Each of us has an interior life—an inner room which Scripture often calls the heart, or the deep heart. And the Lord is telling us to go there to our inner room within each of us. He also tells us to close the door. That's what we've been talking about over the course of this podcast—we are called to become contemplative souls, to wake up to the mystery of the Trinity living and dwelling in our hearts by grace and grow in the sense of the presence of God.

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How do we interact with the indwelling Trinity and live in this presence of God? In this episode, Fr. James tells us there are three things we need to do. First, we need to guard our hearts, and not be pulled away from God by distractions and sin. Second, we need to enter our hearts by finding times of silence and recollection. And, third, we need to simply talk and pray to the persons dwelling within us—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

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God is commonly present to all things, but in our baptism, God comes to be present in our souls in a new way, in a special mode. So how can we understand this special mode of the presence of God that we call the indwelling Trinity? In this episode, Fr. James explains that this mode of God’s presence in our souls is something really distinct. It's a way of being present that's person to person, heart to heart, so to speak. 

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Through our baptism, and so long as we are living in a state of grace, each of us has the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit living and dwelling in the depths of our hearts. In this episode, Fr. James explains the mystery of the indwelling Trinity, which is so important because this particular mystery describes the point of contact between the highest mystery of them all, the Holy Trinity, and the mystery of our own souls. And one of the marks of the contemplative soul is becoming more and more aware of the gift of the indwelling Trinity that was given to us in our baptism.

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What's in the future? We are weak in our faith and we tend to conceive of the future as if God is not going to be there. In this episode of Contemplata, Fr. James explains that in the fifth paraclete promise assures us there is no future without God in it. In fact, the future belongs to the Father. We don’t know the future or what the circumstances or the events of the future will be, but we do know that whatever they are, God will be there for us. The Holy Spirit will lead us and guide us through all of it. 

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The Lord promises to send the Holy Spirit to penetrate the hearts and minds of people who are listening to the proclamation of the gospel. And he promises that when the Spirit comes, he will convince them of sin and of righteousness and of judgment—so the fourth paraclete promise could be called the promise of convincing concerning sin. But what does this mean, to convince the world of sin? In a word, it means that the Spirit will illuminate a person's conscience to realize he or she has sinned.

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Why would we expect anyone today to come to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, to come to believe in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and to come to practice the Catholic faith? The reason we expect that is because in the third Paraclete Promise the Lord promised to send us the Spirit of Truth to bear witness along with us to these truths of the faith.

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The second Paraclete Promise the Lord gave us at the Last Supper was the promise of memory and understanding. This promise tells us what the Holy Spirit promised will do in us—to bring to our memories all that the Lord has told us and to teach us. 

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At the Last Supper, the Lord promised to send his Spirit to dwell in each of us. And when you and I were baptized, we received the Holy Spirit in a whole new way—we came to have the very person of the Holy Spirit himself living and dwelling in the depths of our souls. You and I can also pray for this indwelling of the Holy Spirit to grow and to increase in us more and more.

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In this episode, Fr. James Brent, O.P., introduces us to what scripture scholars call paraclete promises, which are found throughout scripture and are a great reason to be confident in our prayer before God. Fr. James will point to many of these promises that God has made (which can be found in scripture) and, over the next 5 episodes, he will look at the 5 Paraclete Promises the Lord promised to send in the Upper Room. Pope St. John Paul II focused on these paraclete promises quite a bit. He really believed that this was the place to turn in order for the church and for the world to receive the renewal that we need so desperately.

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