44 Him, and to fully share in His mission. It is an experience similar to the experience of the founders at the foundation of a religious institute—“their experience of the Spirit must not only be preserved by those who follow them, but must also be deepened and developed. Today, too, an openness and docility to the Spirit’s action, which is always new and creative, is required. The Spirit alone can keep alive the freshness and authenticity of the beginnings, while at the same time, instilling the courage of interdependence and inventiveness needed to respond to the signs of the times.” The spiritual life is also a consent: “We must therefore allow ourselves to be led by the Spirit to a constantly renewed discovery of God and of his Word, to a burning love for God and for humanity and to a new understanding of the charism which has been given.”27 To compare: other documents defi ne the spiritual life as “a life enlivened and led by the Spirit toward holiness or the perfection of charity,”28 or even as “a life in Christ.”29 Therefore, baptism is at the foundation of the spiritual life, God’s sharing Himself in the Holy Spirit; a human experience of the power and the guidance of the Spirit, and a voluntary acceptance of God’s life combined with a growing in the Holy Spirit. All of this is needed to reproduce Christ’s principles in ourselves and to be like Him in order to become sons of the Son in the Spirit and thus to establish a close, heartfelt, and fi lial union with the Father after the example of Christ. The Primacy of the Spiritual Life is the Primacy of Living with Christ in the Spirit, for the Father As we can see, the emphasis on the primacy of the spiritual life is an emphasis on the priority of the Holy Spirit, that is, on the grace, the charism, the imitation of Christ and the relationship with Him in the Holy Spirit. It is not the primacy of something subjective, some personal, internal experiences of a religious order member, but rather the primacy of what is objective, in other words—God and His grace, an externally manifested faith and a dedicated love. The primacy of the spiritual life is nothing less than giving God such a priority in our personal and communal life that it may be defi ned as the key principle of the Christian vision of life. It has been extremely well articulated in the Apostolic Letter Novo millennio ineunte: “If in the planning that awaits us, we commit ourselves more confi dently to a pastoral activity that gives personal and communal prayer its proper place, we shall be observing an essential principle of the Christian view of life: the primacy of grace. There is 27 RdC, 20. 28 PDV, 19. 29 PDV.
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