Spirit's 'giddyap; won't move dead horses: meeting seeks Trinity's third person at work - Spirituality

National Catholic Reporter, Dec 12, 1997 by Art Winter

HALES CORNERS, Wis. -- "In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and ..."

Most Catholics could probably finish that sentence. How much more they could tell you about the third person of the Trinity is, however a different matter. Speakers and participants at a recent gathering agreed that the Holy Spirit is the "forgotten person" of the Trinity. Catholics don't know much about the Spirit, and therefore tend not to accord it much of a role in their lives.

That neglect, experts believe, stems from two fundamental ecclesiological mistakes. Neither is justified by Catholic theology, but both are deeply rooted in Catholic tradition. The first equates the Spirit with the hierarchy, and the second locates its activity primarily in the past.

Conference participants sought to break down that paradigm replacing it with one that sees the Spirit as active among all people and as breathing life into today's prophetic movements.

This is more than a dusty theological exercise. It affects our "spirituality," a term that Michael Downey and other contemporary writers use to describe how we live life -- all of it, not just the personal or pious part. What is more, in his book, Understanding Spirituality (Paulist), Downey says, "We are witnessing a tidal wave of interest." So, we have a situation in which we have a God we don't know very well, side by side with growing interest in this whole mysterious business.

To see what all this might mean for our spirituality, I joined 230 persons from around the country for five days this summer at the John Neumann Summer Institute at the Sacred Heart School of Theology in Hales Corners, a Milwaukee suburb. The topic, "The Holy Spirit: Who Speaks Through the Prophets," sounded promising.

Losing the Spirit

The assumption going into the gathering seemed to be that we have somehow lost the Spirit, or forgotten about the Spirit, or don't know the Spirit as the Spirit would like, or even as we would like. Nobody at the conference, either from the speaker's podium or in questions raised from the floor, disputed that. In opening the gathering, Richard Kirsch, director of the host Neumann Institute, became the first to express it, saying we had gathered to consider the Spirit "who is also known as the forgotten person of the Trinity."

In doing so, he set up a target for the speakers who followed -- 10 in four days. At the end, it seemed their attempts to hit this target fell into four basic categories -- the loss and recovery of the Spirit, what she (yes, most of the speakers referred to her in the feminine) is doing, where she is doing it and what this means for the rest of us, that is, what it means for our spirituality.

The strongest articulation on the recovery of the Spirit came from the keynoter, Fr. Richard Fragomeni, a professor of liturgy at the Catholic Theological Union in Chicago. He centered this rediscovery in the renewal of the liturgy. He cited a long list of revised liturgical texts that emphasize the Spirit's role in a way our worship has not done for a long time -- in some cases going back as far as 800 years.

"These liturgical texts,n he concluded, "signify the fact that we have rediscovered the gift of the Spirit."

Others suggested that the Spirit had been lost in part because she was mistakenly seen as operating only, or primarily, among bishops, priests and religious. Sr. Elizabeth Johnson, Fordham theologian and author, recently made this point in a Praying magazine article. Johnson, not one of the conference speakers, wrote that in the wake of the Reformation, "Catholic theology institutionalized the Spirit, tying the Spirit very tightly to church office and church officials."

As a result, Johnson said, the idea grew that the Spirit is encountered primarily, or even exclusively, through the sacraments and the magisterium. In other words, in the Catholic scheme of things, the Spirit ended up in the ecclesiastical bag. Continuing this scenario, the church handed out servings of the Spirit to the faithful as if they were sacramental candies. People outside the church fared far worse. Because they didn't benefit from the church's ministries, we presumed the Spirit didn't touch them at all.

The gathering at Hales Corners left little doubt that the notion of the Spirit functioning in this restricted way is now dead. As such, it could be labeled a dead horse, an image Fragomeni used to good advantage in his talk. As he was concluding, he said he wanted to share advice he had come across in an education journal. The advice: "If the horse you are riding dies, get off."

The quotation produced raucous laughter. Why? What dead horse did people in the audience have in mind that made the remark so funny? Fragomeni applied the point broadly. "Now this seems simple enough. Yet in our ministries, in our church, in our nation, in our religious communities, in our parish, in our families, in our personal lives, we don't always follow that advice."

Then, to the delight of his already laughing audience, he listed a dozen alternatives we try instead of facing the fact that our horse indeed is dead and that it is time to get off. They included: buying a stronger whip, switching riders, appointing a committee to study dead horses, waiting other places where they are riding dead horses more effectively and complaining about the status of dead horses these days.