WHEN SHUTTERS CREAK AND WINDOWS STICK

                                            

The theme of this week, in both Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, seems to be openness to the loving approach of God. I find this particularly opportune, as it has been cropping up in my own meditation for some time now. An analogy occurs to me which, like all analogies, is fallible but still apt and instructive. Even as a child, I always found wonderful the fact that we are surrounded by invisible radio waves and that we have but to turn on a radio for all these programmes to become real, audible and (usually) intelligible. Perhaps the Holy Spirit is like this. Perhaps we are surrounded by Him at all times and have but to turn on (it's instructive that in French the word for "to turn on" is "to open") something in our heart to receive Him: His programme, His teaching, His support, His love. Completely different from "seeking God".

Spiritus Sanctus has always been my instinctive favourite person of the Trinity. But it is curious to see how He is spoken of in the New Testament. In both the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, the Holy Spirit is somewhere between a He and an It, not quite a person, rather a force: very specific, circumscribed, almost concrete. Yeshua or one of the Apostles breathes on you and you receive the spiritus -- which, after all, is pneuma, ruach: breath, wind, or spirit. And receiving that spirit, that force, enables you to do things impossible before: preach the Word to hostile and sometimes lethal audiences, tread on serpents and drink poison without coming to harm. May the Force be with you -- in you, indeed.

For the true understanding of the Holy Ghost as a person we have Athanasius and the Cappdocian Fathers -- Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianze -- to thank. I used to think that the Athanasian Creed, as printed in the Book of Common Prayer, was a rebarbative and most unattractive text; later I discovered how much serious and magnificent thought and devotion it contains. And the three Cappadocians richly repay far more attention that we are wont to give them. Here is a typically gorgeous passage from Gregory of Nazianzus:

Look at these facts: Christ is born, the Holy Spirit is His Forerunner. Christ is baptized, the Spirit bears witness to this ... Christ works miracles, the Spirit accompanies them. Christ ascends, the Spirit takes His place. What great things are there in the idea of God which are not in His power? What titles appertaining to God do not apply also to Him, except for Unbegotten and Begotten? I tremble when I think of such an abundance of titles, and how many Names they blaspheme, those who revolt against the Spirit!

I have always found it difficult -- and have written so here before -- to assimilate the currently-common idea that the Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son. It is a tempting thought in some ways, but a love that is a relationship cannot, surely, be a Person? The idea stems, I imagine, from the Filioque clause, which holds that "the Spirit proceedeth from the Father and the Son" and not, as in Orthodox Christianity, from the Father alone. The Orthodox consider that as a result Western Christianity underestimates the Spirit; and I wonder if they may not be right. 

If it is the Holy Spirit that surrounds us and seeks us, we should do well to ask Him to open our shutters, our windows and our doors so that we may receive Him -- a paradox, but such opening is not something we can do by ourselves. And there is no contradiction there with, say, Holman Hunt's painting of Jesus standing at the door and knocking, for the Spirit and the Son, and the Father, are one God, and when one knocks, the Trinity knocks. Let us open: a little chink will do. Give the Spirit an inch, He will take a mile. Maranatha!

HE SANG THE SPIRIT, 17 CENTURIES AGO

Today is the feast of St Basil the Great and of his friend St Gregory of Nazianze. Basil, a capable 4th-century archbishop, is also a Doctor of the Church, and has been called "the Minstrel of the Holy Spirit". So I thought I would put up here a snippet from his De Spiritu Sancto, to give us an idea of his voice. Here he is defending the glory of the Holy Spirit against those who underestimate Him.

49.  And His operations, what are they?  For majesty ineffable, and for numbers innumerable.  How shall we form a conception of what extends beyond the ages?  What were His operations before that creation whereof we can conceive?  How great the grace which He conferred on creation?  What the power exercised by Him over the ages to come?  He existed; He pre-existed; He co-existed with the Father and the Son before the ages.  It follows that, even if you can conceive of anything beyond the ages, you will find the Spirit yet further above and beyond.  And if you think of the creation, the powers of the heavens were established by the Spirit, the establishment being understood to refer to disability to fall away from good.  For it is from the Spirit that the powers derive their close relationship to God, their inability to change to evil, and their continuance in blessedness.  Is it Christ’s advent?  The Spirit is forerunner.  Is there the incarnate presence?  The Spirit is inseparable.  Working of miracles, and gifts of healing are through the Holy Spirit.  Demons were driven out by the Spirit of God.  The devil was brought to naught by the presence of the Spirit.  Remission of sins was by the gift of the Spirit, for “ye were washed, ye were sanctified,…in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, and in the holy Spirit of our God.” There is close relationship with God through the Spirit, for “God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts, crying Abba, Father.” The resurrection from the dead is effected by the operation of the Spirit, for “Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created; and Thou renewest the face of the earth.” If here creation may be taken to mean the bringing of the departed to life again, how mighty is not the operation of the Spirit, Who is to us the dispenser of the life that follows on the resurrection, and attunes our souls to the spiritual life beyond?  Or if here by creation is meant the change to a better condition of those who in this life have fallen into sin, (for it is so understood according to the usage of Scripture, as in the words of Paul “if any man be in Christ he is a new creature”), the renewal which takes place in this life, and the transmutation from our earthly and sensuous life to the heavenly conversation which takes place in us through the Spirit, then our souls are exalted to the highest pitch of admiration.  With these thoughts before us are we to be afraid of going beyond due bounds in the extravagance of the honour we pay?  Shall we not rather fear lest, even though we seem to give Him the highest names which the thoughts of man can conceive or man’s tongue utter, we let our thoughts about Him fall too low?

3-IN-ONE

Trinity Sunday is the culmination, in a sense, of the Church’s liturgical year. We move from Advent to Christmas, from Christmas to Epiphany, from Epiphany to Lent, from Lent to the Cross, from Good Friday to Easter, from Easter to Whitsun, from Whitsun to the Ascension, and from Ascension Day to Trinity. Then comes what once described as ‘the long green highway of the year’, the Sundays After Trinity with their noble and varied Collects. But what of Trinity itself?

For the human race, apparently mired in death, the Great Event is the Resurrection. But the Resurrection cannot be taken without the Cross; the two together are the great outpouring of the Son’s love for us; and the Son is not, cannot be, without the Father. “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority; but the Father who dwells in me does his works.” (Jn 14:10) And beyond that, there is the Holy Spirit: “And I will pray the Father, and he will give you another Counselor, to be with you for ever, the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you, and will be in you.” (Jn 14:16-7)

And so, meditating, thinking and praying (and frequently quarrelling), the Church came eventually (381 AD) to the doctrine of the Trinity: the Triune God, one God, three Persons. The Resurrection is the Event; the Trinity is the great Mystery of the faith. In the view of St Basil, his brother Gregory of Nyssa and Gregory of Nazianzus, as Karen Armstrong explains in A History of God, “the Trinity only made sense as a mystical or spiritual experience . . . It was not a logical or intellectual formulation but an imaginative paradigm that confounded reason. Gregory of Nazianzus made this clear when he explained that contemplation of the Three in One induced a profound and overwhelming emotion that confounded thought and intellectual clarity. ‘No sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendor of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back into the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am thinking escapes me.’” 

And yet it is a mystery that Jesus lets us in on, lets us into: because the Spirit dwells with us and in us, and if the Spirit and the Son and the Father are one, we are taken up into that great beating cosmic heart of Love. How do we celebrate it? All (of the Faith) is always present, wrote T.S. Eliot; yet the point of the liturgical year is that we can concentrate on some individual aspects at any one time. When the parable of the Good Samaritan is read, we look on the people we pass in the street in a new way; in Lent, we give a different attention to those who suffer; and on Trinity Sunday we might usefully learn from the Carthusians and other contemplative orders to meditate on the mystery as Gregory did. The more so in that that same Mystery has chosen to dwell with and in us, poor clods that we are.

CONTRA SPINOZAM TRINITAS

 My God, I heard them say

Thy way of being was a Clock of clocks,

A self-perpetuate motion, and that Love

Was, to create by necessary law;

And they reproach’d for Paradox

My words that thou, perfect above,

Didst need no more;

Sure they are blind who do not see

Thy love in this, that being is a gift;

Who do not sense that we

And all the random forms of hill and drift

Are here by no necessity

But by thy lasting Courtesy:

So they forget thy Trinity.

    Out of thy joyous solitude

    And tender in omnipotence

    To shape a world and on it brood,

    Fashioning trees and men of sense;

    From archangelic psalmody

    Mankind having destruction drawn,

    To enter into agony

    And for their healing to be torn;

    And, resurrected, still to dwell,

    Informing our experience,

    Praying in us, Immanuel,

    Unravelling our impotence;

Such thy unnecessary love: can we do less,

Released from death,

Than savour each delight of breath,

Blessing Thy wilfulness?

RK