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

The New Testament

In the New Testament, according to Fragomeni, the Spirit's message is one of breakthroughs. In the Spirit, Jesus proclaims God's reign on earth, not just the repentance of John the Baptist. With the Spirit, Fragomeni said, Jesus reverses the order of things by opening us to a deeper understanding of the Sabbath, by speaking and eating with women, strangers, outcasts and sinners, and by seeking to dislodge and subvert the oppression of established power.

The Spirit, he said, also delivered breakthrough messages through the apostles. A major one allowed them to rid themselves of the law of circumcision. He said he finds an easily missed "twist" in the apostles' decision. "For the Jewish tradition," he said, "only men were worth something and had the power to stand in the synagogue. Women were in the back. Circumcision was male initiation into a male dominated religious system."

He added, "But when the apostles prophetically eliminated circumcision, they admitted that no longer was there Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, for now in Christ, in the Spirit who speaks prophetically, all those boundaries have been abolished forever." Pausing, he added a twist of his own, "Or at least until the second century!" Now he had people not only laughing, but applauding as well.

The Spirit continued to deliver its breakthrough messages in post-biblical times, he said. You can see that in "The Didache," a book of first or second century church teachings, that, among other things, instructs a bishop to give his chair to a worshiper who arrives late and has nowhere to sit. He said the Spirit's message through the Christian community was that all share in its gifts, though that message was blunted by centuries of clericalism.

At the Second Vatican Council, which he described as a new Pentecost, the Spirit has once again proclaimed its message of universal gifts, he said. Finally, Fragomeni said, the Spirit still proclaims its message of liberation through the poor, a message we now see also includes the liberation of the earth.

Fr. Michael Himes, author and professor of theology at Boston College, also helped clarify what the Spirit is saying. To get the message, he said, you have to understand the full meaning of Paraclete, the name John's gospel gives the Spirit. Often, he said, we think of it as someone who will defend us, but it really means someone who will goad us. "Perhaps," he said, "the best description we can give is that the Paraclete is the one who says `giddyap' to a horse." Himes added, "The Paraclete is the one who stands on the side of the race and tells us, `Go-on, you can do it, you're almost there, keep going. Don't lose heart now, keep pushing.'"

Other speakers also had their versions of what the Spirit was doing or saying. All gave the impression that while we may have dallied, the Spirit has not. It brought to mind an analogy between the Spirit and the lost child Jesus in the temple. When found, he said, "Did you not know that I must be about my Father's business?" As we recover the Spirit, we may very well hear her saying the same thing. Where is the Spirit speaking and acting, where is it carrying on the Father's business? The answers here proved to be among the conference's most far-reaching and challenging, for the only conclusion one could draw was that the Spirit, once thought to be in the ecclesiastical bag, is now loose and roaming around the world doing what she wants and needs.