The Church’s tradition of novenas — nine days of prayer — is rooted in the nine days the Apostles and Mary spent in the Upper Room between the Ascension of Christ into Heaven, and his gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost.
During this novena, we will spiritually place ourselves in the Upper Room, asking each day for a fruit and a gift.
Day 1: Wisdom (gift) and Charity (fruit)
Wisdom
And wisdom is precisely this: it is the grace of being able to see everything with the eyes of God. It is simply this: it is to see the world, to see situations, circumstances, problems, everything through God’s eyes. This is wisdom. Sometimes we see things according to our liking or according to the condition of our heart, with love or with hate, with envy…. No, this is not God’s perspective. Wisdom is what the Holy Spirit works in us so as to enable us to see things with the eyes of God. This is the gift of wisdom. …
And this cannot be learned: this is a gift of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, we must ask the Lord to grant us the Holy Spirit and to grant us the gift of wisdom, that wisdom of God that teaches us to see with God’s eyes, to feel with God’s heart, to speak with God’s words. And so, with this wisdom, let us go forward, let us build our family, let us build the Church, and we will all be sanctified. Today let us ask for this grace of wisdom.
And let us ask Our Lady, who is the Seat of Wisdom, for this gift: may she give us this grace.
~ Pope Francis, April 9, 2014
Charity
The charity of God is poured forth in our hearts, by the Holy Ghost who is given to us. Charity is truly the only fruit of the Holy Ghost, but because this one fruit has an infinity of excellent properties, the Apostle, who wishes to mention some of them by way of example, speaks of this one fruit as of many, because of the multitude of properties which it contains in its unity, and conversely speaks of all these fruits as of one only, by reason of the unity in which is comprised this variety. …
The Apostle, then, simply means to say that the fruit of the Holy Ghost is charity; which is joyous, peaceable, patient, benign, good, long-suffering, mild, faithful, modest, continent, chaste;
~Francis de Sales
And today we celebrate...