Thoughts about the Holy Spirit

from a Reading of the Prison Letters of Paul

A Note for Eugene

We are influenced by what happens to us, more than by any book. Recently in Masterton the Holy Spirit gave me peace and the healing of old wounds through the hands of an undenominational pastor. It was not something I had expected. In winter we are inclined to think that the spring will never come. But the spring is here now, though the outward weather is cold and the roads of Jerusalem are soggy with mud. My poor soul is putting out some green shoots. Let us praise the Holy Spirit that he deals so lovingly with us!

And now I will be able to make some comments with a peaceful heart on Saint Paul’s letters to the Churches at Ephesus and Colossae, as you once asked me to do. Before now, my mind would have been like a cracked mirror, which distorts reality because of its own deficiency. But the Spirit supplies what is lacking in us for the tasks he commands us to undertake. It is my conviction that the Spirit desires me to fulfil your earlier request.

You already know my simple theology. Jesus is God. It is necessary for us to join in the ritual meal and sacrifice. The works of mercy must be done if we are to be united with the Lord Jesus in this world and the next. For myself, I have for some time added a fourth requirement, necessary for this country, that the European face of Christ should not be allowed to obscure page 513 or annihilate his Polynesian face, since the Risen Christ is a spectrum of all races and all cultures.

My eyes do not see more than this, that is, they did not see it until now. But now I add a fifth leg to the chair of belief, that without the power of the Holy Spirit we cannot do the works of mercy that God requires, and that the Spirit must be waited for and supplicated and welcomed. Blessed be Jesus! Blessed be the Holy Spirit, who lifts the poor boats of our souls above the rocks, as the tide does when it rises. Without the Spirit we may have good desires but we have no power to perform them.

The crisis of the Church is not at its deepest level a crisis of authority or a crisis of dogmatic theology. It is a crisis of powerlessness in which our sole recourse is to call on the help and inward power of the Holy Spirit.

I will not deal in a scholarly fashion with the background of Paul’s letters from prison. You can do that better than I can. Instead I will pick up those points on which the Spirit sheds some light for me. That way, I will not spoil the cloth by adding pieces of my own manufacture.

Comments on the Prison Letters

For we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and of your love for all God’s people.

In these words to the Colossians, Paul indicates the twofold dimension of Christian belief, deistic and humanistic. The Cross has an upright and a cross-beam. The upright can be taken as representing the relation of man to God, the cross-beam, the relation of person to person. Moreover, to become a living tree and to flower, the Cross needs to be planted in the earth of our daily experience. It is Mother Mary who signifies most for us this actualising power.

We Catholics have tended to emphasise deism at the expense of humanism. It can be expressed in allegory. On one side of the mountain the pines grow. They rise up high and stately, like the pillars of a cathedral. We are aware of a religious solemnity in their shadow. Their branches say, moved by the wind, ‘Endure, endure, one day we will come to God.’ But below the pines nothing can grow. One finds only pine needles and dog manure.

On the other side of the mountain grow the broad-leafs. They do not rise so high. Their branches spread out horizontally and much dead material falls to the forest floor. The scene is not a tidy one. But saplings grow up among the rotted wood and fallen leaves, and the broad-leafs shelter them with their branches.

The pines are an image of deism. The broad-leafs are an image of humanism. Was the Lord Jesus a pine or a broad-leaf? That is the question we have to ask ourselves. The evidence of the Gospels leads me to the conclusion that he was a broad-leaf and the pines felt obliged to kill him.

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The crisis of the Church, in her deep return to the Gospel realities, asks of us something resembling a personality change, from deist to humanist, from pine into broad-leaf. There is of course, Eugene, another though a lesser danger, for Christian humanists, that their reactions may lead him to neglect the deistic dimension. We can remedy this by an increased reliance on the power of the Holy Spirit.

The difference between Christian humanism and secular humanism does not come from a difference in objectives. Both Christian and secular people love their neighbours, and desire to show them mercy, and labour to help them. The difference is in the recognition of the source of love. Christians recognise that the love in their hearts flows from God, through the Lord Jesus by the power of the Spirit. This is not to deny that Communists may be hidden saints of the kingdom. It is indeed the shame of the people of God that the hidden saints of the kingdom continually surpass them in works of mercy. But this is because the people of God neglect to call from the depths of their hearts on the liberating power of the Spirit.

To love the people of God means to serve them. We are called the servant Church. And a servant’s job is to clean out lavatories, actual or metaphorical. We are servants not only of the people of God, those who already recognise the Cross of Jesus as the mercy sign, but servants also of the kingdom of God, all those who have the seed of mercy in their hearts. Our task then is plain, not to seek for affluence or prestige, but to take on the roughest jobs, the jobs nobody else will tackle, and to persevere in them through the power of the Holy Spirit.

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When the true message, the Good News, first came to you, you heard of the hope it offers. So your faith and love are based on what you hope for, which is kept safe for you in heaven.

The people of God long continually for the parousia, the fulfilment of Christ’s promises by the establishment of the new creation. This is the central and necessary travail of our souls. Heaven will be the fully human society. But that is ‘kept safe’ for us on the other side of the grave.

Sometimes the promise leads us falsely into quietism and inactivity. It need not do so. What is done here will be perfectly fulfilled in heaven. The presence of the Holy Spirit among us is our warrant. Thus we can be calm in failure, yet persevere. In what should we persevere? What else but the abundant performance of works of mercy? Only the Spirit can give us the power to do them.

Our hope is based on what the Lord Jesus has already done. Our faith is in him. Our love springs up like water from a well because his Spirit dwells page 515 in our hearts. And love, to be love, must express itself actively in practical mercy to our neighbours, by which we share in the building of the new creation.

As the Spirit made the world out of nothing, so now from the chaos and nothing of our hearts the Spirit makes the new creation. We are the living stones of the new Jerusalem.

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‘Song to the Father’ (CP 587)

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For this reason we always pray for you, ever since we heard about you. We ask God to fill you with knowledge of his will, with all the wisdom and understanding that the Spirit gives. Then you will be able to do what the Lord wants, and always do what pleases him. Your lives will be fruitful in all kinds of good works, and you will grow in your knowledge of God.

The image is one of growth, not one of instant illumination. All the same, the seed of the Spirit has to be in souls to make them persevere in fruitfulness.

The prayer of Paul, already in the Spirit, benefits those who are newly rooted in the Spirit. The wisdom and the understanding that the Spirit gives are inward gifts. The new Christians are able to act freely. They do not have to turn to a rulebook to find the right response to each new occasion of their lives. The territory of the Spirit is always an unknown area, containing the freshness of the new creation, like seeing the world being made by God before our eyes.

The old dispute about faith and works should be handled gently, since the tree must certainly be judged by its fruit, that is, good works are a sign of the operation of the Spirit; yet the intuition that without the power of the Spirit the works cannot be done is wholly true. We have to bow our heads to the Pentecostals.

The junkie cannot get off junk without the inward power that comes from the Spirit. His tensions will always return and wreck his resolutions if he lacks the physical and spiritual peace that the Holy Spirit gives. The policeman cannot stop thumping the junkie’s head on the wall unless the Spirit enters his soul to take away his prejudices and frustrations. People on their own cannot help people.

The first Christians did not start to share their goods in a free and full manner till after the bomb of the Spirit exploded in their souls at Pentecost. Before then, they would be morally incapable of this free and joyful sharing. The acquisitive habit is one of the deepest rooted habits of the human race. page 516 To say, ‘This is ours, not mine,’ and to carry the words into effect is as much a miracle of God as the raising of the dead.

This is apparent in the life of our own cities. The people have good impulses. They wish to be of help. They are soft-hearted paralytics. The intention is present but the power is lacking. Therefore the poor still go into jail and girls of thirteen go down on the boats to sleep with sailors to get a bed to lie in and the price of a meal. The paralysis can be removed by God. Then the poor will be fed and the homeless will be given a bed to sleep in.

A humanism that lacks the power of the Spirit falls continually into anger and bitterness and false accusations. The accusations are invariably unjust because those who have not encountered and received the Spirit are truly unable to do and continue to do what is good. A man who has received the Spirit will not condemn the faults of his neighbour, because he knows that without the Spirit he would have the same faults or worse faults.

We Catholics may say that we have already received the Holy Spirit in confirmation. This I believe, yet a seed that is never watered will lie dormant like the grains of wheat in the tombs of the Pharaohs. What the Pentecostals call ‘Baptism in the Spirit’ is for many of them a first reception of the Spirit, and for us a strong watering of the seed.

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Christ is the visible likeness of the invisible God. He is the first-born Son, superior to all created things . . . God created the whole universe through him and for him. He is the head of his body, the Church; he is the source of the body’s life; he is the first-born Son who was raised from death, in order that he alone might have the first place in all things.

Jesus is God. The world was made in Christ. And the new creation, the wholly human society and the perfecting of non-human creatures grows like a tree from the root of his incarnation.

As the child leapt in the womb of Elizabeth when she met Mary with the Lord Jesus in her womb, and she prophesied by the Holy Spirit, so our own dynamic recognition that Jesus is God happens usually through contact with those who are already filled with the Spirit. It is a horizontal dimension.

I think that many Catholics have recognised intellectually that Jesus is God but lacked awareness of the power of the Risen Christ. Recently I went into a church in Wanganui with a young friend of mine, who had been brought up as a Catholic, but later, without actually abandoning the visible church, had become a Spirit-filled Christian. We knelt together and prayed in the large cold church.

‘They know the death of the Lord very well,’ I said. ‘But often they’ve never felt the joy of his Resurrection.’

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I wanted to cry out, ‘Jesus is God,’ in that church. But I refrained because an old lady was kneeling quietly and I did not wish to scandalise her.

In the next three or five or ten years, when the Kentucky Mountaineers hold huge revival meetings in our towns, and our young people go away from us to speak in tongues with them, the Catholic elders will say, ‘Why have they left us?’

And I will have to say, ‘You forgot the power of the Spirit and turned a religion of love into a religion of law and ritualism. You were unable therefore to nourish the souls of the young ones. Now other people are looking after them.’

And I will go first to the revival meeting, to join in prayer with the young ones and share their turbulent awareness of the Risen Christ, and then to Mass, to drink the same water from an older spring. I have drunk from that spring often in solitude, while the young roamed the pavements without any rooted hope or belief, so I will not complain when they gather together to praise the Lord Jesus in another place.

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Through the Son, then, God decided to recover the whole universe. God made peace through the Son’s death on the Cross, and so recovered all things, both on earth and in heaven.

[Introduced by ‘The Song of the Sun’ (CP 486)]

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And now I am happy about my sufferings for you. For by means of my physical sufferings I help complete what still remains of Christ’s sufferings on behalf of his body, which is the Church.

To be happy in suffering is the gift of the Spirit. The completion of Christ’s sufferings through his members is a mystery that involves all Christians. It too is a gift of the Spirit. If the Holy Spirit is present in our souls, then a cancer or a nervous breakdown will take on a different meaning. We may learn to recognise that calamities open doors.

Since we are children of God, begotten by the Spirit, our lives are an extension of the life of the Lord Jesus. This is not to deny that he is the source. Plainly without him our suffering would be spiritually valueless. But our union with him transforms the meaning of our sufferings. The suffering of the Christian is part of Calvary.

The Spirit comes to give a new value to suffering: we suffer out of love. But the Spirit comes also to remove paralysis and weakness and obstructions page 518 in the soul and body. It is the Spirit who sanctifies suffering, not us. We are at liberty to be bold and ask for the Spirit’s healing of all affliction, since the Lord Jesus came so that we should have life and have it more abundantly.

The Spirit gives what is necessary for everyone to fulfil their vocations. Some may indeed have precisely a vocation to suffer. But for most people, heavy suffering is an obstacle in their vocation, and the Spirit can and will remove it. The heaviest suffering may come in the heart itself on account of the absence of the Spirit, who has not been sought or invoked or welcomed. This is in a sense an unintended Cross.

To little children the parents give light loads, embraces and praise. The Spirit deals so with us. Our sorrow comes usually from ourselves, when we wrestle on our own instead of nestling in the Spirit.

If the Spirit sends us suffering, the Spirit gives also the capacity to bear it with peace and joy. Then the suffering becomes an unmistakable sign of the presence of the Risen Christ in the world.

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For this is God’s plan: to make known a secret to the people, this rich and glorious secret for all peoples. And the secret is this: Christ is in you, which means that you will share the glory of God.

Nobody is excluded from the Christian secret. It is for all peoples: Christ is in you (not ‘can be in you’) because by his life and death and Resurrection he united himself to everyone. The assent of the believer is the positive recognition of an already existing relationship. The assent does not create Christ in his soul; that would be beyond human power; and at any rate, Christ is already there. But the assent allows the Holy Spirit to vitalise the seed which is Christ, and which was planted by the death of Christ. A believer who confesses, ‘Jesus is my Lord and God’ has begun to be turned into Christ and to live a life which is an extension of the life of the Lord Jesus, however unlike the Lord Jesus the believer may appear to be.

I remember still the step I made in Auckland, Eugene, when I was in your brotherly care. To make the jump across the chasm, to recognise that I was already accepted by God, precisely as I was, precisely as I am, was desperately hard. Yet it had to be done, since a theology of self-perfecting leads inexorably to despair.

How good does one have to be to become acceptable to God? That is the web the Jansenist or Calvinist spins for himself. This clumsy, lucky fly broke through the web and blundered with a bottomless relief into the arms of the unjudging Father. We are loved by God, not because we are good, but because God is good.

I had a good elder brother in yourself, Eugene, since I learnt that I could page 519 open my heart to you with no fear of misunderstanding or rejection. Is God less loving than our friends? To make oneself spruce for God is an infantile delusion. God accepts us in our true spiritual dishevelment. It is God’s power that makes us able to grow spiritually, as the sun reaches into the dark earth and warms the seed. But the seed itself is the life of God in our souls. God’s love creates in us the capacity to love, by giving shape to Christ in us.

Now the Spirit comes again to water the seed.

God indeed nourishes the souls of everyone, as the sun touches the seed underground. But when the shoots pierce through the ground, the moment of choice becomes possible, to live for self or to live for the love of others, to be with God or not to be with God.

We cannot choose to reach God. We can choose to let God reach us, or to close ourselves against God.

Perhaps the destiny of glory terrifies us.

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Song to the Lord Jesus (CP 571)

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See to it then, that no one makes a captive of you with the worthless deceit of human wisdom, which comes from the teaching handed down by humans, and from the ruling spirits of the universe, and not from Christ.

The situation to which Paul refers as a dangerous possibility is not one where people use talents and transmitted knowledge for ordinary social purposes. It is rather a situation of idolatry: reliance on a false humanism that looks for a source of spiritual power in people and not in God.

The modern parallels are many. Science seen as the great wonder-worker; education seen as the great problem-solver; money and the things that money can buy seen as the ultimate source of security; certain broad theosophical and magical theories current among the young; a belligerent secular humanism that sweeps aside reliance on the power of God as a backward superstition; even the longstanding rigidities of churchianity – these attitudes may be unavoidable for those who have not yet acknowledge the power and wisdom of Christ; but in a Christian they are evidence of an imperfect conversion.

God will deify human beings through Christ. Human beings cannot deify themselves.

The defect lies in the spiritual attitude. One is free to acquire and use all human knowledge, to discuss the possible meaning of magical or theosophical propositions, to own a car and a TV set, to throw coins and consult The Book of Chances, to get an MA degree in anthropology, to keep the rules of the page 520 Church with great thoroughness, to join in some protest march with the PYM, provided always that one sees human thought and action as ultimately valueless and self-frustrating without the indwelling love and peace and power of the Holy Spirit.

The Spirit may indeed begin to move in the heart of the one who hopes for miracles from people. Wherever justice, truth and mercy increase, it is the work of the Spirit. But the seed below the ground is in a different position from that of the shoot that has emerged above the ground. The Christian has to acknowledge unequivocally that with God alone is power.

The ‘ruling spirits of the universe’ may be figures in Judaic angelology. The phrase is broad and ambiguous. But in the letter to the Christians of Ephesus, Paul expands his meaning – ‘At that time you followed the world’s evil way; you obeyed the ruler of the spiritual powers in space, the spirit who now controls the people who disobey God.’

It seems plain that Paul is attributing a false humanism to its source among the demons, not inappropriately, since the Lord Jesus told us that Satan is the father of lies. This is not to attribute a deliberate evil intention to those who are misled. In the letter to the Ephesians, Paul implies that all who are not yet brought to life by the Spirit are trapped among false opposites, depending vainly on deliverance by a human spirit. Our contemporary experience seems to me identical, Eugene. Even within the visible Church, the humanism that rises up is too often of this contentious self-defeating kind. We have all drunk from those muddy springs and gone away with sore bellies.

Our own problem, then, is twofold, to avoid the error, and equally to avoid an unjust condemnation of those who attribute a magical or semi-divine power to human faculties, when no acceptable alternate view may have presented itself to them. Mature Christians are not obsessed by demonology. But the reason they are not obsessed is because they have already begun to participate in the victory of Christ by his co-operation in the work of the Spirit.

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So let no one make rules about what you eat or drink, or about the subject of holy days, or the new moon festival, or the sabbath.

The tendency to return to Judaic ritualism is condemned by Paul, principally no doubt because it is a turning aside from reliance on the Lord Jesus. When we read the words of Paul, we remember the sad dependence of many Catholic people on feast days, first Fridays, set forms of prayer, particular images, and all those things that have made us assume the appearance of a neo-Judaic cult. I grant that all this is now being mercifully simplified. The fault lay in the attitude, the searching for a security in ritual which ritual cannot give.

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I doubt if this fault will ever wholly leave the people of God, until the new creation is fulfilled. It has already persisted for two thousand years. But we should welcome the water that rises from beneath us to break the ice.

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You have died with Christ and are set free from the ruling spirits of the universe. Why then do you live as though you belonged to this world? Why do you obey such rules as, ‘Don’t handle this,’ ‘Don’t taste that,’ ‘Don’t touch the other’? All these things become useless, once they are used. These are only man-made rules and teachings. Of course they appear to have wisdom in their forced worship of angels, and false humility, and severe treatment of the body; but they have no real value in controlling physical passions.

We have to consider the religious fetishism of our Church. It did not die out with the Colossians. It still continues.

I look forward to the time when the Mass will be celebrated freely and frequently in Christian homes. Then the chalice may be a kitchen cup, the paten a saucer, the bread may be cut from a family loaf, and the wine bought at the bottle store. This reaction may seem excessive; but a false humility obstructs a true humility. The beauty of the poverty of Christ is most apparent in what is ordinary or even makeshift. I have seen such Masses, and the Spirit did not refrain from moving strongly in the hearts of those who participated in them.

As things stand, children who come into one of our Churches are likely to find themselves under the shade of the pines, not in the fruitful shelter of the broad-leafs. They are impressed by the solemnity, but their souls are constrained.

Our mother Church, Eugene, is like an old half-paralysed woman who, by God’s act, carries a beautiful child in her womb. When the child is born, it will not be constrained by fetishism. It will look to the ritual meal, certainly, but even more to works of mercy, and the virtues of Maoritanga, and the indwelling love and peace of the Spirit, for its soul’s food.

What Paul says about penance rings true to my own experience. There have been times, as you know, when I gave myself over to long fasts, self-flagellation, exposure to cold and other penances, in an effort to force the hand of God and acquire the virtues necessary for my vocation. I do not regret those times. In a civilisation as much devoted as ours is to the pursuit of physical comfort, they may have provided the balance of an opposite example. But now the penance the Holy Spirit imposes on me is to laugh as often as I can.

Physical austerities certainly do not remove the tensions that plague us and lead to anger or discouragement or impurity or plain bad nerves. Only page 522 the Spirit can do this for us, with the gift of peace. And the Spirit does it when we are doing what the Spirit wants us to do, which usually means, feeding the hungry and consoling the sad.

The Spirit can deliver us also from ritualism and fetishism. I look in some hope to the growth of the Catholic Pentecostal movement. The direction is the right one, even if the spirituality is clumsy and new. But I suspect that while we are occupied in our uncertain works of renovation, the Spirit will flash like lightning across the sky, among those who have left our Churches or never entered them. The Spirit has always shown a preference for the poor.

Let us not complain. The battle for the souls of the people may be won without our participation. A woman sits at home in wartime and patches clothes. She may still be doing what she is meant to do.

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Do not lie to one another, for you have put off the old self with its habits, and have put on the new self. This is the new being which God, its creator, is constantly renewing in God’s own image, to bring you to a full knowledge of himself.

The effort of self-reformation is useless. Moralism is useless. Controversy is useless. The power of the Spirit has to be known in experience. Paul is referring to the central miracle of the Christian life, in which believers become aware that the Spirit gives them the power to do what they of themselves cannot do.

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Song to the Holy Spirit (CP 572)

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Be helpful to one another, and forgive one another, whenever any of you has a complaint against someone else. You must forgive each other in the same way that the Lord has forgiven you. And to these add love, which binds all things together in perfect unity. The peace that Christ gives is to be the judge in our hearts; for to this peace God has called you together in one body. And be thankful. Christ’s message, in all its richness, must live in your hearts. Teach and instruct each other with all wisdom. Sing psalms, hymns, and sacred songs; sing to God, with thanksgiving in your hearts. Everything you do or say, then, should be done in the name of the Lord Jesus, as you give thanks through him to the Father.

The Catholic faithful have often been warned against subjective moral judgments. The true meaning of this warning, however, does not derive from the danger of subjectivity, as if conscience and the capacity to distinguish page 523 and apply an authoritative message (such as Paul’s letter) were not themselves inward powers, but from the danger of using either conscience or an external rule as a refuge from the demanding encounter with the Holy Spirit, who alone gives wisdom. This warning should be given equally against the two false opposites of subjectivism and legalism. Then, after giving the warning, we must fall to praying, ‘Lord, Holy Spirit, help us’, since there is no other guide. Without the Spirit, whatever warning is given, we will end up either on the bleak rock or in the bog.

The message of Paul to the slaves of Colossae is not in any sense a reestablishment of the Judaic Law. New attitudes, new feelings, new capacities, spontaneous praise, a freedom of mutual instruction, are the fruits of their co-operation with the Spirit already present in their hearts. The authority Paul exercises, in the name of the Lord Jesus and of the Spirit, is not to tell them what to think, feel and do, but to canalise gently an already flowing spring. The Spirit has to be at work among them, or else the instruction of Paul will seem either impenetrable or a horrifying moral demand incapable of fulfilment. This has been our characteristic dilemma, Eugene.

The peace that Christ gives is disrupted by attitudes or actions contrary to the love given by the Spirit. That peace itself is to be the judge. It is rarely recognised among us that the rule of love is vastly more delicate and demanding than the rule of law.

It is true that those who are guided by the Spirit have not become sinless. I know this to my own deep sorrow. We will no doubt wound the Spirit, and wound our own hearts in so doing. From time to time we may also do or say things, not in themselves a falling away from love, which scandalise those who are guided by custom or set forms of objective justice. On the other hand, things that the moralist might count as nothing – a withdrawal of attention from some brother, a harsh word or look, an impulse of covetousness carried out, some shadow of an I-It relationship between wife and husband or husband and wife – will meet the rebuke of the Spirit and burn in us like a hot iron because they disturb the peace of Christ established in the heart.

I need not dwell on the specific points of advice regarding moral conduct that Paul gave to the Colossians. They are well known. The moralists have always seized on them, chewing the husk and spitting out the wheat, setting aside the inward power of the Spirit which alone could make us or the Colossians capable of carrying out or even truly grasping Paul’s injunctions. Being human, let us be quick then to forgive the moralists their fear.

It is apparent from his testimony in other letters that Paul did not intend to present the Colossians with a spiritual traffic manual. Too many of our people have been hypnotised by the particulars of moral instruction, to the neglect of the guidance of the Spirit who alone can bring such particulars to life.

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The Colossians are to be free people, even if some are still in a state of objective slavery to earthly masters. Christ has set them free, to be guided by the Spirit, and to learn from one another and the light the Spirit sheds on the particular events of their lives. This freedom is something that we have to learn again.

Plainly an openly religious style of life is intended. To speak of God, to praise God, to pray together, should not be strange things to us. The division of religious and secular categories of life is to be broken down. But these things require to be done in a spirit of peace and gentleness.

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Tychicus, Onesimus, Aristarchus, Mark, Barnabas, Joshua, Epaphas, Luke, Demas, Archippus – these names are clustered in the final greetings of Paul to the people of God at Colossae. Paul’s words have a tone of informal friendship – ‘our dear brother Tychicus’, ‘Onesimus, the dear and faithful brother’, ‘Mark, the cousin of Barnabas’, ‘Luke, our dear doctor’ – it is the voice of mutual love within the family of the Lord Jesus. This is no less the case though Paul mentions at a later date in the second letter to Timothy that ‘Demas fell in love with the present world and has deserted me’ – all movements of regeneration and conversion are accompanied by defections and backslidings, and the sorrowful love for the absent brother is part of the prayer and instruction of the Christian family.

The love of warmth cannot be set aside as an unessential human factor. No; it proceeds from the Holy Spirit. Grace comes to crown and nourish nature, not to annihilate or ignore it. Eros is most truly himself when he submits to the guidance of Agape.

I find these litanies of love, the names of many friends, repeated often among the vagrants who are my brothers and sisters. I find them also among the Pentecostals, wherever the Spirit has begun to give light and warmth to their hearts. The movement of the Spirit is always to personalise, localise, sacralise; and I believe that this familiarity of friendship in the Lord will be a characteristic of the new servant Church that is being born from the womb of the old, as the Christian communities themselves emerged from the womb of Judaism and the nature religions. The time will come when the faces of the people of God in Colossae and Ephesus, shown to us by the letters of Paul, will be for us like our own faces seen in a mirror.

The letter to the people of God in Ephesus is in the main an expansion of the one Paul wrote to the Colossians. But there are many sidelights, many new points of emphasis. I will dwell on these in order.

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Let us praise the Father for this glorious grace, for the free gift He gave us in his dear Son! For by the death of Christ we are set free, and our sins are forgiven. How great is the grace of God, which is given to us in such large measure! In all wisdom and insight God did what was purposed, and made known to us the secret plan already decided upon to complete by means of Christ. God’s plan, which will be completed when the time is right, is to bring all creatures together, everything in heaven and on earth, with Christ as head.

The death of Christ and his return to the Father releases among us the power of the Spirit. The ‘secret plan’ is not a formula of salvation to be repeated by the lips or contained in a book, or, for that matter, to be crystallised in a particular Church structure. There will be books. There will be structures. But the plan of God is the work already commenced among us, something that we ourselves are free to experience as co-creators of the new spiritual universe. Truly what we do is done by the Spirit working in and through us. Yet our obedience is not that of chessmen on a board, moved by the hand of the player, but a true and voluntary participation. God values before all else in us the capacity for free choice, without which we would be unable to love. The gifts of the Spirit augment this freedom; they establish it in the proper soil of the Divine creativity; they do not diminish or destroy it.

A relevant comparison may be that of a gardener to whom God has given the job of planting and watering an orchard. He may choose in measure what seeds he plants. He may choose how he prunes and waters. Yet God gives seed soil, moisture, life, and strength to perform the task, and guidance in its performance. God chooses to work with people, not merely to command them, having worked with and through and in the man Jesus. The life of the Church is a continuation of the life of Jesus.

The wholly human society of heaven will emerge from this labour, under the sovereignty of Christ. Yet Paul has made it plain that this sovereignty is not mere eternal authority, but an organic relationship resembling that of a human head to a human body. Our life comes to us, from the Father, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit enables us to accept Christ as our friend and master, as the first disciples accepted him. Let us not suppose that they were saints and we are not. As they were, so we are; as they became, so we can become.

It is the Holy Spirit who gives the power to make this possible, indeed, in a sense, easy, though certainly not effortless. The sense of insurmountable difficulty comes from a hidden assumption that we can do what we have to do, and be what we have to be, by our own power. What God commands, God also gives the power to do. It is our first business, then, to demand from God the power of the Holy Spirit.

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When you heard the true message, the Good News that brought you salvation, you believed in Christ, and God put the stamp of ownership on you by giving you the promised Holy Spirit. The Spirit is the guarantee that we shall receive what God has promised, and assure us that God will give complete freedom to believers. Let uspraise his glory!

Paul speaks of the Holy Spirit as the guarantee that God’s gift will in fact be given. Because the seed of the Spirit is already present in the souls of the Christians of Ephesus, they can be sure that the spiritual growth will continue.

To hear, to believe, and then to receive: these are the three stages of conversion. The gap for ourselves, Eugene, the thing that separates us from the children of Paul, is commonly our omission of the third stage. We hear, we believe, but curiously we do not seem to receive the power to obey God fruitfully and joyfully. Thus we lack that very sign of authenticity which would enlarge our hope and draw into our company those who do not yet believe.

The problem of spiritual blockage has many aspects, as, for example, a partial degeneration of our Christianity into moralism and legalism, a spirit of fear that sees God not as our deliverer but as our taskmaster and executioner, a timidity that draws back from the labours and the independence of the children of God, a false view of ecclesial authority, and perhaps most of all the endemic materialism of our times. Miracles are needed: miracles of nourishment, miracles of sharing, miracles of healing. But we may suppose that the age of miracles is past, though hidden miracles surround us like blackberries on the bushes in autumn.

The blockage can be shifted only by a full participation in the third stage of conversion. We have to join in community to call upon the Holy Spirit, remembering, if such is the case with us, that we have already received the Spirit in Confirmation, and that further reception is a watering of the seed planted then. We have to bare our souls inwardly, acknowledging our factual powerlessness and asking the Spirit for power to enable us to do the work of God. Then the hungry will be fed and the sad will be consoled. The Spirit alone gives the power to do these things.

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The works of mercy that are most pleasing to God

To feed the hungry;
To give drink to the thirsty;
To give clothes to those who lack them;
To give hospitality to guests and strangers;
To bail people out of jail, visit them in jail, and look after them when they
come out of jail;
page 527 To bury the dead and go to funerals;
To instruct the ignorant with humbleness;
To strengthen those who are doubtful, or weak in the faith, and help them
to clarify their minds and make their own decisions;
To rebuke those who are at fault with tender love and without humiliating
them;
To forgive what seems to be harm done to yourself;
To put up with difficult people;
To pray continually for all creatures.

Our religion is the science of loving well. The Holy Spirit alone gives us the wisdom and the power to do this, and the Spirit is the love with whom we love. The centre of our religion is the love of the Lord Jesus to the human soul and the human soul’s response, moved by the Spirit.

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[At this point the poem ‘Song of the Soul to the Lord Jesus’ was inserted, i.e. ‘Song to the Lord Jesus’, CP 571.]

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I have not stopped giving thanks to God for you. I remember you in my prayers, and ask the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, to give you the Spirit, who will make you wise and reveal God to you, so that you will know God. I ask that your minds may be opened to see the light, so that you will know what is the hope to which God has called you, how rich are the wonderful blessings God promises believers, and how very great is the Spirit’s power at work in us who believe. This power in us is the same as the mighty strength which the Spirit used when Christ was raised from death, and seated at God’s right hand in the heavenly world.

An impulse of sad envy may rise at times in our hearts, when we recognise through the words of Paul, or through observation of the works of the Spirit in others, the freedom and abundant joy of those who embrace Christ as their husband and carry his light even in their faces. It is the envy of the frigid woman who is scandalised by the vigorous happiness a healthy bride enjoys with her husband, and it comes from a piercing sense of personal deprivation. No doctor except the Spirit can cure this sickness of the soul. God does not wish to deny us the privilege of a similar health and happiness. We become Jeremiahs in all sincerity, lamenting our own paralysis and the paralysis of the Church; and God may allow this for a time, to purge us of a false reliance on ourselves; but he himself comes at length to the paralysed man to make him page 528 whole. The command, ‘Take up your bed and walk’, requires for obedience an act of trust on the part of the patient, a belief that the Holy Spirit can make health and walking possible and even joyful.

When the Spirit enters our souls, the power of the resurrected Christ is present in us. I do not believe there is a limit to this power, except the limits that God may choose to set when apportioning gifts. We too can raise the dead, heal the incurable, cast out demons, endure all things, love our bitterest enemies, and remain tranquil at the heart of the storm. We can perform the works of mercy, not just talk about the fact that they should be done. For myself, I desire very strongly that the Spirit will give me, in great kindness, the gift of healing, since many who are sick come to me. The Spirit does give it to me in measure, but I desire it in a fuller measure.

We can do whatever God asks of us. But these things are impossible to man. Only the Spirit can do them in us and through us. And the name of the Lord Jesus is the name in which they are done.

Self-devaluation is as useless as self-approbation. The Spirit drives both out of our souls. Then we begin to tremble, since our imaginary power has gone from us, and only the Spirit’s true power remains.

The prayer of Paul indicates to us the power of prayer. His prayer was answered. The people of God in Ephesus became wise and holy. Two thousand years later, the same prayer rises with anguish in our hearts, and the same power of the Spirit works among the people to bring healing and light and peace. God grant that our eyes are not blind to the Spirit’s working!

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Christ rules there above all heavenly rulers, authorities, powers, and lords; he is above all titles of power in this world and the next. God put all things under Christ’s feet, and gave him to the Church as supreme Lord over all things. The Church is Christ’s body, the completion of him who himself completes all things everywhere.

The parousia has begun in the Lord Jesus. It is now extended to ourselves, as fire makes its way through the peat that lies underground. The summation of all things will be when all things rest in harmony in the breast of Christ.

Our fault has always been to look to a future event to bring the sovereignty of Christ to us, whereas that sovereignty had already begun, in the communities of the early Church, and is equally available to us today.

Truly, we suffer with the Lord Jesus in this world. But our suffering is not powerless or joyless, since the Spirit can be in our hearts to give us both power and joy.

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For it is by God’s grace that you have been saved, through faith. It is not your own doing, but God’s gift. There is nothing here to boast of, since it is not the result of your own efforts.

I can affirm with some intensity the meaning of this passage on account of my experience of the recovery programme of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was impossible for me to refrain from drinking. The notion that I could put the cork in the bottle by my own efforts was the greatest single obstacle on the road to recovery. God made it not only possible, but, in a sense, easy. He removed my drinking problem, with the proviso that I should help others and learn from them, if the problem were not to return. Fourteen years later I have no temptation to drink. Without God’s grace, I would now be long dead, or else ringing up on imaginary telephones in the ward of a mental hospital.

A wholly unexpected ease in rightdoing is one of the marks of the activity of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit prefers to act in a communal context. This should not seem strange to us, since the Christian message regarding the Trinity has revealed to us that God is communal in being. And since we are made in God’s image, we are most truly human in communal situations.

We may fear that our sins will always prevent the working of the Holy Spirit in our lives. This is not the case. One sin alone, the sin of fear itself, is the cause of the obstruction. Sinners who go boldly to God and bare their hearts will receive the power to do what God asks.

God knows what we are. God knows our profound weakness, stupidity, lack of preparation. Yet it is precisely to us that God chooses to come. Why should we obsessively tidy the houses of our souls in preparation for the arrival of that divine guest, the Spirit? The Spirit might say to us what the Lord Jesus said to Martha, ‘Woman, you’re too busy!’ No doubt her busyness came from anxiety, and there was that touch of subconscious envy and annoyance that the Lord chose to sit down with her inactive sister. But the busyness may have excluded the Spirit. It is hard for a guest to converse peacefully with a housewife who is dusting the furniture or putting the roast in the oven.

An anxious spiritual preparation indicates that we are still relying on our own powers. The Spirit sets the house in order by giving us the power to do what we could not previously do. In an extraordinary way, the Spirit seems to ignore our faults, to forget them, to behave as if they did not exist. This matter is the greatest single wonder of my own life. This God of ours is certainly not the God of the Jansenists!

I think we should not be excessively active. We should turn from our tasks, even leaving them undone, to go to God, so that we can receive the power to do them easily and peacefully and joyfully. And we need not invent tasks when God has not required them to be done. The tasks of the works of page 530 mercy are the ones God most requires of us. And they cannot be done except by the Spirit working through us.

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For Christ himself has brought us peace, by making the Jews and the Gentiles one people. With his own body he broke down the wall that separated them and kept them enemies.

Paul visualises the death of Jesus on the Cross as a shattering ‘with his own body’ of the wall in the Temple that shut the Gentiles out from the sacred inner area where only Jews could enter. And in these days of a new ecumenism, we might reflect on the words of Paul, applying the same concept to the relation between Catholics and those whom we call our separated brethren.

The Catholic Church bears many resemblances to the Church of Moses. She has the crown jewels, as it were, of Sacraments and doctrine, but is not exceptional in the vigour of her performance of works of mercy and justice. If the Spirit moves today most forcibly among the Pentecostals, are we to call God an imperfect Christian? God chooses the chosen, and we dare not deny fellowship to those who call on the name of the Lord Jesus and are filled with the Spirit. It would be better for us surely to repent and offer ourselves to the life-giving power of the same Spirit.

*

I ask God from the wealth of his glory, to give you power through the Spirit to be strong in your inner selves, and that Christ will make his home in your hearts, through faith. I pray that you may have your roots and foundations in love, and that you, together with all God’s people, may have the power to understand how broad and long and high and deep is Christ’s love. Yes, may you come to know his love – though it can never be fully known – and so be completely filled with the perfect fullness of God.

To God who is able to do so much more than we can ever ask for, or even think of, by means of the power working in us: to God be the glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus, for all time, for ever and ever! Amen.

I have seen those who are buried in the love of Christ kneel and pray together. I have seen them go out in the streets to bring the young people from the billiard saloons and street corners, into a hall where they could eat together, slowly and gently bringing them to belief in Christ. I have heard them striving to interpret one another’s dreams and visions. I have seen them lie awake sighing and weeping because of the sorrows of the people. I have seen them share their goods and welcome the street gangs into their houses.

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I said to one of them who was dear to my heart, ‘Don’t try to carry the town on your back. Don’t put too much weight on the young horse.’ But he carried on, praying, weeping, working, praising God, with his eyes alive with love and sorrow.

These things were not done by members of any denomination, but by those who loved Christ and were loved by him and knew something of his love. They appealed continually for strength to the Holy Spirit.

Elsewhere in the same town there were religious libraries and religious schools and religious communities. But the faithful of the denominations were unable to do what the others were doing. No doubt they sincerely wished to do it. They knew that many in the town were lonely. They knew that some lacked food. They knew that there were no houses for strangers to sleep in. But a frost of habit and timidity gripped their hearts. I do not blame them. Only the Spirit can melt that frost.

The love of the Lord Jesus liberates us from fear and the false security of ritualism or moralism. And this liberation can come only through the power of God himself.

If our Spirit-filled brothers lack doctrinal breadth, let us go and offer them the help of our knowledge and our Christian humanism. In process of doing this, we may learn from them the secret of the love of Christ.

[At this point the poem ‘A Second Song of the Soul to the Lord Jesus’ was inserted. CP 523]

*

Do your best to preserve the unity which the Spirit gives, by the peace that binds you together.

When people are led by faith in their own powers, peace is disrupted and Christianity is torn apart. To find unitative thinking, we may have to go back in spirit and see the Lord and ourselves through the eyes of those who lived beyond the Council of Chalcedon. But an intellectual road will never be enough. If the broken and paralysed portions of the body of Christ can ever be brought together in unity, it will be because people first ask for and obtain the wisdom and power of the Holy Spirit who gives life to that body. I think that this is already happening.

*

So we shall all come together to that oneness in our faith and in our knowledge of the Son of God; we shall become mature, reaching to the very height of Christ’s full statute. Then we shall no longer be children, carried by the waves, and blown page 532 about by every shifting wind of the teaching of deceitful teachers, who lead others to error by the tricks they invent. Instead, by speaking the truth in a spirit of love, we must grow up in every way to Christ, who is the head.

In these comments on Christian maturity, Paul does not say to the Ephesian converts, ‘I am the father; you are the children; the children will never be equal to the father.’ The faults he mentions are in fact those of spiritual adolescence, and he is pointing towards a necessary adult independence.

The prerequisite for this independence is to speak the truth in a spirit of love. The recitation of a tabulated catechism would not fulfil this requirement or anything secondhand. The truth is experiential. Everyone can speak truthfully from their own salvation history, as the Spirit moves them.

The maturity, then, that belongs to Christ can be achieved only by accepting the control of the Holy Spirit in one’s own life. A very demanding freedom is implied in this.

*

Try to learn what pleases the Lord.

This simple phrase, embedded among various moral maxims given by Paul for the guidance of the Ephesians, sheds a strong light on the rest of what he is saying. The learning is truly experiential. It is not a forced session under a religious instructor. The Lord teaches the soul what is pleasing, in part no doubt by the guidance and friendship of others, and the Spirit gives the power to carry out what is being learnt.

That the phrase is not trivial is shown by the fact that it is repeated again in another form – ‘Don’t be fools, then, but try and find out what the Lord wants you to do.’ It is not simply a matter of complying with some pre-established moral requirements. The moral requirements of Christianity are in the main those that the ordinary person recognises. What is different in the Christian situation is that the Spirit gives the believer the power to carry them out.

Paul, though, says more than this. The heart of Christian morality is active, not passive. Paul himself does not know what the Lord may wish each one of the people of God in Ephesus to do. The Lord would have to tell them. For one, it might be a verbal witness to the faith; for another, it might be some particular work of mercy; for another, it might even be to suffer martyrdom; for others to take a wife or husband; for others, to remain celibate and devote their care to the fatherless and unprotected.

Each would have to find out. The fool would be the person who coasted along passively, the inert Christian, believing yet lacking the fruits of belief, failing to enquire of the Holy Spirit what his or her particular vocation should be.

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Slaves, obey your human masters, with fear and trembling; and do it with a sincere heart, as though you were serving Christ . . .

Masters, behave in the same way toward your slaves; and stop using threats. Remember that you and your slaves belong to the same God, who treats everyone alike.

This controversial passage displays the social realism of Paul. His converts are both slaves and masters. He doesn’t want to split the Church, to harm either group, by setting them at one another’s throats. Moreover, he, himself a patriotic Jew, knew well that the Lord Jesus did not support the Zealots in their revolt against Roman domination. Quite simply, those who used the sword would perish by the sword, or by slower and more terrible means. A slave revolt would lead, as night follows day, to a massive persecution of the new-born Christian communities.

I think we may claim that Christian pacifism is implicit in Paul’s moral doctrine. He is engaged in promoting a non-military revolution. The weapon of the new revolutionary is love. I do not think Paul advocates servility, any more than he advocates tyranny. The phrase ‘with fear and trembling’ is a general phrase, implying perhaps little more than ‘assiduously’. But the slave has the strength of his patience. The peaceful heart that the Holy Spirit gives is connected to the tap-root of Christian love.

Paul wishes to remove both servility and tyranny from the institution of slavery. Even today we retain these factors in what is called a free labour market. We retain the sting of slavery without the formal institution. To be free means to hold one’s head up even in the slave market, to give work, obedience and politeness, to give even a transforming love within the context of the economic treadmill, but not to see what one cannot sell, the inner self that belongs already to God.

Paul’s statement is a profound social and moral paradox. Christ became a ‘slave’ and died a slave’s death. Yet he was profoundly free, since he chose to be this, and to die thus. If slaves accept their slavery as a following of Christ, they freely choose to accept an already existing situation, and the slave-masters mediate to them, in everything except a demand that they should sin, the will of Christ. The sin they must at all costs avoid is to give way to anxiety in the master’s presence, thus losing the peace and freedom Christ has given them, and becoming slaves in the demonic sense, victims of servility. They must never yield to the passion of fear. This is to lose Christ’s dignity. The right ‘fear and trembling’ is not servility before others; it is awe in the presence of God. The harmony and the freedom come from deep within, by the power of the Spirit, since at the deepest level, where the Spirit works, people are neither slaves nor masters, but creatures who were born to love and be loved.

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I think that Paul, as he so frequently does, was asking of his slave converts the morally impossible: to love their masters in and through the Spirit, even if they tortured them and flogged them and tried to rape them. Their response is now part of our liturgy. Those old men and little slave girls who died by fire and iron and the teeth of beasts (I weep as I write) are the ones whose names we speak now in a whisper, whose faces blaze on us across twenty centuries with the light and beauty and fire and love and joy and hope and fortitude of the Spirit. We sometimes ask them to pray for us. Christian pacifism is a fact, not an ideal. I think we may say that Paul’s paradox has borne extraordinary fruit.

The social activists will be on my back for this interpretation. It does not preclude a rock-bottom sympathy with Judas of Gabbata or Spartacus or Titokowaru or Che Guevara. No doubt they loved the people and did what they had to do. And let no one who wishes to use guns against the poor, when they come with guns to demand liberty and sustenance, imagine that I wish to condone a double violation of justice. But I think the interpretation is the true one. Military revolution is not normally a Christian mode of action. Without the Spirit, neither master nor slave can be free.

It is right to add to this that Paul did not wish the Christians to be slaves. In his first letter to the men of Corinth, he advises them – ‘Were you a slave when God called you? Well, never mind; but if you do have a chance to become free, use it . . . God bought you for a price; so do not become people’s slaves.’

*

Finally, build up your strength in union with the Lord, and by means of the Lord’s mighty power. Put on all the armour that God gives you, so that you will stand up against the Devil’s evil tricks. For we are fighting not against human beings, but against the wicked spiritual forces in the heavenly world, the rulers, authorities, and cosmic powers of this dark age. So take up God’s armour now! Then when the evil day comes, you will be able to resist the enemy’s attacks, and after fighting to the end, you will still hold your ground.

So stand ready: have truth for a belt round your waist; put on righteousness for your breastplate, and the readiness to announce the Good News of peace as shoes for your feet. At all times carry faith as a shield; with it you will be able to put out all the burning arrows shot by the Evil One. And accept salvation for a helmet, and the word of God as the sword that the Spirit gives you. Do all this in prayer, asking for God’s help. Pray on every occasion, as the Spirit leads. For this reason keep alert and never give up; pray always for all God’s people.

Paul’s military analogy has given birth to many sermons, to much false comfort among those who like being soldiers, and to one great book, John page 535 Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. We mentally visualised the equipment of the Roman soldiers. We have visualised ourselves wearing it as the armour of our souls. But the point of Paul’s analogy has often passed us by, that the putting on of the armour has to be accomplished by prayer.

Prayer is the means by which we lay ourselves open to the action of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit will lead us to prayer and will give us, piece by piece, the armour of our souls.

The poor and feeble men of Colossae and Ephesus were no different from ourselves. They too were members of a huge decaying civilisation. The words of Paul must have seemed to point to a spiritual height far beyond their possible attainment. But the Spirit came to them to give them power.

That is the central lesson of the two letters from prison: without the Spirit, you can do nothing; with the Spirit, you can do all things.

The young believe often in demons but not in God. In our towns there are no places for the poor to go to, except to jail. The sad and lonely people slash their wrists, drink booze, swallow pills, sleep together without a stable love, go to the mental hospitals. Wars continue. Racism breeds hatred and contempt. The oceans are clogged with detergents. The poor of the world remain unfed. The old people are inclined to sit in front of their TV sets and wait for the world to end.

The world may indeed end. But we see rising like a rainbow in the sky the race of the resurrected Christ, that face which is itself the perfect sign of God’s mercy. We see the people gather, clumsily, narrowly, even at first coldly, to cry out, ‘Jesus is God’, and ask for the power of the Spirit. And the Spirit answers them because they are poor and because they ask. And the Spirit gives these poor and feeble people the armour of Christ’s truth and love, and the power to heal the sick, and to share their goods with one another, and perhaps to cast out demons.

I trust that we will not say, ‘Their doctrines are imperfect’, or ‘Only a priest can exorcise’, or, ‘These emotional conversions won’t last’. I trust we will greet them gladly as brothers and sisters. They will hold Paul’s letters in their hands, from which they learnt the ancient secret, that Jesus is God, and that the power of his Spirit cures the incurable and makes impossible things possible and even strangely easy to perform. It is my opinion, Eugene, that the Spirit in these days is shifting mountains of despair from many souls and making crooked roads straight for the feet of those who will run to do the works of mercy.

What shall we say then about the structure that we too narrowly call the Church? One could say we had our chance and missed it, by failing to receive the fullness of the Spirit in whom we already believed. But better to say that the Spirit blows where the Spirit wishes to blow.

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[At this point the poem ‘Song to the Lord God’ was inserted, CP 572]

May God the Father keep you in the love and peace and joy of Christ, and grant you all gifts that you may require and God may desire, through the power of the Holy Spirit. Pray for this man, Eugene, who has to walk in darkness. Give my love to all our friends.

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