Rediscover the One Who Leads to Rediscovery
For much of my life I didn’t really consider the Holy Spirit much more than a placeholder to complete the Trinity. As my friend Tim Ghali once quipped, the Holy Spirit was invented ten years ago (along with the emergent church, Henri Nouwen, and lectio divina). There seems to have been a re-discovery of the Holy Spirit in many swaths of American Christian circles since the Second and Third Waves of charismatics in mainline and evangelical churches respectively.
What is most scary about the "rediscovery of the Holy Spirit" is that we are actually rediscovering God. That’s kind of scary. The Scriptures tell us that the Holy Spirit is the spirit of Jesus within us. And the Holy Spirit is sent by the Father. How do we forget God when the personhood/essence/being of God is wrapped up within itself. When we forget the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit we forget God. They are One. That’s scary.
While many of us can wallow in our collective guilt of forgetfulness and spiritual neglegence we must rememeber that rediscovery is the Holy Spirit’s job. We are always on the Way, always on the journey, always rediscovering God in the same way we rediscover sunlight each morning when we wake up. It is ironic. and not coincidental, that the Holy Spirit has led us to rediscover the One who leads us to rediscovery.
The most perplexing prospect of the Holy Spirit is that our rediscoveries are not always the BAM! WOW! PUNCH! types of events like peaceful doves descending from heaven or toungues of fire raining down from the sky. Our rediscoveries are more subtle than that, as they should be. The Holy Spirit is our agent of rediscovery, drilling into the marrow of our souls and letting the Godhead know what is deepest within us—stuff we don’t even know about ourselves. As God calls to God within us we must be truly humbled. God is a mystery, but we are ourselves mysteries. We are our true self only in relation to God, who knows us more intimately than we know ourselves.
No wonder the rediscovery of the Rediscoverer is such a joyous occasion as we look forward to Pentecost. We live in the shadow caused by the darkness of the cross being cast by the overpowering light of resurrection all through Easter. And now, with our time of reflection soon passing, we go forth into the unknown like the disciples did, waiting patiently for the next rediscovery we will have as the breath of the Holy Spirit blows into our nostrils, filling our souls with the presence of God and bringing the kingdom into our midst.
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I always find it interesting how we tend to forget about the Holy Spirit. I know Calvinists are not the first people normally associated with the Holy Spirit but even John Calvin says that all of Christ’s benefits are of no use to us without the power of the Holy Spirit.
All of the love of the Father. All of the sacrifice of the Son. All of the blessings of union with Christ come ONLY through the Holy Spirit. Salvation comes to us as the Spirit makes us more and more one with Christ (now I’m sounding Orthodox). I find it interesting that the more I pay attention to the work of the Holy Spirit, the more I see the value of other traditions.
Amazing, unity through the Spirit.
I think our forgetfulness of the Holy Spirit is in part due to the way we commune with God as we understand the divine presence through the Holy Spirit. The metaphors of the Spirit, like breath or water or fire, are all things that are often taken for granted by us. How many times during the day do we breath, drink water, and light a fire on our stove? We don’t stop to recognize the wonder of these life-sustaining activities then, and I think it is the same with the Holy Spirit. The Spirit is ever active in sustaining us and it is like an involuntary action, like our breathing.