There are commandments and there are commandments. What does this mean? Firstly, we can already discern how the Holy Spirit was at work in the early Church. In the first reading the Apostles decided not to burden the early Christians with the Jewish requirement of circumcision. What they did was to instruct the early Christians to avoid certain practices.

What does that tell us?

There is no freewheeling when it comes to love. There is a tendency to view the love and keeping the commandments as oil and water. Love is more forgiving and more accepting. Laws are a bit more restrictive. Moreover, we tend to associate love with the Spirit.

However, Christ in the Gospel was clear. He will send to Spirit to teach the Apostles and to remind them of His teaching. While the Lord will be absent but He is not an absence. He will leave them but that is not an abandonment.Instead He will be present via the Holy Spirit. We need an ability to discern the Spirit’s presence in the Church.

According to Pope Benedict, we can interpret the Church according to certain hermeneutics. There are basically two lenses to view the history of the Church. We can view tradition as continuous or discontinuous.

It is fashionable to interpret Vatican as a break with the past and therefore a divergence from the tradition that we inherited. When the Apostles took the decision not to impose circumcision, they also gave the Gentile Christians certain prohibition. There was a break from the Jewish past but it was not a complete break.

The question we need to ask ourselves is where Christianity came from. Christ Himself was a Jew. However, in academic circles, there is a growing tendency to speak of the Hebrew Scriptures and the Christian Scriptures as if they were discontinuous. In actual fact, they are linked one to the other.

Such a kind of discontinuity tends to reduce the Holy Spirit into an “accomplice” because He is the spirit of spontaneity and possibly stands on the side of greater freedom. Sadly, discontinuity was the seed for the Protestant challenge to tradition that as a result it reduced every individual to the supreme interpreter of Christ’s teachings. Everyone is a pope.

What is closer to the truth is how continuous we are with tradition and how itacts as an anchor that allows to engage in the world that is changing fast.

In fact, a world which is in constant flux is a source of anxiety and disengagement amongst young people. Can you imagine all those denominations of “churches” that claim to have preserve the teaching of Christ in its entirety. How? God’s revelation seemed to have died in the post-Apostolic age only to resurface when this or that denomination was founded. How convenient!

Instead, what is more consistent in the matter of God’s revelation is that He reaches out to us through the ages and He speaks through the Holy Spirit,Sacred Scripture, the Magisterium and the Tradition of the Church.

Pope Benedict XVI pointed out the blessedness of Christianity’s first expansioncame through its contact with Greek philosophy. The interaction and interchange with Greece gave Christianity the language that allowed it to appreciate God’s self-revelation as the Blessed Trinity. Without passing through Hellenistic linguistic and philosophical framework, we might have had a less defined way to appreciate the Blessed Trinity.

The role of the Holy Spirit promised by Christ is to help the Church be consistent in her teachings through the ages. In fact, the Holy Spirit who is the author of the Sacred Scripture is also the author of the developing tradition and constant magisterium. Furthermore, we can see how faith and reason are not incompatible with each other. Why? Because both have the Holy Spirit as their author.

In the end, when we speak of love, we recognise that commandments or regulations or prohibitions are not alien to a life in the Spirit. The Spirit blows where it will and therefore, both freedom and spontaneity are creative qualities that allow the Church to navigate the changing tides fads and fancies. But what is also heroic is keeping the law or being faithful to Tradition. When it comes to the Magisterium and the handing down of Tradition, clarity and charity are not mutually exclusive. They are two sides of one coin. When the Church teaches clearly, it is an act of love. And the Church also manifests her love by teaching clearly.

Thus, in whatever challenges that we face, our life in the Spirit requires patient discernment and courageous acceptance of where God is leading us to. When we hear the word cosmetics, we recognise that it is associated mainly with the world of beauty. However, its etymology is far more “sedate” or “legal” than we realise. The root of the word cosmetic is cosmos and it directs our attention to the well-ordering of the universe. Perhaps a point to consider that the process of well-ordering cannot come about without commandments, restrictions and obedience. Submitting to God’s will may even run contrary to one’s desires but under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the embrace of God’s will is well-orderedfreedom and true obedience.