Holy Spirit Talk

Thank you to the Awakening team for selecting me for this topic. This talk is not about abstract ideas and dogmas. I am here to speak to you about how the Holy Spirit gives us new sight. The Holy Spirit powers the spiritual life and it’s a little difficult to see at first; however, with proper care, I believe the Love of God and the Holy Spirit are truly visible to us.

First let us pray. The response is: Have mercy on us.

Opening Prayer

(Repeat after each invocation: Have mercy on us)

• Spirit of all the forms of grace. R
• Spirit who scrutinizes the divine depths. R
• Spirit who prays for us with inexpressible pleading. R
• Spirit of adoption of the sons of God. R
• Spirit who appeared over the Disciples in the form of tongues of fire. R
• Spirit with which the Apostles were filled. R
• Spirit who gives to each one according to His will. R

Christianity is quite a strange religion if you think about it in our modern context. We, Christians, talk about the Holy Spirit and God’s invisible hand a lot, but it feels like we’re using words that have no meaning. I opened this with the idea that this talk is not about abstract ideas. Rather, it is about the power which drives the Body of Christ. For example, why should I believe in the Holy Spirit? Can anyone explain to me what a spirit is? I’ll give you a moment to consider [pause of a couple seconds]. What is a spirit?

Imagine telling your classmates that their life is guided and influenced by spirits and they should listen to the good ones. Better yet, there’s an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good spirit hiding inside you and every other person who undergoes this water ritual called Baptism, but if I cut you up like a corpse there’s nothing to show for it. Believe me, your classmates will write you off as some religious nut and the nice ones will try to ask a question or two before they silently resign and keep school strictly professional. Nice, isn’t it? The thing you believe in sounds like something that a crazy person would say before family and friends check them into a psych ward. I say this to draw out how radical our belief is and expose the world-turning reality of our faith. We are distant from the strangeness of this reality that we believe partly because we have words that separate us from how striking these beliefs are.

Speaking for myself, I knew the Holy Spirit was real when I went through RCIA, but it didn’t feel real until I got baptized this past Easter. If you ask people what they think a spirit is, many would say an invisible force or maybe someone checks the dictionary and says that it’s an immaterial entity or the third person of the Trinity. In fact, this summer I was speaking with a couple of psychics at a coffee shop and the question of what a spirit is naturally came up. I distinctly remember one of the psychics describing spirits as being like “angsty teenagers”. Those answers gesture towards what we believe, but what does it mean for our world to have a Holy Spirit, in a Catholic sense? The dictionary definition of Spirit will not do justice to this question, which is about the personal nature of the Holy Spirit.

I want to bring to life the power of the Holy Spirit which is exemplified by Pentecost in the beginning of Acts: “When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and it filled all the house where they were sitting. And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” I’ve spoken with Christians of all types and one of my grave fears is that we lose a sense of the mystical and the divine. I want to avoid having a faith that is all material and just empty words to the divine. We need to have sight to see the Love of God.

The Holy Spirit is the most mysterious part of the Holy Trinity. There’s a couple of questions that come to my mind such as “What is the Holy Spirit?”, or “How do I know what He looks like in my life?” These are important questions because they force us to dig deeper into our faith. I can say for myself that the Holy Spirit was quite mysterious when I was discerning the faith. For context, I just got baptized and confirmed this past Easter after growing up in a religion foreign to Christianity. It’s interesting how the Holy Spirit has changed my life because it seems a little unbelievable that this invisible thing, crazier yet, a Person has had such an influence on my life. It must be a person because it’s impossible to state all the ways that I have been affected by the Holy Spirit. For myself, I can’t even begin to begin with the ways that my friends have impacted my life from hanging out to helping me in times of need, be it for a test or in hard times. The small, unspoken actions are the things that really have an impact on our life and you can’t tell now until a long time has passed when you begin to notice just how beautiful those actions are.

For example, I noticed in college that when my parents were making food, they would always feed me first before feeding themselves. This really struck me because it was never announced and it’s taken 22 years for me to notice it. That’s quite a long time to notice, but that kind of love is silent and gentle. It feels natural and more importantly, it is not a burden. Rather, we take joy in loving. My parents’ joy in feeding me first isn’t visible in the moments when I’m hungry or setting up dinner. However, over time I see the world differently now and I’ve seen a glimpse of that deep love my parents have for me.

Another example is when you fall in love with another person. I know that many of you are underclassmen and having been one I know that relationships and getting into them is often on your mind.. Often we love the idea of a relationship because we want to hang out or talk or have an anchor or even the physical touch that just feels comforting. Eventually, all of you will fall in love with someone. What’s interesting is that their appearance changes, but it’s not like that person is physically different. They didn’t do anything special, but that person just seems to sparkle. Nothing material has changed, but the world seems a little different and it’s so difficult to convey because others can see the same thing and glance over. This invisible reality has moved me, though I didn’t realize it till I was older and had more sight to see it. The Holy Spirit loves us in the same way so that we are changed even though the physical world is the same. The Holy Spirit wants to have all YOU and all of YOU!

I felt this amazing power of sight again when I was baptized. I would read Scripture and it would just shine in a way that it never had before. There is just this quality to Scripture that makes it so powerful and personal. I can’t explain it, but all I know is I seem to marvel everytime I read it. The point that I’m trying to emphasize is that love changes our sight and God does this acting through the Holy Spirit. Our sight is so strange, because we see all the time; however, when we love truly and deeply our vision changes. The world is both the same and different, same as before and completely new and different.

The Holy Spirit is Love Personified. I know that sounds like flowery speech, but it’s true. More importantly, it can change your life should you simply choose to listen to that voice. So far I’ve spoken about who the Holy Spirit is from my perspective and how I’ve grown in understanding. Now, I want to approach it from a narrative perspective because I think that’ll challenge each of you more and we need to look at the reality of our belief straight in the face, otherwise we’ll be found lacking.

In a novel by a famous writer, Fyodor Dostoevsky, called Crime and Punishment, one of the main characters is Sonya. For context, Sonya is an innocent and anxious girl who offers her body up for prostitution to feed her family because her father lost her job and she has many step-siblings who starve. Another character offers her family money to survive, but the shame and the scars are still there after the prostitution ends.

Sonya is utterly rejected by the world, a world full of normal, ordinary people like you and me. She sells herself to buy food for her starving step-siblings while her father’s inability and despair leads to alcoholism and disputes in the family. Her father ends up spending all the family’s money and there is resentment amongst everyone. [pause for a couple of seconds] That’s a lot, but the point is that Sonya’s world is in chaos and there doesn’t seem to be any hope for this poor woman.

Living through such trials, Sonya still loves her father though he is wasted by addiction and sin. This is a difficult task because there is so much that is wrong with him. I remember reading it the first time and thinking he doesn’t deserve any pity. He’s a drunkard. How is it possible that she loves her father though he is riddled with flaws? This is a love that exceeds the power of this world. Yet, she offers herself up for her step-siblings so they may grow and she may diminish. This kind of love is beyond common sense. This kind of love is beyond the wisdom of the educated and well-to-do. She could leave the family behind and focus on herself, but she doesn’t. It would be so easy for her to walk away! The conviction and power that she experiences is not some magic trick or simply because she has more discipline than others. There is some extraordinary factor in this story that is not so obvious to our sight. As I mentioned at the beginning, we have to dig a little deeper to see what’s really happening in Sonya’s life.

Sonya is similar to the Biblical Mary Magdalene in a lot of ways; a woman of utter disdain to the world, but beautiful to Christ who heals her and lifts her by and through the Holy Spirit. Mary Magdalene is an outcast who we see weeping upon the feet of Christ, she is then lifted and made to spread the word of the resurrection of our Lord, Jesus Christ. What an honor, she plays such an important role in the story of salvation. We get to see through this story how a broken world is overturned by the power of the Holy Spirit and the Love of Christ. This story spins upon the redemptive power of the Holy Spirit which has real implications for the real world.

Sonya is given the power of the Holy Spirit! She experiences freedom that many people in easier situations lack. She serves as the cross upon which the narrative spins because the Holy Spirit operates through her and changes the hearts of many in the story. It’s easy to say that she should’ve done this or that, but we live in a fallen world and tragedies happen. How does she have the strength to support her dysfunctional family when common sense fails?

Well, Sonya reads the Bible in secret with her friend. Surely there must be more to the story than a woman who is simply strong enough to support and love her family in tough times. That’s just not how our lives work. How does Sonya have the strength to believe when she knows what she did is wrong? Wouldn’t it be easier to fall away from the faith or better yet, what if the words in the Bible are just words? All these questions pop up unless she (or we) has someThing that she (or we) can draw strength from! It can’t just be a thing though, because things have limitations and what if we get tired. So, It must be someOne! Maybe she can manipulate the words to say that prostitution is permissible and she did something right. Similarly, we could manipulate our thoughts into thinking we sinned for a just cause. But how long can that last before we realize that it doesn’t work? SomeOne has to be able to bring Sonya and us back to the Truth. How does she deal with the constant feeling of impurity or how do we feel after we consistently sin? We need SomeONE to make us feel meaningful. She obviously wouldn’t believe it on her own because the physical world doesn’t say so. SomeONE needs to be higher and more true than the world otherwise we just wouldn’t be convinced to turn from our sinful ways.

I’ve covered a lot of material in this talk, so here are a couple of points that I hope you remember if nothing else sticks.

The first point is I want you to see how the Holy Spirit changes our perception of the world and just how visible He is in the story of our lives. The Holy Spirit is not just a definition or an idea to remember.

The second point is that it’s not in the moment to moment that we see the hand of God. Rather, it is in the weeks, months, years, and totality of our life that we see how God plays a role in making us integral parts of His story. I was able to see how subtle love can be in my own parents who made sure I ate before they did. This subtle love changed my own vision of the world.

Lastly, I want us to reflect on how the Holy Spirit powers our own lives in doing the impossible. Like Sonya, despite struggling against impossible odds, we are able to love in an incomprehensible way. The Holy Spirit is not just an invisible truth, but a visible reality. We can love in impossible ways because the Holy Spirit does so already for us!

I think it would be good to close in prayer.

Closing Prayer

Come, Holy Spirit, come.
And from your celestial home
Shed a ray of light divine.
Come, Father of the poor.
Come, source of all our store.
Come, within our bosoms shine.
You, of comforters the best;
You, the soul’s most welcome guest;
Sweet refreshment here below;
In our labor, rest most sweet;
Grateful coolness in the heat;
Solace in the midst of woe.
O most blessed Light divine,
Shine within these hearts of thine,
And our inmost being fill.
Where you are not, we have naught,
Nothing good in deed or thought,
Nothing free from taint of ill.
Heal our wounds, our strength renew;
On our dryness pour your dew;
Wash the stains of guilt away:
Bend the stubborn heart and will;
Melt the frozen, warm the chill;
Guide the steps that go astray.
On the faithful, who adore
And confess you, evermore
In your sevenfold gift descend;
Give them virtue’s sure reward;
Give them your salvation, Lord;
Give them joys that never end.
Amen. Alleluia.

Discussion Questions

• How has the Holy Spirit changed your vision of the world and those around you?
• What is a description of the Holy Spirit that makes sense to you?
• How can we see the Holy Spirit more clearly in our own lives?