Fruits of the Spirit vs. charisms. How are they different? Both fruits of the Spirit and charisms provide us with tools to deepen our relationship with the Holy Spirit. Charisms can lead us to the manifestation of the fruits of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
Understanding the Fruits of the Holy Spirit
There are nine fruits of the Holy Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. These fruits evidence a life lived in communion with the Holy Spirit. When we nurture our relationship with the Holy Spirit, these fruits naturally manifest in our thoughts, words, and actions. They become part of our character and influence how we interact with others.
The Role of Charisms
While the fruits of the Holy Spirit are essential, charisms add an extra layer of purpose to our spiritual journey. Accordingly, the Holy Spirit gives us special gifts and talents, charisms, to build and serve the Church. They are the areas where we feel most alive and fully engaged in our faith.
Charisms as Pathways to Fruitfulness
However, Fruits of the Spirit, vs. charisms, are not specific and personal to each individual. Charisms bring a sense of joy and fulfillment that resonates deeply within us. When we embrace and engage our charisms, we tap into the power and guidance of the Holy Spirit. Thus we can connect with others more deeply, minister in unique ways, and contribute to the growth of the Church.
Discernment and Cultivation
To discover our charisms, discernment plays a vital role. Therefore, we need to be attentive to our natural inclinations, passions, and the activities that bring us the most joy. Sometimes, what we may perceive as mundane or insignificant can actually be a charism in disguise. It is through discernment and prayer that we can uncover and cultivate these gifts from the Holy Spirit.
Accordingly, Fruits of the Holy Spirit and charisms are crucial in a vibrant faith life. The fruits are the visible outcomes of our relationship with the Holy Spirit. Charisms allow us to embrace our unique calling within the body of Christ. As we invest in the gifts of the Holy Spirit and our charisms, we bear abundant fruit. Embark on this journey, explore charisms, and witness the transformative power of the Holy Spirit in our lives.
Learn more at Many Parts Ministries.
Jill Simons [00:00:00]:
You. Hello and welcome to Charisms for Catholics. My name is Jill Simons and I’m the executive director at many parts ministries where we equip the body of Christ by helping people learn about and discern their charisms, which is really another word for spiritual gifts. When you discern your charisms, you’re able to see how the holy spirit is already active in your life and where he is inviting you to further build the church. Let’s dive in. Welcome to parts two of our two parts series where today we’re going to be talking about fruits of the holy spirit and the difference between fruits of the spirit and the charisms. Last time we talked about gifts of the holy spirit versus the charism. So you can go back and listen to that one if you haven’t yet.
Jill Simons [00:00:51]:
We’re going to be focusing today just on the fruit of the holy spirit and where that kind of fits with charisms. So I just learned recently actually, that it’s fruit singular of the holy Spirit and not fruits of the holy spirit. But there are nine of them and we get this list of nine from Galatians chapter five. It says that the fruit of the spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. And so those nine things are essentially what we can expect as the fruit in our life when we are living in union in relationship with the holy Spirit. And this is contrasted earlier in the chapter when it talks about essentially the fruit of living in sin. What things do we see in our lives when we are outside of right relationship with God and the holy Spirit. And so those are of course the opposite, right? We see hate and anxiety and distrust and all of these things in our lives when we are trying to be our own God and we are living outside of relationship with the holy spirit.
Jill Simons [00:02:07]:
But as I said, these things are really the fruit is the perfect word. They’re kind of the end product of being in relationship with the holy Spirit. So unlike the gifts and the charisms, they aren’t something that’s sort of handed to us fully formed by the holy spirit. It’s not something that it just is received freely as a gift to kind of open or not and use or not. This is what you’re going to see as a hallmark of your whole life if you’re living in relationship with the holy spirit. And so in general, the gifts of the holy spirit and your charisms are going to be the parts through which you get to living a life marked by the fruits of the holy Spirit. They are what’s going to come first because that’s the gift that you receive from the holy Spirit and then you sort of take and let that plant how it jill in your heart and your life and the effectiveness of that, how much you receive. That is going to result or not in the fruit of the Holy Spirit when we allow ourselves to be really marked by those things in our lives.
Jill Simons [00:03:22]:
So going back to the gifts, when we allow wisdom and counsel and piety reverence, all of those things to be planted deeply in our hearts and in our lives in addition to whatever our charisms are, that’s when we start to see the fruit of the Spirit in our lives. And so we can also extend this metaphor to really see this is the fruit that we should expect from a well functioning, holistic body of Christ. This should be something that we’re seeing as the fruit of the action of the whole church. And saying that I know that that’s not necessarily always the case. We definitely live in a fallen world and I’m sure there are many iterations of the body of Christ communities and parishes that are not necessarily marked by love, joy, peace and patience. But that’s what we’re going for. That’s the general trajectory that we want to be seeking is where the fruit of the Holy Spirit is present everywhere, that the Holy Spirit is where we have let the Holy Spirit’s gifts, those graces, both in our charisms and his general gifts, take root so that we can see the fruit. Oh, I like that phrase.
Jill Simons [00:04:46]:
I think I’m going to keep that and use that in the future. Let it take root so we can see the fruit. Because when we are using what we’ve been given, seeds work. Things work when you plant them, but when you don’t plant them, when you don’t tend them, when you just kind of let them go, it’s unlikely that you’re going to see any fruit or the fruit that you might see might be less than the fruit that has been well tended. And so this is a good reminder of what comes about in our personal lives and in our community when we intentionally invest in both the general gifts of the Holy Spirit but also in our charisms. And I don’t want there to ever be the sense that I’m relegating the gifts of the Holy Spirit, those seven general gifts to like a second hand spot. They are extremely important. But I think that as individuals, it can be a very powerful path to greater intimacy with the Holy Spirit to focus on our individual charisms.
Jill Simons [00:05:54]:
Not because we think that we are the most important person or we’re trying to be selfish or focus on ourselves, but because those are going to be the things that resonate most personally and most deeply with us as individuals. I have talked to so many people who maybe seemed more or less lukewarm in their faith to even their spouses, people that knew them well. It was kind of a general trend in their lives that they were not deeply engaged. But when you identify their charisms so often there is like a deep, deep fire around those things. I’m thinking of an example of a woman who was in my own parish who I thought was more checked out than not, but she was in a group that I was going through discernment with and it was clear that she had a deep charism for mercy, actually. She really and truly experienced the person of Christ in every person in need that she met. And so this manifests mostly as rage and being very, very angry and frustrated with other people who did not have this experience of seeing with this level of empathy and compassion in the poor and hurting and having her begin talking about this and sharing about her natural, visceral reaction to these people. It moved a lot of us to tears and it was like, oh my gosh, none of us have ever experienced this to the depth that you experienced this.
Jill Simons [00:07:34]:
And so then when we were able to say, hey, this is something that the Holy Spirit has specifically given you to build the church, that is your role is to help the rest of us see people this way. She was deeply empowered by that, realizing that she actually had been in step with the Holy Spirit in small ways. Through the expression of this charism and that through opening up this particular door that is very comfortable for her to open, she could come to a greater knowledge of and awareness of the Holy Spirit in her life. So rather than having to go and invest in wisdom and piety and knowledge that seemed so distant and frustrating potentially to her, and that was her experience and something she shared with me was that these spiritual attributes had seemed very foreign to her and she did not quite know how to sort of wrap her life around them, essentially. But coming at it from her charism, looking at this great gift of mercy she has now been focusing on. How can I cooperate with the Holy Spirit through this gift of mercy? And how can I come to know God’s voice through how he invites me to show mercy, which is so natural, organic joyful for her to do? And so she’s starting to see the fruit of the Holy Spirit in her life as she opens this door to her charism, which then naturally leads her deeper into relationship with God and opens up a kind of new spiritual awakening that creates the space for those other gifts to be opened as well. Does that make sense? Where it’s something that is kind of a pathway that’s native to each of us as individuals and I think that that’s really important to talk about. It’s not we all need to focus on the same seven things.
Jill Simons [00:09:41]:
I think this is focused on a lot in Confirmation, and I don’t think we should stop talking about the gifts of the Holy Spirit or anything like that. But I think it’s empowering for people going through Confirmation to also hear about the fact that, hey, there’s also these other gifts that the Holy Spirit has already given you that he wants to fan into flame. That’s going to be really native to you. And that path might be a more natural road to starting to see these fruits of the Spirit in their lives. That it’s one of those things where once you get a taste, once you start to live in that joy and that peace and that gentleness, it gets kind of addicting. It draws you in. And this has been very much my experience of my spiritual life given this list of seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, if you’d said, how do you feel about investing in a greater outpouring of fortitude in your life? And I’d be like, that just doesn’t really resonate with me. That doesn’t really appeal to me.
Jill Simons [00:10:49]:
And that’s not to say that our personal proclivities need to be elevated above what they should naturally be. There’s good things in the spiritual life that aren’t things that quote unquote sound like fun that we should still be doing and focusing on. But I think that a lot of times we overestimate the amount of white knuckling that our faith requires. There’s this idea that the only way to get through it is going to be to invest in these things that you maybe aren’t super interested in, that don’t super resonate with you. And it’s kind of just who can gut it out the best kind of game when in reality the Holy Spirit wants to meet us where we’re at because he created you where you’re at. He created your interests and your natural inclinations and everything the way that it is. And obviously we can take that in a sinful direction. That is not what I’m talking about.
Jill Simons [00:11:46]:
I’m talking about blessing the best parts of ourselves that do come naturally to us, that become that pathway to seeing the fruits of the Holy Spirit in our lives through a much more gentle native parts than looking at this is the general outpouring of gifts for everybody set another way. There are HR tasks in every job. Every job has paperwork and benefits, paperwork and new trainee training and all of these general things shared by more or less all jobs across the board. That’s probably not the part of the job that people get excited about. People probably get excited about doing the actual action that they are there to do. That’s our charisms. Again, I don’t want to kind of relegate the gifts of the Holy Spirit to a second class status, but I think it’s okay to name and recognize the fact that that’s not necessarily what people get excited about or get inflamed by. They are incredibly necessary.
Jill Simons [00:13:04]:
They are incredibly great graces. But I think it’s also okay to recognize the fact that those are things that we learn to enjoy and appreciate a lot more once we are already into the work of being in the family of God. I think of them maybe sort of like vegetables. I don’t know if that’s a fair comparison, but the kind of thing where as an adult in maturity, there’s a huge appreciation there. Wow, this is such a great way of nourishing my body and nourishing my mind, and this is a huge gift that I get to partake in, and there’s a maturity that’s required to really enjoy them the way they’re meant to be enjoyed. And I think that’s kind of true in this situation as well, where gifts are something that kind of become engaging in maturity, whereas the charisms are something that like a favorite food. Even as a child, even in our immaturity, we can really get a lot of enjoyment and a lot of joy out of and then enjoying eating. That is something that invites you into exploring other flavors and other palates.
Jill Simons [00:14:19]:
And so hopefully that helps kind of make sense of how these three things fit together in the ecosystem of the body of charism. All are so necessary, all are so important to our spiritual journey, but they each kind of take up their own space. And so as we move forward, we’re really going to focus in this podcast on the charisms, but we’re also going to talk probably pretty regularly about the fruit, about how we experience the fruit of the Holy Spirit through the use of our charisms. And that’s something that I invite people to watch for as they go on their discernment journey. Where are you seeing really incredible fruit in your life? A great example is that as I use my charisms to work in this ministry, I experience the fruit of peace in a way that I have never experienced it before, which keeps drawing me deeper and deeper into the work that the Holy Spirit is inviting me to do, because I dislike investing in myself and my time anywhere. That doesn’t bring me that same sense of peace because again, I’m getting kind of addicted to it, which is the idea we want to be really attuned to where we’re receiving those fruits because that shows us where the Holy Spirit is active and present in our lives. Thanks so much for joining us on today’s episode of Charisms for Catholics. If you would like to learn more about your charisms or begin your own discernment journey, head to our website@manypartsministries.com where you can download our free PDF guide to all 24 charisms and also begin your own journey by taking our Charism Assessment.
