A Meditation on the Holy Spirit

What can we say about the Holy Spirit? This is a difficult theological question, and a deep mystery, never quite solved or defined by the Church in many centuries of meditation and conjecture. But still, on this Holy Trinity Sunday, we try to imagine.

The Spirit does not have a physical body, and so does not actually have a gender in the way we think about that, but in the Bible can be spoken of either way. To me, the Shekinah, the Presence of God, sounds rather feminine, and I imagine Her as a balance with the other two Persons of God.

1. The Holy Spirit is the third person of God's Trinity, distinct but not separate, within the Divine Unity of One God.
2. He is sent by the Father and the Son to be our Mentor and Comforter.
3. She is the Presence of God, the Holy One, living in our hearts, perceptible or palpable to us when She wills.
4. He has spoken through the prophets to give God's message to his people.
5. She never talks about Herself, and does not seek her own glory.
6. He teaches God's children all that they need to know, to be saved and to love God. 
7. She is the Manifest Love of the Father and the Son for each other, and for us.
8. He prays within us, and passes our prayers on to the Father and Son.
9. She is the conduit through which God's power and grace enters our lives.
10. He commands the angels in their tasks to guard and protect us.
11. She observes our intentions, knows our inner desires, and values our faith.
12. He sustains our lives, and meets our needs, for as long as we shall live.

Part II.
We may imagine and conjecture what it means to be the third person of the Divine Unity. Let's look at how each person of the Trinity is his own person.

1. The Father is One God, a Unity - able to create, and then focus on a plan and a goal.
2. In bringing forth the Son, so God begets Diversity - self-expression & variety, and the capacity for sharing, but also disagreement.
3. Together, the Father and Son find within Themselves a new capacity, for Consensus - that harmony built from agreement in the midst of difference, which becomes the foundation of true and mutual Love.

Love seeks for commonality in the midst of our differences. Often it asks for a compromise, and sometimes it needs creativity. Yet always there is a purpose and an aim. Love is the motivation, the hopeful agency that moves us toward our destiny. Love shows us how our Diversity can seek Unity through a Consensus of purpose. It tells us that we can, indeed we must, seek agreement in order to truly love one another. That is the working of the Holy Spirit.

So we have a way of imagining God as a Trinity, a single undivided essence, yet with three persons keeping their differences in check through agreement in Love. The Son is begotten by the Father, and the Holy Spirit emerges fom them both as a holy sigh of Love, seeking consensus rather than disagreement. Each person is his own agency, able to think independently and creatively from his own perspective, yet also seeking to develop an agreed purpose, plan and goal in mutual respect and Love.