How do we become partakers of the Holy Spirit?

First: through fervent prayer. The Lord of Glory says, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him!” (Luke 11:13). If we are careful to provide bread, fish, and eggs for our children to sustain them in their life on earth, our Heavenly Father is careful to provide the Holy Spirit for us, who is alone the Spirit of communion. He makes us steadfast in the only-begotten Son, carrying us off into the bosom of the Heavenly Father. His work is to give us the “new life” that bears the marks of heaven; that we might return to the Fatherly embrace once more.

St. Clement of Alexandria says, “‘And if we, being evil, know to give good gifts’ (Luke 11:13), much more is it the nature of the Father of mercies, the good Father of all consolation, much pitying, very merciful, to be long-suffering, to wait for those who have ”⁸²⁵ turned.

Second: through baptism and the renewal of the Holy Spirit: “But when the kindness and the love of God our Savior toward man appeared, not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to His mercy He saved us, through the washing of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit, whom He poured out on us abundantly through Jesus Christ our Savior” (Titus 3:4–6).

825 St. Clement of Alexandria, Who is the Rich Man that Shall be Saved? 39 (ANF 2:602).

St. Ambrose comments on this, saying, “It is, then, the Holy Spirit Who has delivered us from that Gentile impurity. For in those kinds of four-footed creatures and wild beasts and birds there was a figure of the condition of man, which appears clothed with the bestial ferocity of wild beasts unless it grows gentle by the sanctification of the Spirit.”⁸²⁶ He also says, “Who is he who is born of the Spirit, and is made Spirit [spiritual], but he who is renewed in the Spirit of his mind (Eph. 4:23)? This certainly is he who is regenerated by water and the Holy Spirit, since we receive the hope of eternal life through the laver of regeneration and renewing of the Holy Spirit (Titus 3:5).”⁸²⁷

St. Augustine comments, “In baptism, all past sins are washed away. By baptism, the spirit that lusts against the flesh [cf. Gal. 5:17] finds aid, that we might not suffer defeat in our [spiritual] battles. Through it, the Lord’s Prayer is effective, when we pray, ‘forgive us our debts’ [Matt. 6:12]. In this way, we are renewed, we find aid in our wrestling, prayer is poured out, and our heart is not adulterated. In this way, we become blameless.”⁸²⁸

As St. Gregory of Nazianzus says, “For if [the Holy Spirit] is not to be worshipped, how can He make me divine by Baptism? … And indeed from the Spirit comes our New Birth, and from the New Birth our new creation, and from the new creation our deeper knowledge of the dignity of Him from Whom it is derived.”⁸²⁹

Third: feast on the nourishment of the soul. It is good for person to strive with all the means of grace, whether by reading the Holy Bible, prayer, fasting, or metanoias (prostrations). But without the grace of God and the presence of the Holy Spirit who is the soul’s nourishment, a person cannot attain to eternal life.

St. Macarius the Great emphasizes this thus: “When God made this body of ours, He did not grant to it that it should have life either from His own nature or from the body itself, nor meat and drink, raiment and shoes; He appointed that it should have all the supplies of life from without, making the body in itself quite naked, and it is impossible for the body to live at all apart from things outside itself, without food and drink and clothing.⁸³⁰ If it attempts to subsist upon its own nature alone, taking nothing from without, it wastes and perishes. In the same manner is it with the soul also. It has not the divine light, though it is created after the image of God. So has He ordered its conditions, and has been pleased that it should not have eternal life of its own nature; but of His Godhead, of His Spirit, of His light, it has

826 St. Ambrose of Milan, On the Holy Spirit 2.107 (NPNF II/10:128).

827 St. Ambrose of Milan, On the Holy Spirit 3.64 (NPNF II/10:144).

828 St. Augustine of Hippo, On the Psalms 19.80. Cf. St. Augustine of Hippo, A Treatise Concerning the Correction of the Donatists 9.39 (NPNF I/4:647).

829 St. Gregory of Nazianzus, Select Orations of Gregory Nazianzen 31.28 Fifth Theological Oration (NPNF II/7:327; PG 36:105A) amended.

830 The body came to need clothing and shoes when humans deprived themselves of God’s righteousness by disobeying the divine command and becoming isolated from the Holy God.

spiritual meat and drink, and heavenly clothing, which are the soul's life, the life indeed …

“The divine nature contains the bread of life, who said, I am the bread of life (John 6:35) and living water (John 4:10), and wine that makes glad the heart of man (Ps. 104:15), and the oil of gladness (Ps. 45:7), and the whole variety of the food of the heavenly Spirit, and the heavenly apparel of light which comes from God. In these things the eternal life of the soul consists. Woe to the body when it stands upon its own nature, because then it wastes and dies; and woe to the soul if it takes its stand upon nothing but its own nature, and puts its trust in nothing but its own works, not having the fellowship of the Spirit of God , because it dies, not having the eternal life of the Godhead vouchsafed to it.

“When men are sick, as soon as the body is no longer able to receive nourishment, all hopes of them are given over, and all true friends and kinsfolk and lovers are in tears. In the same way, God and the holy angels are in tears over souls that are not nourished with the heavenly nourishment of the Spirit , and have not come to life in incorruption.”⁸³¹