Mystery surrounds us, but do we honor it? As with grace, do we recognize it as a gift we can either accept or decline? For those of us whose powers of logic have been secularized, it is perhaps understandable that we tend to dismiss the mysterious as unreal and therefore irrelevant. But, for us Christians, how does this square with our understanding of the tenets of our faith?
With regard to the Trinity, is it possible that with our etiolated, post-Enlightenment grasp of reality we have allowed the third Person, the Holy Spirit, to be relegated to the realms of mythology? Have we done so in spite of the words we recite in the Creed: “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life”?
We Catholics should refresh our understanding of the vivifying actions of the Holy Spirit. Two particularly mysterious ones come to mind which merit our contemplation.
One is the Epiclesis which occurs during the sacred mystery of the Mass. As the Catechism (1105,1006) states: “The Epiclesis (“invocation upon”) is the intercession in which the priest begs the Father to send the Holy Spirit, the Sanctifier, so that the offerings may become the body and blood of Christ and that the faithful by receiving them, may themselves become a living offering to God….Let it be enough for you to understand that it is by the Holy Spirit, just as it was of the Holy Virgin and by the Holy Spirit that the Lord, through and in himself, took flesh”.
A second mystery is reflected in the words found in the first chapter of the Book of Jeremiah and has to do with the mystery of our conception each of us has experienced but none of us remembers: “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you”. Or, in the words of Psalm 139: “My frame was not hidden from You when I was made in secret, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all my days were written in Your book and ordained for me before one of them came to be”.
It is the Holy Spirit who effectuates these mysteries. Through the action of the priest the Spirit consecrates the bread and wine which become the body and blood, the Real Presence, of the crucified Lord. It is the Sprit who at the time of our conception inspires in us the imago dei, the image and likeness of God which graces us with the precious gift of humanity.
Is there a correlation, as one suspects there may be, between the growing disregard for the Holy Spirit in our secularized society and the spreading prevalence of these two contemporaneous trends, the diminished recognition of the Real Presence and the disregard for the sanctity of early life in the womb? To minimize the role of the Holy Spirit in our lives is to ignore the sacredness – mysterious as it is – that surrounds us.
Here at the National Catholic Community Foundation, we regularly discover new oases of hope where awareness of the Holy Spirit is vibrant and the imago dei reverenced. One such example is Blessings International which is featured in the current Voices of the Vineyard column. Readers will be encouraged by the witness Blessings International provides to the presence of the Holy Spirit. These are the countervailing forces that advance the Kingdom.
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So informative, thanks so much for this reminder of the powerful workings of the Holy Spirit…..and in Blessings International as we learned about in Voices in the Vineyard! Jim Coffey