Falling in love: The work of the Holy Spirit

What excites me about Christianity is its surprise factor. Risky, challenging, revelatory, it bubbles with new ideas and pictures, uncovering God where you least expect, and questioning many of your spiritual and social and political assumptions.1

This is exactly what excites me about being a Christian but sometimes it seems harder and harder to find it actually manifested in the life of the Church. The last thing we want is excitement, risk, challenge and revelation. The maddening thing about the Holy Spirit is that it is uncontrollable. That's why questions about the Holy Spirit are often questions about authority. The Spirit undermines our often limited view of authority and since most of us are control freaks-at least some of the time-we spend a great deal of energy seeing to it that nothing really changes, that nothing really happens. But the Spirit blows where it will. Perhaps that's why the Church has been somewhat weak with regard to the life of the Spirit. It cannot and will not be controlled by synods, canons and rubrics. The Church organizationally has often preferred to control rather than attract, dominate rather than invite, compel rather than win over.

Andrew Greeley has recently suggested that the Church remodel its understanding of authority in the light of a generous and open view of the way God works in the world: "God as inviting, calling, attracting, instead of God as controlling, directing, regulating. God as Omega more than Alpha; God as the one who gathers in the fragments more than the God of the Big Bang."2 One rarely hears of the God who is breathtakingly attractive-the one who desires us and finds us desirable. In the monastic setting where I was trained as a priest, we were told that God is madly in love with us and that the life of faith is indeed risky, challenging, revelatory. The sheer beauty of it all swept us away.

Greeley believes that we have neglected the third of the great transcendentals (beauty) with our concentration on the other two (the good and true). "Often, it seems, in contemporary American Catholicism we start with the true and never get beyond it." I appreciate Greeley's point all the more because he shows how the effect of this lopsided approach to authority affects the Church at the level of the local community. Some of our parishes are dull little affairs presided over by a fearful clergy and laity. As the world seems more and more uncertain, the rigidities increase. Both the liberals and conservatives want to compel people to become virtuous. How do we encourage each other to become better Christians, better human beings? Greeley writes, "To the extent that people remain Catholic, it is because they are caught up in the beauty of sacramental Catholicism and the stories it tells, no matter how shoddy the presentation of beauty nor how inept the telling of stories. Beauty and the charm it exercises are not options." This isn't to say that synods, canon laws and rubrics don't play an important role in our common life. They do. But isn't it time to ask what we might have lost in our neglect of the sheer attractiveness of the God who was in Christ? Faith is about falling in love. Falling in love is the work of the Spirit.

In addition to this lopsided view of authority, we also need to face a serious error in the way we have come to view the role of beliefs in the life of faith. Most people still equate faith with believing certain things about God or the sacred.3 The mistaken idea is that you have to swallow a few correct beliefs before you can embark on the spiritual journey. This, in part, is what makes religion such a dried-up miserable affair. I find it increasingly hard to tell the difference between believers and non-believers. The difference that matters is between those who are awake and those who are asleep; between those who are in love and those who are not. Karen Armstrong points out, "In all the great traditions, prophets, sages, and mystics spent very little time telling their disciples what they ought to believe." They were invited to trust that "despite all the tragic and dispiriting evidence to the contrary, our lives did have some ultimate meaning and value. You could not possibly arrive at faith in this sense before you have lived a religious life. Faith was thus the fruit of spirituality, not something that you had to have at the start of your quest."4

The Church would do well to recover this ancient wisdom of inviting people to live a certain way before it clobbers them with doctrine. How about leading a compassionate life? How about recognizing the sacredness of others? How about showing up at rituals that help us wait before mystery? How about beginning with the twin prerequisites for prayer: an acknowledgment of our own fragility, and a sense of wonder? This might also help us to be more generous to people of other faiths and to "those whose faith is known to God alone." As Brian Mountford reminds us: "The popular Christian response to this pluralism... has been an instinctive and defensive withdrawal behind the barricades of conservative faith. The attitude is safety first: history ended yesterday, so let's preserve what we've got at all costs, and let's not take the risk of further exploration."5 Above all, let's not fall in love. That would be sentimental and irresponsible. So, we get bogged down with all the things we think we are supposed to believe before we can even begin the journey. Was Jesus divine? Was Mary a virgin?