Almost every Catholic learned, somewhere between first communion and confirmation, that there are seven gifts of the Holy Spirit. Almost none of them remembers all seven. And almost no one — including the person writing these lines, for many years — knew what each one actually meant, or how to recognise its action in daily life.

The gifts come from the prophet Isaiah. “The Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him: the spirit of wisdom and of understanding, the spirit of counsel and of fortitude, the spirit of knowledge and of fear of the Lord” (Is 11:2). The Greek Septuagint added a seventh — piety — and it is this list of seven that entered baptism, confirmation, and the whole tradition of Christian spiritual theology. St Thomas Aquinas devoted nearly a hundred articles of the Summa to them. To him they were not technicalities: they were stable dispositions that make the soul docile to the Holy Spirit, like sails that open to the wind.

Here are the seven, in ascending order — from the most everyday to the highest — with the concrete sign by which you can tell whether it is at work in you.

1. Fear of the Lord

It is not fear in the modern sense. It is grown-up reverence — the kind of respect a beloved son has for the father he admires. The gift of Fear of the Lord makes the soul recoil from sin not out of a calculus of consequences, but because it offends the Person loved.

Daily sign: you cannot blaspheme any more, even in anger. Old small lies begin to weigh. God’s name, said lightly by someone else, suddenly sounds different.

2. Piety

It is the gift that turns the relationship with God from juridical to filial. Before, one prayed like someone fulfilling a contract; after, like a son walking into his father’s house. It also includes tenderness toward everything that belongs to God — the Church, the saints, parents, country, the poor.

Daily sign: you begin to call God Father and it does not sound forced. Devotion to Our Lady stops being a “pious practice” and becomes real affection. You feel something at the sight of an open chapel in the middle of the day.

3. Knowledge

It is not the knowledge of natural science. It is the capacity to see created things in the right light — to know what comes from God, what does not, and what comes from him but can be deflected. It is the gift that prevents one from confusing the good with what merely seems good.

Daily sign: you start to see things without the advertising filter. You identify, before others do, what is off in an apparently Christian discourse. The Scriptures, read slowly, sound denser than they did before.

4. Fortitude

It is the supernatural capacity to sustain what nature would drop. The martyrs have Fortitude in the extreme form, but the gift is also at work in the father who keeps working in silence after a humiliation, in the mother who forgives again, in the professional who refuses a small well-disguised bribe.

Daily sign: you carry what once would have flattened you, and patience does not feel like effort. You recover faster from frustrations. Faced with a choice between the comfortable and the upright, you choose the upright without much drama.

5. Counsel

It is prudence applied to the concrete case, raised by God. It makes the soul know what to do now, in circumstances no manual covers — the right sentence for the rebellious son, the silence at the exact moment, the professional decision that seems small now and will weigh ten years later.

Daily sign: other people start asking your advice without knowing why. You decide with more peace and less rumination. When you pray beforehand, the way out shows up in the middle of the day.

6. Understanding

It is the gift that penetrates revealed truths from within. Whoever has it does not memorise the Creed — he sees it. Gospel lines read for the hundredth time open like folds that had been stitched shut.

Daily sign: sacred texts that felt like stone start to release meaning. A single liturgical phrase, repeated for years, suddenly grips the soul for days. You can explain to someone what you had always repeated without grasping.

7. Wisdom

The highest of the seven. It is not the one who knows the most; it is the one who relishes what comes from God. Wisdom reorders affections: what is worth it, the soul prefers; what is vain, the soul drops. It is the gift that turns daily prayer from an exercise into a refuge. Without it, all the other gifts remain available, but little used.

Daily sign: you prefer half an hour in silence before the tabernacle to an hour of distraction. Weekends start to look different. You can no longer return to certain things that used to fill your day, and you do not miss them.

How to ask for the gifts that are missing

The gifts were infused into the soul at baptism and sealed at confirmation. No one needs to ask for what he already has. But almost everyone needs to ask for them to be activated — because the gifts work to the extent that they find a willing soul. That is why the Church prays the Veni Creator so insistently in the novena that precedes Pentecost: to wake up inside every baptised person the current that has been there from the first day.

Look at the list. Identify which one is most dormant in you. Ask for it by name every day until Pentecost, and through the year that follows. In the Pentecost Triduum you will find the three proper prayers of the last three days of the novena, exactly on the higher gifts. And in Gratia Plena I write, in a more autobiographical register, about the hour when Wisdom entered my life — without warning, in the middle of a banal task.

The Holy Spirit does not impose; he waits. But when someone asks for a gift by name and with regularity, he answers — usually sooner than expected.