"The Spirit renders Christian action God-like...

"The spirit renders Christian action God-like, in harmony, that is, with God's way of thinking, loving and acting, so that the believer becomes a visible sign of the Blessed Trinity in the world".

In the Letter to priests for Holy Thursday, John Paul II presents a profound meditation on the Holy Spirit and on the influence exercised by his gifts ("the sevenfold gift") upon the life of Man.

Through the Spirit "who leads us into the life of the Trinity" we are completely immersed also in the essential nucleus of the Great Jubilee, in the relationship between the Jubilee and the world and between the ecclesial event and the human reality that meet in a solemn convergence of time. The two thousand years since the coming of Christ are, in fact, an ever-open horizon in the history of humanity, in which the Christian sign contains the dusk and dawn of a whole millennium.

With regard to the time that still separates us from the Great Jubilee of the year 2000, together with its urgency, we perceive more and more - almost to mitigate its inevitable harshness - the ineffable and sovereign lordship the Holy Spirit exercises in the hearts of each person and especially in the hearts of those who are preparing themselves - and who prepare - to make all men and women look more vigorously and fruitfully towards the Third Christian millennium.

The Holy Spirit helps us to look through the eyes of the soul at what escapes our human eyes. In fact, no horizon is so vast as not to be reached by the breath of the Consoler.

We all need to move freely in these dimensions in order to find ourselves deep down. Humankind cannot drift around for vague destinations, nor can it count time only in days.

Yes indeed: the Holy Spirit is a ray of hope that fills and pervades everything. He is the Church at work in the world.

The great Jubilee cannot but live and take life from the breath of the Spirit. Every other form is merely pure and simple subsistence.

Easter, which we have just a celebrated, makes the presence and guidance of the Spirit even more alive and vibrant in the commitments and prospects that lead us towards the threshold of the Holy Door.

And, with regard to time, we must take into account that in the journey towards the Jubilee Year, the Easter of 1999 is the last great threshold that leads to the Door of the millennium.