inside america

VENI SANCTE SPIRITUS…
In facing the reality of the Holy Spirit, something will always be missing until our awareness of His physical presence brings us to grasp this concrete and crucial factor in our daily lives. Not a ghost, but a presence that empowers human life.

by lorenzo albacete

A few years ago, I was in El Paso, Texas, lecturing on the Holy Spirit at a priests’ continuing education program. I looked over my notes for the lecture and I felt something was lacking. My notes were just a lot of abstract concepts. Of course, as an academician and theologian, I loved all that stuff, but how could this help those priests involved daily in very concrete problems and issues in such a challenging pastoral area? It seemed that I had managed to make the Holy Spirit boring! How could I present the Holy Spirit as a concrete, crucial factor in the daily lives of these priests and the people they served?

I was thinking about this during breakfast a few hours before the lecture, and I decided to ask the lady who prepared and served the breakfast what she thought about the Holy Spirit. She was a Mexican lady who lived across the border in Juarez and went back and forth every day to work at the house in which I was staying. I asked her whether she was a Catholic and she told me her faith in Our Lady was the source of her strength in facing the many difficulties of her life. So I asked her whether she also prayed to the Holy Spirit for strength and she said, “Yes, I do, but it is difficult for me because I don’t know much about Him and all I know is that He came in the form of a pigeon. It is hard for me to pray to a bird! It is easier to pray to Mary and Jesus because they had human faces and I can imagine them and feel them close and speak with them.”

I thought, “There you have it; that’s the problem: it is difficult to speak with a bird.” She needed a “human face” that she could relate to the Holy Spirit in order to be able to speak with Him. (Thank God, I thought, that she spoke Spanish, since in Spanish the Holy Spirit has always been a spirit, and not a “ghost” as in traditional English! That’s even more challenging than a bird, which you can, at least, imagine more easily!)
In short, the term Spirit is just that, too spiritual, for those who experience challenges very much in the flesh. Originally, in Christianity the word “spiritual” did not refer only to the immaterial dimension of the human being. It designated all the dimensions of human life as empowered by the Holy Spirit. Thus, the resurrected body could be called a “spiritual body,” even though it clearly referred to a real body, beginning with the body of the Risen Christ, who could appear and disappear, but who insisted to His astounded disciples that He was not a ghost, proving it by showing His wounds and eating with them. And in the Eucharist we ask to become “one body, one spirit in Christ.” The offertory refers to the consecrated wine as “our spiritual drink.” St. Paul, insisting on the reality of the Risen Christ, says bluntly that “the Lord [Jesus] is the Spirit.”

Indeed, it could be said that the Holy Spirit cannot be represented in images save that of a dove, or a tongue of fire, precisely because it is the Spirit that allows the physical body of Jesus to be the risen body of the Eternal Son of God, just as it was the Holy Spirit that makes possible the Incarnation in the womb of the Blessed Virgin.
Thus, we “see the Holy Spirit” (and the Eternal Father) when our faith allows us to recognize the presence of the Risen Christ, and when we welcome Our Lady as our mother, the mother of the Church, the Body of Christ, and we ask with sincere fervor, “Come Holy Spirit, come through Mary.”
My Mexican friend in El Paso was very excited to hear all this… and the priests were rescued from a boring academic lecture!