CHAPTER VII

SPIRIT

LISTEN to the choir of New College, Oxford sing 'Come Holy Ghost.' Music details HERE.

The Holy Spirit is God as He is everywhere and at all times.
– St. Thomas Aquinas.

God is no otherwise your God than as he is the God of your life, manifested in it;
and he can be no otherwise the God of your life but as his Spirit is living within you.
– William Law.

IF the first part of the Creed took our minds right away from our personal struggles and experiences,
and brought into focus the great Fact of God,
and the second part showed us the self-revelation in history of that Absolute Love,
setting the standard of reality for men;
the third part turns our attention back to the conditions under which we are to live out our own lives.
It describes the position in which the action of the Eternal Charity in history has placed us;
our here-and-now experience of an all-penetrating Divine Spirit,
the supernatural energy we are given,
the supernatural organism of which we form part,
the supernatural achievement towards which we move.

All this opens up for us a wholly new vista of what Henry Martyn used to call

"the mysterious glories of religion."

We have been shown the sky of stars, enchanting and overwhelming us:
and now we realize that we are living the star-life too.
One of these shining worlds, held within Eternity and kept by the Eternal Charity, is our own.

I am not a God afar off.
I am thy Maker and Friend.

We think now of that One God's intimate presence with us and support of us;
as a living, acting, holy Spirit penetrating the whole world and each soul in that world.
We recognize His ceaseless pressure on and in our spirits,
His generous and secret self-giving on which we depend so entirely:
the way in which we, with our limited spiritual powers, experience His energetic love,
and the way we are required to respond to it.

I believe in the Holy Spirit,
the Lord, and Giver of Life.

All kinds of life;
nothing is specified.
That mysterious thing Life, then, is declared to be given and sustained by the generous Spirit of Charity;
poured out from the fresh springs of that fontal Being we call Father,
and that loving Wisdom, that Creative Thought, we call Son.
In its essence it is holy;
we are merely the more or less adequate forms that it vivifies and upholds.
To say,
"I believe that the Eternal Godhead,
whose unspeakable majesty I adore,
pours out His holy and living Spirit on and in all flesh"
means that we recognize with awe a close and mysterious union between God and all things He has made:
the Artist-Lover present and active in all that creation which He loves.
And in human beings
this close union and constant life-giving action
is especially to be recognized and declared, with gratitude and awe.
We believe, then, that the Living God is the direct cause and source of all our living:
and not this alone,
but of all the lives we touch,
all by whom we are attracted
and by whom we are repelled.
We believe that there is no place or cranny where He is not;
no situation in which He is not interested and in which He does not act –
none, therefore, to which we can refuse interest,
or in which we can dare to do less than our best.
When our inward and outward action literally and actually correspond with this august belief –
but not before –
we shall be living the Life of Faith.

If we put some of the things
which the New Testament says about this aspect of religion,
alongside the declarations of the Creed,
we receive a tremendous impression
of the actuality of this experience of a penetrating and life-giving Spirit,
the Divine Generosity acting as a distinct and personal energy within the human scene.

We have all been made to drink of one Spirit,
says St. Paul,

as if this ineffable truth were a commonplace of Christian experience.
And this Spirit, says the Creed, is both Lord and Life-giver;
the Absolute God acting, and bringing the whole Trinity into the soul,
which thus becomes the temple of the Holy Giver of Life.
To enter that sanctuary, shut the door, and there find Him, is a very important part of the life of prayer.

Yet only a part;
for this inward communion cannot remain steady and unblemished for very long.
Something,
the jar of circumstance,
or the deeper disharmony of our own nature,
breaks in to spoil it.
Then we need the completing experience;
when we recognize our own insufficiency,
and our weakness and dimness must be made good by a fresh gift out of the riches of the Divine Charity,
ever holding in reserve for us more than we have guessed or known.
When we seem to open our door and expose our emptiness,
and a strange power pours in to enhance and enlighten;
and we go out strong in that power, but not in ourselves.

In that hour,
says Christ,
do what the Spirit shall say unto you.

It is the Spirit,
says St. Paul,
who maketh intercession for us.

The Spirit fell on them,
says the writer of Acts.

If we look at all this, and consider that it describes our real situation as Christian souls –
little spirits supported by the infinite Spirit of Divine Love –
we surely receive a new vision of the richness of our inheritance,
and the greatness of our responsibility.

In the Fourth Gospel,
the strange word "Paraclete" enters the Christian vocabulary
as the best available term for this experience of the Spirit of God acting within our lives.
Our nearest meaning for "Paraclete" seems to be,
"One who is called to stand alongside us,"
or stands by us to give us support.
So we are given the marvellous vision of the infinite Divine Charity,
Giver of all life,
ever standing alongside our small derived spirits in their efforts and struggles.

Hold Thou up my goings in Thy path that my footsteps slip not.

In that most intimate and practical of all prayers,
the small unsteady spirit of man acknowledges its real situation;
even though we often have the illusion of fighting it out alone,
for the Charity which keeps life never coddles it.
The maturing of our personality, its full transformation in God,
could hardly be achieved unless we were left in an apparent independence;
to suffer, accept, deal with circumstances as real incarnate spirits,
subject to all the vicissitudes of physical life.
Our courage and loyalty must be tested by a genuine experience of solitude and darkness,
if all our latent possibilities are to be realized.

O Lord, your battles do last a long time!

said poor Suso,
worn out by the disciplines, sufferings and reverses
through which his ardent but unsteady soul was brought into stability and peace.
Certainly life is not made soft for Christians,
though it is in the last resort made safe.
Nor do the struggles of the spiritual life –
even the most crucial and most heroic –
either look or feel very glorious while they are going on.
Muddy trenches,
great watchfulness and weariness,
a limited view,
endless small duties and deprivations,
and no certainty as to whether we are winning or not;
these are the conditions of the long struggle for the victory of disinterested love.
It is often the patient defence of an unnoticed corner which decides the result.
The difference between the real spiritual experiences even of sanctity,
and the popular notion of them,
is the difference between the real private in the trenches,
and the glossy photograph of the same warrior,
taken when he is at home on leave.

Yet the whole power and life of the Invisible God,
the Divine Charity itself,
stands by us in the trenches.

As ye are partakers of the suffering,
so are ye of the support,

says St. Paul to the Corinthians.
The two things go together.
The Spirit of Life stands alongside all those who are really living,
making a genuine effort to stand up to the heroic obligations of the soul;
not by those who value religion for its consolations, and treat their faith as a feather-bed.
The energy of love will never do for us that which we ought to do for ourselves;
but will ever back up the creature's efforts by its grace,
coming into action just where our action fails.
This is a secret that has always been known to men and women of prayer;
something we can trust,
and that acts in proportion to our trust.
Sometimes it is on our soul that the tranquillizing touch is laid:
sometimes the hurly-burly of our emotional life, which threatens to overwhelm us,
is mysteriously stilled.
Sometimes events, which we think must destroy us or those whom we love,
are strangely modified by the Spirit that indwells and rules them.
More and more as we go on with the Christian life we learn the absolute power of Spirit over circumstance:
seldom sensationally declared, but always present and active.
God in His richness and freedom coming as a factor into every situation;
over­ruling the stream of events which make up our earthly existence,
and through these events moulding our soul,
quickening and modifying our lives at every point.

This general free action of the Power of God within life is what we rather vaguely call Providence.
Its pressure and activity is of course continuous in and through the whole texture of that life,
though usually unperceived by us.
But now and then it emerges on the surface
to startle us by its witness
to a subtle and ceaseless will and love
working within the web of events;
and we perceive that the enfolding mystery has the character of Living Mind.
I am sure that we ought to reckon with this mysterious fact far more than we usually do.
Evidence of the free and direct action of God lies very thick on the pages of the New Testament.
It has always been the decisive factor in the lives of the Saints;
manifested the more clearly in proportion to their simplicity, surrender and confidence of soul.
How marvellously those lives develop –
Augustine, Francis, Catherine, Teresa, Vincent de Paul, the Cure d'Ars –
once they have given themselves into the Hand of God.
Sometimes a strange power seems to control great events in their interest;
sometimes it moulds by small touches a homely career to the greater purposes of love.

The power of God present unto salvation,

says St. Paul (not the power of God present unto comfort);
this is the very essence of the Gospel.
We are held and penetrated by a personal Spirit,
a never-ceasing Presence, that intervenes to use or over-rule events.
The more freely, simply and humbly the soul is abandoned to this penetrating and encompassing power,
the more it becomes conscious –
dimly and yet surely –
of its constant, stem, yet loving, action
through all the circumstances of life.
To resist that action means conflict and suffering.
To accept it may still mean suffering;
but a suffering that is sweetened by love.

The German mystics used to speak of the spiritual life as the School of the Holy Spirit.
There was an upper school and a lower school.
In the upper school only one thing was taught:
the science of perfect self-abandonment –
that death to self which is the condition of all full and vigorous life.
The lessons given in the upper school were hard and painful;
but the teacher was the Divine Charity.
Darkness, loneliness, the apparent loss of God,
unexpected humiliations,
mortifying struggles with our own temperaments,
all enter into the curriculum of the upper school.
In the lower forms the educational method is gentler and more pleasant.
But when we face the really tough lessons of the interior course,
it is like the first time that we are introduced to algebra or metaphysics.
We are suddenly made aware of unrealized worlds,
and are completely baffled,
conscious only of our own utter ignorance and helplessness.
Instead of the neat exercise books, the tidy meditations,
the orderly self-examinations and prayers to which we have been accustomed,
we are left floundering.
The Teacher now uses the direct method,
and we have to find out how best to respond.
No use to rely on those excellent manuals which offered to teach us "how to make our approach to God."
Here God makes His approach to the soul.
He comes and invades our life in strange disguises,
and purifies us in ways that we cannot recognize.
The first thing we are taught is our own ignorance and nothingness,
our total dependence on the Spirit of Life;
and our whole inner life is simplified by this,
and becomes a humble, mere self-opening to that Spirit
who is the real doer of all that we do and the teacher of all that we know.

Lord, my spirit faileth.
Hide not thy face from me.
Cause, me to hear thy loving kindness in the morning,
for in thee do I trust.
Cause me to know the way in which I should walk
for I lift up my soul unto thee ...
teach me to do thy will,
for thou art my God.
Thy Spirit is good. ...
Quicken me, O Lord, I am thy servant.

In the upper school we learn the entire and direct dependence which turns this prayer into a perpetual and natural conversation between our small spirits and the Spirit of God.

Let yourself be guided by My rules,
said the voice of that Spirit to Pascal.
See how well I have led the Blessed Virgin and the Saints,
who have let Me act through them.

There one of the most acute and subtle intellects which humanity has produced, enters the upper school and listens to the one lesson it teaches.
"Let Me act" –
not resisting, setting up conflicts, capitulating to cowardice or disguised self-interest,
but docile to the quiet movements and pressure of the Divine Charity however strange and unexpected they may be.
Those courageous spirits who have done this have always been justified of their trust.
They have accepted the only possible position of the human will and thus become the tools and instruments of the Universal Will, the Lord and Giver of Life, by whom alone all that is worth doing is done.

Behold the hand­maid of the Lord!

– this is humanity's total contribution to the mystery of Holiness,
because this alone can open the door to the transforming supernatural energy.
Saints are simply persons who are sufficiently self-abandoned to let the Spirit act through them;
instead of persisting in self-chosen and self-interested activities.

Thus it seems idiotic as well as unworthy
to refuse those acts of self-opening and self-abandonment
which make the human soul accessible to that boundless life:
cowardly and stupid to fail in responding to the training
that is always being given to us through circumstance,
and by making us more sensitive to the pressure of God
educates us for that particular position in the scheme for which we were made.
"Progress in the interior life,"
"spiritual power,"
and other great things of which we speak with an easy admiration,
sometimes complaining that they do not seem to come our way,
can only come by this way:
by a humble, persevering and courageous conformity to the Lord and Giver of Life,
an ever deepening surrender to the total movement of the Spirit's will,
an ever more peaceful acceptance of His gradual transforming action on us,
supported in the difficult process of change by the "grace of His Unchangeableness."

Christ seems to have thought of prayer as, above all, a way in which our little spirits may become more and more accessible to the life of that Eternal Spirit.
His teaching about prayer hinges on our human poverty and need as towards the Holy Spirit;
and that boundless Life and Love pressing in on us,
responding to every demand, search and supplication,
making good our needs,
because it is Love.
Everyone that asks receives, and he that seeks finds, the Holy Spirit.
The one thing He considers worth asking for, the true object of prayer,
is this concrete gift of the Spirit of God,
for which alone we hunger, seek, and clamour at the frontiers of the unseen world.
The Spirit which creates, penetrates and keeps us,
feeds and illuminates us,
enters our lives and presses through them to other lives,
has far more in reserve for us than we have yet received;
and our real growth is a growth in longing for that total and transfiguring presence.
But the Spirit is one of those guests for whom space must be made;
whose presence makes a difference to the whole house, and not merely to the spare room.
We give the invitation at our own risk,
not knowing which of our old easy-going ways will be incompatible with this Presence;
which enters as Lord, as well as giver of life,
making demands and setting going activities which must take precedence of everything else.
For we are really asking that the life and energy of the Absolute God shall enter and use our premises,
and recondition them to suit the purposes of Charity:
and this means more than fresh curtains and a little whitewash.

The ordained end of the whole interior of life
is the unconditional giving of this invitation,
which brings an unconditional response:
replacing our ignorant and restless action
by the boundless living action,
the energetic Spirit of the one God.
The Liturgy,
which is the voice of the praying Church,
declares this again and again;
as we should realize if we would listen,
and take its words literally,
as they are meant.

Mercifully grant that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts.  
That we may daily increase in thy Holy Spirit more and more.  
Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit.  
That we may be renewed day by day by thy Holy Spirit.

There is something definite and practical about all this.
It is an appeal from the limited to the Limitless, in Whom we live and move;
to the personal action of the Godhead,
both transcending and indwelling His creation as "maker, lover and keeper" of all that is made.

So too self-giving to the purposes of Spirit,
entering that mighty current of living Charity,
means entering into a real communion with other souls, who are linked to us within that tide;
and is the secret of that strange power which is exercised by men and women of prayer.
When General Gordon was at Darfur, working for the suppression of the slave trade,
that great man of action wrote this in his diary:

Praying for the people whom I am about to visit gives me much strength;
and it is wonderful how something seems already to have passed between us,
when I meet with a chief (for whom I have prayed) for the first rime.

Such a statement as that brings with it a sense of all our small human affairs as bathed in, embraced by Eternal Spirit;
and of our dullness and blindness in not making this truth the ruling fact of our lives.
If something has passed within the world of Spirit between two persons who are about to have a difficult interview or whose sympathy is incomplete –
if one has sought the other in that ocean of the Divine Charity which bathes both their souls –
the meeting may still call for mutual patience, may mortify self-will or self-love;
but all will now take place within the Universal Spirit,
which cherishes the true interests of both, and is the bond between them.
So, the carrying forward of all our human relationships into the stream of the Creative Love, means making the interests of others – already deeply interesting to God – our interests too;
and is the essence of real intercession, which, like all creative prayer, requires as its preliminary death to self and life to Him.

And last, the Holy Spirit in whom the Christian believes is not only a boundless source of life and of support,
but One who is declared to "speak by the prophets."
A prophet is an individual seized and used as the organ of the Voice of God;
a channel, along which news of Eternity reaches the human world.
We think of the prophet as a great figure charged with a mysterious message;
but the early Church did not limit the word like this.
As the experience of Spirit was a recognized fact,
so the prophet too was a recognized type in Christian society.
He was the person subordinated to God,
chosen and used by God;
and therefore possessed of a certain initiative and freedom.
He constantly corrected the tendency of institutional religion to be the slave of its own routine;
tempering the churchy mood by the disconcerting freshness of the supernatural world,
the clear, awestruck vision and stern demands of a disinterested love.

The prophet continues, under many names, to be one of the channels
through which the Creative Spirit acts within the human world:
teaching and directing men through men.  
Thus all spiritual literature has a prophetic character.
Like poetry, it is greater than the mind that produces it;
and is charged with a message from the supernatural world
for which this mind is merely the channel and instrument.
We cannot set any limit to the work which feeble, sinful and apparently unsuitable individuals can do for God,
when they are called and used by the Spirit.

I formed thee,
I knew thee,
I sanctified thee,

says the Voice to the reluctant and astonished Jeremiah:

I have appointed thee a prophet unto the nations.

Jeremiah's terrified response,

Ah, Lord God!
I cannot speak,
for I am a child!

is entirely beside the point.
The initiative does not lie with the vessel so unexpectedly chosen,
but with the Divine Life pouring in and through it.

Whatsoever I shall command thee, thou shalt speak ...
be not afraid.
I am with thee to deliver thee saith the Lord.

Jeremiah,
sensitive to spiritual reality, and therefore to his own utter inadequacy,
and the real awfulness of that which he is called to do,
is by that very fact made fit to be a channel of God:
for only those who recognize their own inadequacy even begin to be adequate to the Spirit's demands.
He speaks by the prophets, surrendered and self-emptied:
does not tell the prophets to express their own admirable ideas.

In his own small way the ordinary Christian must be prepared for all this;
because it is a part of the economy of that spiritual world in which we live.
He must expect to hear the Voice of the Spirit speaking through very unexpected and unsuitable messengers,
and even perhaps to be seized and used in his own turn
for some bit of work which will further the purposes of the Charity of God.
That living Charity in its freedom and power
acts most often in defiance of our limitations, prejudices and expectations;
does not necessarily engage its servants at the best registry office,
or take those with a good character from their last place.
The story of the sudden call of the diffident and timid Jeremiah
is read by the Church on the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul;
pressing on us the sense of the priority of the living God,
His personal action, His disconcerting freedom, coming to us in history,
speaking by the mouths of very peculiar people,
chosen according to His view not ours and accomplishing His purposes
sometimes by wandering roads and sometimes by straight.

You are a chosen vessel to Me,

says the Voice to the astonished persecutor of the Church:

You happen to be the right shape for My purpose;
and that is the only thing that matters.
The sudden blazing impact of truth,
the agony of shame,
the tremendous discipline to which I call you,
will complete your preparation for the work I shall give you to do,
the place in the scheme which you alone can fill.

For there is no creature,
however rebellious and however imperfect,
who cannot be transformed to the purposes of the Spirit of God;
ruling His Creation from within as Lord and Life-giver,
and secretly and subtly determining the path of every soul.