Who is the Holy Spirit?

We say that the Holy Spirit is the third person of the Divine Trinity, but the Church's explanation has always seemed to fall flat to me. Their analogy of the other two persons breathing out their love for each other, and that breath being the subsistence of the Holy Spirit, just doesn't feel like there's a real "person" there. It feels like something is lacking, that this third aspect of Divinity is less complete. And that should never be so. The real misunderstanding must be my fault.

But I have to think of everything I know about the Holy Spirit, what Jesus said about Him. First, the Spirit comes to teach us about Jesus and the Father, but He never speaks about Himself. Now, clearly, both the Father and the Son are persons (distinct, but not separate, etc.), because we have experienced knowing them in action. But the Spirit never reveals anything about Himself. One must wonder if He has a self, or a personality. Jesus does: He gives Himself for us to be saved. The Father does: He desires to draw all people to Himself, to cherish and protect them. But the Holy Spirit seems totally self-less, with no autonomous will. Indeed, if any will exists, it must be to eternally effect a consensus of collaboration and shared intention between the divine Trinity.

When the Father and the Son look at each other, they see ultimate perfection, and thus aspire to emulate and share the image and illuminating likeness of each other. The Holy Spirit is that aspiration. But that does not seem to me to have the aspect of a person. And then, I remember another thing. We are meant to be the Temple of God, with the Holy Spirit dwelling inside of us, and from there, He wants to teach us how to emulate and share the image and likeness of God with which we were created.

The only thing that the Holy Spirit desires is to live in our hearts and to help us to transform our lives into the likeness of Jesus. He wants to teach us how to be selfless, in service to God. Thus it occurs to me that only when the Spirit is at home in his temple does He fully become a person. I hesitate to say it, but that person is us. As the body of Christ, we are the indwelling of the Trinity, because they are inseparable, but it is the person of the Holy Spirit who is meant to help transform us into God's likeness. Still, to be sure, we must remember that the Holy Spirit never speaks of Himself, and we must never think of ourselves as being any more than human. We become, at best, saintly, not Godlike... not in this world. Our ego must never proclaim that "l am" which reveals the Father, nor dare to speak with the authority of the Son, rather we hope to become as selfless as the Spirit, speaking only to teach about the nature and will of the others in the Trinity.

When we are overflowing with the Holy Spirit, someday in Heaven, and we are drawn into the Divine embrace to share in God's love for each other, then the Spirit will have and be the person that He appears to lack. As his Temple, we offer the Spirit his individual personhood, when our will is conformed perfectly, and  we desire only a consensus and collaboration with a shared intention, not without influence but neither with any insistence upon deflection toward our own "self-ish" agenda. Rather, our whole self will desire to be transformed so it can reflect the image and likeness of what we observe in the other two persons of the Holy Trinity. It is now, and always has been, our destiny to become fully like unto God Himself. But first, we have to rid ourselves of our own egos, and follow Him.

Yet, this is not an individual apotheosis. It is only as members of the community, the Church, incorporated into the Body of Christ, that we can be "transubstantiated" by the infusion of the Holy Spirit. We do not come to be deified as who we are now, but collectively as the communion of all of the saved. God does not want only one person to come and join with Him, but all of his people, the children of Abraham, the nation of Israel, the community of saints, the Body of Christ. We come as a people who have learned to love, and to submerge our own selves into a collective, by consensus, collaboration and shared intention. The distinction of the person of the Holy Spirit is that He is much more than a unity, rather, He is a multitude in unison, like a choir in perfect harmony performing under an expert, master conductor. We are all singing together.

Indeed, this is yet another way to illustrate how the three distinct persons of God don't do anything alone, separately. Even the events of Jesus' earthly life often required the participation of all three persons. In his birth, because of his kenosis (withdrawing his divine powers) He needed the help of the Holy Spirit, and the agreement of the Father in order to be conceived. In his teaching, Jesus only spoke what he heard from his Father, through the Holy Spirit. In his miracles, their effectiveness was a sign of the sharing of divine authority. And in his resurrection, who do you think the two angels were, who came down to roll away the stone and help to raise him from the dead? This is not a sign of any lack of God's power as an individual person, but a manifestation of their perfect unity, their continuous commitment to togetherness, their inseparability. They simply do all things together, always.

And we are offered the opportunity to be participants in that activity, according to the divine plan. Even from the beginning, that was the intention of God, when He created Adam. God walked with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, talking and planning what they wanted to do, and sharing their image and likeness in the imitation of the perfection which each one perceived in the others. Of course, Adam and Eve were created in perfection. How else does God do things? God wants to be like a perfect human, just as we want to be like a perfect God. And the indwelling of the Holy Spirit is how that is supposed to be accomplished.

And that is why our prayer, asking for the Holy Spirit to come into our hearts, and to help us to become transformed by the imitation of Jesus, never fails. God wants to bring us his gifts, and to fill us with his love, to walk with us each and every day, and teach us all that we need to know. That has been the whole point of creation, ever since the beginning.

A Plea for Hope Amid Despair

"Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but only say the word and my soul shall be healed."

Oh hear me Jesus, Messiah God!
Say the Word, O' My Lord, and heal this deadly wound which debilitates my soul.

Give your Light to my blind eyes, and speak hearing to my deaf ears. Touch my lips but with a kindly knuckle, and loose this knotted tongue that forbids my speech.

My God! I am swimming in misery and tears. I beg of you! Reach out thy hand to a drowning man, as you once did for Peter in a storm. I trust in you, my Lord.

Do not cast me out, for my repulsive face, but feed me, Lord, with a morsel of Thy Living Bread, and raise to Life this leprous corpse!

If Thou dost will, you can give life to my paralyzed limbs. Give me hope, that I might stretch out my withered hands. Lift me up, Lord! Thou canst make firm the tottering gait of my crippled feet.

Oh Christ, when thou dost look at me, do not pass by and leave me fruitless and accursed, as you did the barren fig tree.

I have waited here all of my life for your shadow to pass over me, to maybe hear your voice speak my name. I know Thou canst make me clean and wholesome to behold. Have mercy on me, Jesus!

Thou art my chiefest desire, above all else. Do not despise my tears, my God, but save me for Thyself, that I might come into thy presence to adore Thee. Let me walk by thy side and sit at thy feet to listen to your words of eternal life, and let me live among thy people in your City on a Hill, Jerusalem, in Heaven.

I love you, my Lord, for you first loved us.
Amen.

-- based on a sermon preached by
St. Gregory of Nazianzus (329-390 AD)

As Saint Paul wrote in his letter to the Romans (7:24): "Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?" We should all know that we are spiritually dead, if we do not have a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Adam and Eve were created in the image and likeness of God. Yet while the image is good and permanent, the likeness was to be learned and earned, by walking with God in the Garden of Eden, by having a long term relationship with Him. They had to learn by imitation and discussion about how they should live, even in the Garden.

But there was a trap in the Garden, put there by the Deceiver, Satan. God warned them to avoid it. They didn't listen. By succumbing to temptation and sin, after listening to Satan, all of their learning to be like God was corrupted. Their likeness was broken, and their relationship with God was also broken. We still have the ability to learn to be like God, but now it is broken,  and desperately needs to be fixed.

That is why Jesus came to Earth, so that He could call us back from the brink of despair. He calls us to turn back from listening to the Deceiver. He promises to forgive our foolishness, and wants to fix those parts in us that are broken. He wants to show us how to live correctly, even in this fouled up world.

That is why we must be "born again" by the Baptism of water and the Holy Spirit, so that we can refuse to listen to Satan, and choose to stay in a restored relationship with God. By the rebirth of Baptism, our ability to learn how to be like God is fixed.
We have been reoriented to look toward Jesus, and to listen to his words in the Gospels, until we find that we can speak to Him ourselves and hear Him reply. From there, we can make progress in learning and growing in the likeness of God.

Salvation is our renewed journey, our walk with God in a restored relationship. We spend our time generously to be with Him, as with our closest friend, and among his other friends, the Church. In this way we begin anew the transformation of our hearts and minds into his likeness. We already have his image. That is what makes us eternally valuable and gives us dignity as human beings. But the likeness needs to be restored by pursuing that relationship that Jesus wants to have with us. That's what atonement means, to begin again in a reconciled relationship. We have a new friend! God! Spend your time to get to know Him. If you learn to imitate Him, it will change your life.

But we do not yet have the full likeness of God in ourselves. Rather, we still have our ignorance, our old habits and our mental baggage, which we must struggle to overcome. As a result, we still have an obdurate stumbling block of human fallibility, which repeatedly causes us to sin. Most of us never get completely past that, and even the saints say that they continue to struggle with it.

"For the good that I would I do not; but the evil which I would not, that I do." (St. Paul, Romans 7:19)

But Jesus, because He was God coming down to save us, gives us the power to be conquerors, each day resisting temptation. And He no longer counts it against us when we nevertheless fail, each and every day. We have this hope, that He will finally remove our fallibility, and heal our bruised and stumbling ability to follow Him. We believe that He will do this when it is our turn to die. Because of sin, we are mortal. But He is ready, when that time comes, to raise us to eternal life.

And on that day, if we have sought to know God, and asked for a restored relationship with Him and with his Church, then we can knock confidently upon the gates of Heaven and know that they will be opened to us. And Jesus will be waiting to renew our humanity without the stumbling blocks that have thus far caused our earthly fallibility. So that, in Heaven, we shall be able at last to achieve our own full likeness to our Creator and Saviour, in accord with the Holy Spirit who guides us from within. And without the sin in our lives, there will be no further cause for death. We will have eternal life.

Amen. Let it be so, Lord.
(A personal meditation on the Eastern Orthodox theology of Resurrection and Salvation... a different perspective)