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

Outpouring of the Spirit

Once again the First Testament provided a good starting point. In her presentation, Bergant said this world, as opposed to some future one, is the place for the coming of the messianic age, or the era of the Messiah. It is, she said, accompanied by a universal outpouring of the Spirit. Citing scripture passages supporting this, she described a prophecy from the third chapter of Joel as perhaps the most striking.

Quoting it, and interspersing her own comments, she went on: "I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy. (No gender discrimination.) Your old men shall dream dreams and your young men shall see visions. (No discrimination because of age.) Even upon your men servants and maidservants, I will pour out my spirit. (No discrimination according to class.)" This, she concluded, is an astonishing statement coming from an androcentric, patriarchal society, such as that of the First Testament.

The sweep of the Spirit's universal activity became clear during Himes' talks -- he gave two -- and his responses to questions afterward. After his first talk, on the Spirit as the one who brings about unity, he was asked if he agreed with the observation that even though the Spirit was the person of the Trinity closest to us she, nevertheless, turned out to be the one we knew least. He said he agreed, adding that the reason was that we were looking in the wrong place. To know the Spirit, he said, "You don't look first at scripture. You don't look first at nature. You look first in the mirror."

The Spirit, as John's gospel says, has been "poured out in our hearts," Himes said. As a result, we most directly experience the power of the Spirit in our capacity to give ourselves in love. In sum, one place to find the Spirit, indeed to experience Spirit, is in our living of life and giving our lives to one another.

Coming back to the same theme in response to a question after his second talk, Himes said, "The Spirit is experienced as the very ability that we have to love. It is the ground of that ability." Finding God in the experience of self-giving love, he said, is not, as often assumed, a case of God loving you and you loving one another and then you also loving God as a kind of separate response. "No," he said "God loves you and then you love one another and," snapping his fingers, "that's God."

Himes also broadened the Spirit's realm of activity beyond the personal. In his second talk, he made the point that the church had learned from secular culture and from various disciplines such as sociology, psychology and political science. Afterward, he was asked if the Spirit was somehow involved in producing this secular learning or whether it was just the product of enlightened human endeavor. "I think it is clearly the first," he replied. "Clearly, the Holy Spirit is engaged in it."

As support, he offered what he described as a classic theological principle, one he said Thomas Aquinas often stated. It says that nothing is solely human, and, because God has so chosen, nothing in our experience is solely divine. "Everything is totally caused by God and totally caused by natural agency," he said. "Things are caused totally by both according to two different modes."