The Spirit is Not Your Cheerleader

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash

Over the last year and a bit, I had the privilege of doing some guest lecturing for Hillsong College on Catholic conceptions of a number of theological themes. I started in a guest lecture on the Catholic conceptions of Justice, which turned into a crash course on the cardinal virtue of justice. At the time of writing, I had been asked to present on Catholic conceptions of pneumatology.

One of the points that I plan to bring up in class was something I wish I had at hand in my very early days of teaching, in response to a off-hand remark from a student. This student, going on a bit of a tangent, spoke about her desire for the new age when she would not have to listen to what the Church teaches, but what the spirit tells her.

The impulse is an oft-used one, where the spirit is often invoked as a backdrop for the discernment of new (or seemingly new) things. What is more, the spirit might often be used as a legitimising seal of approval for anything a person wants - I know I am often guilty of looking up from menus and, with tongue firmly in one cheek, asking friends how the spirit has moved in telling them what to have for lunch. In less culinary contexts, Hegel is known to use the third person of the trinity as an expression of a collective will of a given age, a zeitgeist.

Facetious or otherwise, the assumption behind remarks such as these is that the spirit works independently of the first two persons of the Trinity. Although I am sure this will be raised in lectures outside my own in the course of this unit, I will at least mention in passing that at the heart of Catholic pneumatology is the principle that the third person of the trinity is always identified in relation to the Father and the Son.

In Scripture, the book of Genesis refers to the Spirit as the “spirit of the Lord”. In the new Testament, Jesus refers to the spirit as “the advocate, whom I will send from the Father” (Jn 15:26). What is more, the passage from the Gospel of John makes clear that the Spirit is not there as an imprimatur for individual self-expression, at least not fundamentally. Instead, Jesus reminded the disciples that the Spirit at its heart was meant to “testify about Me”.

This is why St John Paul II, in his encyclical on the Holy Spirit, Dominum et Vivificantem, constantly returns to this point that the Spirit “continues the historical presence on earth of the redeemer and of his saving work” (7).

Indeed, the mention of the “saving work” of the second person of the trinity, indicates the how the third is to operate on the earth. Dominum et Vivificantem goes on to link Jesus’ sending of the Holy Spirit, not to Pentecost in isolation, but to the Paschal Mystery. The decisive phrase to establish this link, according to John Paul II, was the mention of Jesus’ own departure from the disciples, which is mentioned not in the post-resurrection discourses, but at the last supper.

What this means is that the spirit is not the cute image of the dove that sits on your shoulder and says affirmingly “my favour rests on you” (Mt 3:17) when you do whatever you please. The scriptures suggest something a bit more disconcerting, that the Spirit is meant to “convince the world concerning sin, righteousness and judgement” (Jn 16:7). The Spirit not only reminds the world of its sinfulness, but also exhorts a turning away from that sinfulness, pointing to the way out.

As an aside, the word “convince” also suggests another operation of the Spirit, which John Paul II calls a “searching of the depths” (34). The Spirit is one constantly on the search of the deep things, first of the deep things of God (1 Cor 2:10). By extension, John Paul II alerts us to the idea that that he that searches the depths of God will also search out our own deepest secrets (35). The spirit does not slam the reality of sin into our faces. Rather, through the work of the spirit, we come to draw them out ourselves till we ourselves become convinced of its reality.

Lastly, because the Spirit points to Christ and ultimately to the Paschal mystery, it also invites us to join in the cruciform life of the one that sent the Spirit. John Paul notes that the Spirit ”who had already penetrated the inmost depths of his humanity, to transform that humanity into a perfect sacrifice through the act of his death as the victim of love on the Cross” (40). For it is this act and no other, that gives birth to new life in a “new humanity”.

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