. In Ezekiel, God promises to put his ruaḥ into the dead. In John, the risen Christ breathes upon the disciples and commands them to receive the Holy Spirit.
The movement is therefore one of new creation. The Christ who is risen from the dead communicates the Spirit of the new creation. Ezekiel’s promise, “I will put my Spirit in you, and you shall live”, finds an extraordinary Christian resonance in the risen Christ’s action: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Christian vocation is thus not simply to receive forgiveness or to receive a new moral programme. It is to receive divine life.
And this brings us to St Paul: “He who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” (1 Cor 6:17). Paul does not mean that the creature ceases to be a creature or becomes God by nature. Rather, grace establishes such a profound communion between the human person and Christ that Paul can speak of “one spirit”. The deepest knowledge of God is therefore not merely intellectual. It is knowledge through participation. We come to know God because his life has entered us.
4. “One spirit with him”: learning to breathe the life of God
This is where the image of breathing becomes a particularly fruitful way of speaking about prayer and spiritual life. We receive God’s life, and that divine life becomes the principle of our response to God. The Christian learns progressively to live from what he has received. This does not mean that the human person becomes passive. Grace does not eliminate human freedom; it transforms and elevates it. The human person truly loves, truly prays and truly acts, but the Holy Spirit becomes increasingly the principle of those acts. The result is a profound circularity. God gives himself to the person; the person is transformed by God’s self-gift; the Holy Spirit becomes increasingly active in the person’s spirit; and the person returns to God a love which originates in God himself.
This is the deepest meaning of the Christian vocation. We are not simply asked to produce a love which would somehow be worthy of God by its own natural strength. We are given the very Love by which God enables us to love him. The first commandment therefore contains within itself the promise of grace. God commands us to love him with all our heart, soul, mind and strength, and God gives us his Spirit so that we may actually become capable of doing so.
5. The living flame: St John of the Cross and the transformation of the person
At this point St John of the Cross’s Living Flame of Love becomes decisive. His mystical theology allows us to understand what happens when this participation in divine life reaches profound maturity. The image of fire is central. The log placed in fire does not cease to be wood, but the fire penetrates it so completely that the distinction between the fire’s action and the wood’s transformation becomes extraordinarily difficult to perceive. In the same way, the Holy Spirit can transform the human spirit so profoundly that divine love becomes the principle of the person’s own loving.
St John makes an astonishing claim. He says that, because God gives himself freely to the soul, the soul, when united to God, can in turn give God to God. He writes that “the soul … gives to God, God himself in God”, and explains that “the soul … can give him and communicate him to whomever it wishes”. This is not to be understood as though the soul possessed the Holy Spirit as a finite object and could transfer a portion of him elsewhere. St John himself immediately gives the necessary qualification: “the soul cannot give God again to himself, since in himself he is ever himself.” Nevertheless, he insists that the gift is real because the soul gives back what God has given to her, now through her own free will and love.
This is one of the most profound descriptions of grace in the mystical tradition. God does not merely act instead of the human person. He transforms the human person so that the person’s own free action becomes a genuine participation in divine action. St John goes even further: “the soul here loves God, not through itself but through him.” He explicitly says that the soul loves “through the Holy Spirit”. This is the fulfilment of the human vocation. The human person becomes capable of loving God with a love which is genuinely his own and yet is also participation in God’s own love. There is no confusion between Creator and creature. The creature remains creature; God remains God. Yet grace creates an extraordinary communion in which the creature participates in the divine life.
6. “Giving God to God”: the fulfilment of the first commandment
We can now understand more profoundly what it means to fulfil the first commandment. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength” (Deut 6:5). Jesus intensifies this by including the mind (Mk 12:30). The ultimate fulfilment cannot consist merely in exhausting our natural capacities in an attempt to produce an adequate love for the infinite God. The commandment itself points beyond natural capacity towards transformation by grace. God gives us his Spirit so that we may love him with the love he has first communicated to us. The heart, soul and spirit must become capable of receiving the divine fire. The Christian’s love for God becomes progressively more than a human response to a divine object; it becomes participation in God’s own movement of love.
This explains St John’s extraordinary statement that the soul can “give God to God”. The soul gives back to God the divine Gift received from God, but now through a truly human act of freedom and love. The gift is God’s, yet it has genuinely become the soul’s. This is why there is no diminution when divine life is communicated. A finite possession is diminished when distributed. God is not. The Holy Spirit is not divided into portions. The divine Gift can be communicated without being exhausted. Indeed, the paradox is that the more completely the Spirit is communicated, the more completely the person lives from the Spirit. The Christian vocation is therefore not simply to become a better person. It is to become a person in whom God’s own life can increasingly operate.
7. From contemplation to communication: the Spirit becomes apostolic
Once this transformation is understood, contemplation and apostolate can no longer be separated. The person who is transformed by divine fire necessarily becomes communicative. The fire received from God becomes fire returned to God in love, but it also becomes fire communicated to others. The movement is therefore simultaneously God-to-us, us-to-God and God-through-us-to-others. This is why the fulfilment of the first commandment has profoundly apostolic consequences. The person who truly loves God cannot remain enclosed within himself. The divine love which has transformed him seeks to communicate itself. The Christian becomes, by grace, a living instrument of the Spirit.
This does not mean that every Christian possesses the sacramental authority of the ordained priest. It means that every Christian who is united to Christ can become a genuine instrument through which the life of Christ reaches others. St Paul can therefore say, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ” (1 Cor 11:1). The apostle’s life itself has become a medium through which Christ can be encountered. The saint is therefore not simply someone who has reached a private mystical perfection. Holiness is intrinsically communicative. The more completely a person belongs to God, the more freely God can communicate himself through that person. This is why prayer itself becomes apostolic. Prayer is not merely something which prepares us for ministry. At its deepest level, prayer is already participation in the movement by which divine life is communicated.
8. The Church continues Christ’s breathing
The history of Christian liturgy provides a fascinating confirmation of this theology. The Church has preserved bodily gestures of breathing or insufflation in several liturgical traditions. The Roman tradition itself once employed insufflation and exsufflation in the baptismal rites, while the breathing gesture remains associated with the consecration of the Chrism in the Roman tradition. Eastern traditions have also preserved such gestures in baptismal and exorcistic contexts. The significance is not that the minister possesses the Holy Spirit as a personal substance that he can physically transmit. The point is that the Church has used breathing as a bodily sign of the Spirit’s communication. The gesture makes visible the biblical association between ruaḥ, pneuma, breath, spirit and life.
The deeper principle is that what Christ did is continued ecclesially. Christ breathed upon the apostles and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Church continues to invoke and communicate the Spirit through her sacramental life. The Second Vatican Council provides the broader theological framework: “Christ is always present in His Church, especially in her liturgical celebrations.” It continues by explaining that Christ is present in the sacrifice of the Mass “in the person of His minister”, that he is present in the sacraments, and that “it is He Himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in the Church”. (Vatican)
This means that the Church does not merely speak about the Holy Spirit. In her sacramental life, she becomes the ecclesial instrument through which Christ communicates the fruits of his Paschal Mystery in the Holy Spirit.
9. The two dimensions of priesthood: Christ in the priest and the priest in Christ
This brings us to the particular mystery of the priesthood. There are two realities which must never be confused, but which must also never be separated. The first is the priest’s sacramental configuration to Christ. The second is his personal spiritual conformity to Christ. Through Holy Orders, the priest receives a sacramental character and is configured to Christ the Priest. The Second Vatican Council states that priests are “configured to Christ the Priest” through the sacrament of Orders “so that they can act in the person of Christ the Head”. (Vatican) The Catechism likewise teaches that the sacrament configures priests to Christ so that they may act in persona Christi Capitis. (Vatican) This happens through ordination. It does not wait for the priest to become holy.
A newly ordained priest is truly a priest. He can validly celebrate the Eucharist. Christ acts sacramentally through him. The sacramental reality is objective and permanent. But this creates a second vocation within the vocation. The man himself must progressively become conformed to the Christ whom he sacramentally bears. There can therefore be a distance between the sacramental reality of the priest and the spiritual maturity of the priest. Ordination establishes the first; sanctification must progressively develop the second.
This distinction is essential for a proper theology of priestly formation. The priest must not merely be capable of doing what Christ does sacramentally. He must progressively become the man whose humanity corresponds to what Christ is doing through him.
10. Sacramental configuration and personal conformity
We can therefore formulate the distinction precisely: ordination gives the priest a sacramental configuration to Christ; spiritual formation seeks his personal conformity to Christ; priestly holiness is the progressive convergence of these two realities. The first is given. The second must grow. The first enables the priest to act in persona Christi Capitis. The second enables his humanity to become increasingly transparent to the Christ whom he represents sacramentally.
This is why it would be misleading to speak simply of the priest acting “in his own name” as though his personal action were independent of Christ. What is meant is something deeper: the priest’s own freedom, intelligence, affection, prayer and humanity become increasingly united to Christ so that his personal action corresponds to Christ’s action. The goal is not that the priest should cease to be himself. It is that he should become himself fully in Christ.
St Thérèse of Lisieux provides an illuminating comparison. She was not a priest and did not possess the sacramental configuration of Holy Orders. She could not consecrate the Eucharist or absolve sins. Yet her humanity could be so transformed by grace that Christ lived and acted through her. Her holiness manifests the second dimension without the first. The priest possesses both. He possesses the sacramental configuration from the moment of ordination, and he is called to develop a profound personal conformity to Christ through the whole course of his spiritual life. This is why the priesthood demands more than functional competence. The priest must become, in his humanity, increasingly adequate to the mystery that has been placed sacramentally within him.
11. “Understand what you do, imitate what you celebrate”
The words spoken to the newly ordained priest are therefore extraordinarily important: “Understand what you do, imitate what you celebrate, conform your life to the mystery of the Lord’s Cross.” These words reveal the telos of priestly formation. The priest is not merely being told to perform the liturgical actions correctly. He is being told to allow the mystery he celebrates to become the form of his own life. He says, “This is my Body”, and his life must progressively become a gift of himself. He says, “This is my Blood”, and his life must progressively become an offering. He celebrates Christ’s sacrifice, and he must progressively become a man who offers himself.
He preaches Christ’s Word, and he must progressively become a man whose own life corresponds to the Word he proclaims. This is precisely why the spiritual formation of priests cannot be reduced to devotional preparation for ministry. The entire human person must be transformed. The priest needs to become the man who corresponds to the Christ whom he sacramentally represents.
The contemporary magisterium itself insists upon this logic. A 2024 Vatican doctrinal note, speaking of priests who preside in persona Christi Capitis, explains that those configured to Christ through sacramental grace are called “in the liturgy and in their entire pastoral ministry” to conform themselves to the same logic of Christ’s self-giving service. (Vatican) Thus the sacramental gift contains within itself a demand for personal transformation.
12. The priest as a living flame and communicator of the Spirit
At this point the theology of St John of the Cross becomes particularly relevant to priesthood. The priest does not merely possess a sacramental capacity to communicate Christ. He is also called to become personally transformed by the Spirit so that Christ can communicate himself through his humanity with increasing freedom. The priest’s sacramental ministry and his mystical transformation therefore converge.
Christ acts through the priest because the priest has been configured to Christ through Holy Orders. But Christ can also act through the priest’s transformed humanity because the priest has progressively become united to Christ in his interior life. The first reality does not depend upon the second. The second is nevertheless necessary if the priest’s whole humanity is to become an adequate instrument of his sacramental ministry.
This gives an extraordinary depth to the priest’s prayer. The priest does not merely pray for the people as an individual Christian who happens to hold a particular office. His prayer is inserted into the priestly prayer of Christ himself. And the more deeply the priest is united to Christ, the more his personal prayer can become an authentic participation in Christ’s own prayer.
The same is true of preaching. The priest does not merely communicate religious information. He announces the Word through which the Holy Spirit works. Vatican II states that Christ is present in his word because “it is He Himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in the Church”. (Vatican) The spiritually transformed priest can therefore become not simply a competent expositor of Scripture but a man through whom the Word becomes spiritually alive for those who hear it.
13. Prayer, preaching and the Eucharist: the transformation of ministry
The Eucharist reveals the convergence of these two dimensions most clearly. The Mass is always the same Eucharistic sacrifice. Its sacramental reality does not depend upon the personal holiness of the priest. Christ is truly present and truly acts. But the priest’s personal participation can profoundly affect the way in which the mystery is communicated to the faithful. A priest who celebrates the Mass with little interior union with Christ still celebrates the true Mass. But a priest whose humanity has been profoundly transformed by the Holy Spirit can celebrate the same Mass with a depth of personal union that makes his entire humanity more transparent to the mystery.
This is not because the sacrament itself becomes “more valid” or ontologically different. Rather, the priest’s personal participation in Christ changes the manner in which the sacramental mystery is embodied, proclaimed and communicated. The distinction is important. The objective sacramental action belongs to Christ and the Church. The subjective conformity of the minister can nevertheless become an extraordinary channel of spiritual fruitfulness.
The same applies to preaching. The words may be doctrinally correct in both cases, but the preacher who has been inwardly transformed by the Word speaks from a different interior reality. He is no longer simply talking about the fire; he has become a man who has been burned by it. The same applies to prayer. The priest’s prayer becomes increasingly apostolic because his prayer is increasingly participation in Christ’s own prayer for the Church. This is why the priest’s union with Christ is not an optional ornament added to ministry. It is the interior fulfilment of his ministry.
14. The fulfilment of the first commandment
We can now return to the first commandment. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.” The Christian vocation is to love God totally. But the extraordinary Christian revelation is that God himself gives us the capacity to accomplish this command. He gives us his Spirit. He transforms our spirit by his Spirit. He makes our heart capable of receiving divine fire. And then, as St John of the Cross describes it, the Spirit’s fire becomes so deeply interiorised that the person begins to love God through the Spirit. This is the fulfilment of the first commandment.
It is not merely the human person giving everything to God. It is God giving himself to the human person, transforming the person by that gift, and then enabling the person to return to God the love which has been received. The first commandment therefore becomes a mystery of divine participation. God breathes into us. We receive his life. His Spirit transforms our spirit. Our transformed spirit becomes a living flame. That flame rises towards God in love and reaches towards others in charity. The entire Christian vocation can therefore be understood as a movement of divine life received, returned and communicated.
15. The Christian vocation: to breathe the same Spirit
This brings us back to the image with which we began. To “breathe the same breath” as God is not to become God by nature. It is to participate in God’s life through the Holy Spirit. It is to allow the Spirit to become increasingly the principle of our thought, prayer, love and action. Prayer then becomes analogous to breathing. We receive, and we give. We receive the Spirit, and we respond in love. We receive divine life, and that life becomes communicative. Is this not the place where our breathing itself is transformed into love, moved from within by the ineffable utterings of the Holy Spirit? St. Paul writes: “The Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words” (Rom 8:26). The Spirit who has been breathed into us becomes, within us, a divine movement of love, an ineffable prayer rising towards the Father. Our breathing is no longer merely human: it is taken up into the breathing of the Spirit himself. At the deepest level, prayer becomes prayer of fire.
The spiritual tradition of the Christian East has often spoken of prayer becoming fire, of the whole person becoming inwardly aflame with the Spirit. The image is not merely emotional. It expresses the transformation of the human spirit by divine love.
The mature Christian therefore does not simply pray about God. He learns to pray from God, with God’s own Spirit working within him. This explains why the contemplative life is intrinsically apostolic. The more deeply one receives God, the more freely God can communicate himself through that person. The Christian becomes, by grace, a kind of living breath of God for the world.
16. Practical consequences for Christian life
The first consequence is that Christian spiritual formation must aim beyond moral improvement. We certainly need conversion, virtue, discipline and fidelity. But the ultimate goal is union with Christ and transformation by the Holy Spirit. The Christian must become progressively capable of living from the Spirit rather than merely attempting to live for God through natural effort.
The second consequence is that prayer must be understood as reception as well as activity. We do not enter prayer merely to speak to God, think about God or ask God for things. We enter prayer to receive God. The whole movement of prayer should gradually become an ever deeper participation in the Spirit.
The third consequence is that love of neighbour is not an alternative to contemplation. It is its overflow. The Spirit received in prayer becomes the love communicated in ordinary life. A person transformed by God becomes increasingly capable of bringing God to others simply by the quality of his presence, his words, his charity, his patience and his prayer.
The fourth consequence is that apostolate must begin from transformation. We cannot give what we have not received. The more deeply the Christian lives from Christ, the more naturally his apostolate becomes a communication of Christ rather than merely the transmission of ideas about Christ.
The fifth consequence is that the goal of Christian maturity can be described as a progressive unity of life. Prayer, charity, work, evangelisation and ordinary relationships cease to be separate compartments. The Spirit who is received in prayer becomes the Spirit who animates the whole of life.
17. Practical consequences for priestly formation
For priestly formation, the implications are even more profound. Formation must never be reduced to preparing a man to exercise priestly functions. The sacramental identity is already given through Holy Orders. The fundamental question of formation is therefore: what is happening to the man who has received this sacramental configuration?
The priest must be helped to understand the distinction between sacramental configuration and personal conformity. He must know that Christ acts through him from the moment of ordination, but he must also understand that his own humanity is called to become progressively conformed to Christ.
This means that spiritual formation cannot be treated as merely one dimension alongside intellectual, pastoral and liturgical formation. It must penetrate the whole of priestly formation because it concerns the transformation of the man himself.
The priest must learn to pray not merely as a Christian but as one whose whole ministry is ordered towards communicating Christ. His prayer should progressively become apostolic: prayer in which he carries others before God and allows the Holy Spirit to act through his union with Christ. His preaching must similarly become a communication of life. The priest must not merely know the doctrine of the Holy Spirit; he must become a man who lives from the Spirit. And the Eucharist must become the centre of this convergence. The priest celebrates in persona Christi, but he is also called to conform his own life to the mystery he celebrates. The more deeply his humanity is united to Christ, the more profoundly he can enter into the self-offering of Christ.
The ultimate goal of priestly formation can therefore be expressed as follows: the Christ who is sacramentally present and operative in the priest must progressively become the Christ who lives personally through the priest’s humanity. This is not a second priesthood. It is the maturation of the priesthood he has already received.
Conclusion: to breathe the breath of God
The journey from Ezekiel 37 to the priesthood has revealed a single theological movement. God speaks, and his Word creates. God breathes, and the dead live. God puts his Spirit into his people, and they know him. The risen Christ breathes upon the disciples and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Christian receives that Spirit and becomes, in Paul’s words, “one spirit” with the Lord.
St John of the Cross then shows us the astonishing possibility contained within this union: the Holy Spirit can transform the human spirit so profoundly that the person begins to love God through the Spirit himself. The soul can “give God to God” because what she gives back is the divine Gift which has become truly hers through grace. And once the soul has become a living flame, the fire cannot remain enclosed. Divine life becomes communicative. The person begins to breathe this divine life towards others.
This is the fulfilment of the first commandment. To love God with all one’s heart, soul, mind and strength ultimately means allowing God to transform the heart, soul, mind and spirit by his own Spirit, so that we can love God with the love by which he loves us.
For the priest, this mystery acquires an extraordinary additional dimension. Through Holy Orders, Christ is sacramentally present and operative in him. The priest can act in persona Christi Capitis. This is given through the sacrament and does not depend upon his personal sanctity. But the priest is then called to spend his life becoming personally conformed to the Christ whom he sacramentally bears.
Thus the priest has before him a twofold mystery: Christ in him, through the sacrament, and the priest in Christ, through sanctification. The first is given; the second must grow. The first establishes the priest’s sacramental capacity to communicate Christ; the second progressively transforms the man himself into an ever more transparent instrument of that communication.
When these two realities converge, priestly ministry becomes extraordinarily fruitful. His prayer becomes increasingly the prayer of Christ in him. His preaching becomes increasingly a communication of the Spirit. His pastoral charity becomes increasingly Christ’s own charity. His celebration of the Eucharist remains exactly the same sacramental sacrifice, but his own participation in that mystery becomes increasingly profound because his humanity has been conformed to the Christ whom he represents. The priest then becomes, in the fullest sense, a living flame: Christ acting through him sacramentally, and Christ living through him personally.
This finally brings us back to the image of breath. The Christian vocation is to receive the breath of God so deeply that we learn to breathe with God: to receive the Spirit, to love God with the Spirit, and to communicate that same Spirit to others. The priest is called to this with a particular intensity because his sacramental configuration to Christ places the very mystery of Christ’s priesthood within his ministry from the day of his ordination.
The Christian life, at its deepest level, is therefore not simply a life for God. It is a life from God, in God and increasingly with God’s own life. God breathes into us; his Spirit transforms us; and the transformed person becomes capable, by grace, of breathing that divine life towards God and towards the world.
The first commandment is thus not merely the beginning of Christian morality. It is the horizon of Christian transformation: to become so united to God that we love God with God’s own love, and so transformed by the Holy Spirit that our whole existence becomes a communication of the divine fire we have received. That is the vocation of every Christian. And in the priest, it becomes both a sacramental mystery and a lifelong summons: to become, in his own humanity, increasingly adequate to the Christ who already lives and acts in him.