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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Let’s be Led by the Holy Spirit

Let’s be Led by the Holy Spirit

The mystery of the Blessed Trinity is one with which saints have wrestled in prayer and come away defeated, at least on an intellectual level. I think it was one of the desert Fathers who said he was more concerned to avoid offending the Blessed Trinity than to get a theological grasp of diversity of Persons and unity of Essence in the Godhead.

Yet we ordinary believers experience the life of the Trinity, whether or not we know it; we are already part of a design which we do not fully understand; and I propose with some diffidence to say a little about the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, whom we call the Holy Spirit.

Because of His Incarnation, we have no difficulty whatever in visualising the Son of God as a Person, and perhaps little difficulty in so visualising the Father; but the fact that some such difficulty does exist in the case of the Holy Spirit is shown clearly enough by the way that artists have represented Him commonly as a dove; less commonly, among the Eastern Orthodox, as an angel; never, to my knowledge as a man. This does not mean that the Holy Spirit is in any sense less a Person than the First or Second Member of the Blessed Trinity; but we attribute the sign of manhood, by analogy, to the Father, who never was nor is a man, to the Son, who in His Divinity neither was nor is a man, but who took on manhood by the Incarnation, simply because for us ‘man’ means ‘person’, and we do not represent the Holy Spirit as a man because we have a real difficulty in visualising Him as a Person.

This is understandable. I find myself that when I think of the Holy Spirit, the semiconscious images, which come to my mind are usually drawn from nature – an ocean, a river – since water revivifies and cleanses; a wind blowing page 572 – since the wind is an invisible force which we recognise by its visible effects; a fire burning – since fire also cleanses what it touches and gets rid of whatever is rubbishy and corrupt. But these images, necessarily misleading, do not add up to the total idea of a Person.

Again, when I think of the Church, the Mystical Body of Our Lord, I also think of the Holy Spirit inhabiting that Body as breath or blood inhabits and keeps alive the body of a man. Without using any images, I would probably be even more in the dark than I am now; the images are necessary, and not in themselves obnoxious, as long as I remember that they are both true and false – true, in the sense that they provide analogies of the Divine Nature and Activity; false, in the sense that they are natural and incomplete signs of a reality that is supernatural.

It is plain enough that God has encouraged us to make use of such signs, since at Pentecost the Holy Spirit manifested Himself to the infant Church by the signs of fire and wind – not being Himself either fire or wind, but by Divine condescension giving the first Christians a visible sign which symbolised more adequately than any other His otherwise inexpressible Divinity.

Therefore, when I think of the effect of the Holy Spirit on the human soul, it is not unsuitable that I should see it in terms of the effect of a strong wind blowing the branches of a tree – the wind blows invisibly, but we see the branches move, and thus as it were see also the shape of the wind – or a fire burning among dry scrub – again the fire itself, the devouring process of material change, is not visible, but its effects are visible – heat, light, flame, smoke, and the noise of combustion.

Thus, curiously, in the experience of most Christians, though the Holy Spirit is Himself the most mysterious and hidden Member of the Trinity, He is also the One whose Presence is most directly experienced – in subtle inspirations, in the pain of purification, in all the pressures and nuances of Christian living.

And less obviously we accept His direction every day of our lives by our acceptance of the Church’s magisterium – to accept the authority of the Church is an act of trust in the Holy Spirit who dwells within the Church and guides her by means of His instruments, the Holy Father and other members of the hierarchy.

More personally, let us suppose that you or I were rung up by some married friend who was having a home disagreement, and who wanted a willing ear and some prudent counsel. What would we do about it?

I think the first and most natural human impulse would be to think – ‘No; that kind of thing’s outside my area. I haven’t got the capacity to be a marriage counsellor.’ Then we might have second thoughts – ‘God may want me to do this. I’ve not gone asking for the job. Somebody’s in trouble, another Christian. I may have to give it a go. And then, if we were even a little wise, page 573 we would say to the Holy Spirit – ‘Lord, give me wisdom. Lord, give me the right words to say and the knowledge of when to be silent so that I can do your Will instead of my own.’ And the odds are that we would have that extraordinary excellence of Divine help – the most beautiful and astonishing experience a human being can have, like being carried along in the course of a great river – and then we would be able to bring some peace and knowledge where before there was trouble and ignorance.

But there is a central pivot on which the whole happening would swing – we would have to be aware of the person with whom we were dealing – or persons, if it was a roundtable discussion with both husband and wife cooperating – and this openness to persons would make oneself suddenly aware of the Holy Spirit as a Person. We discover Him in our relationship with others, to the extent that that relationship is loving and soberly optimistic. In this atmosphere differences are transformed into occasions for charity and calamities into new beginnings. The Holy Spirit is the Master and Revealer of the human heart. We learn how to love from Him.

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