Transcription
Perhaps there has been no area of our theology which needs so much to be explored as the Holy Spirit. We have been brought up in our philosophy and Theology and catechism on the decoty of body and soul. I remember the catechism that I learned, which should we take more care, our body or our soul? Well, obviously the soul. We were even taught that this body was a worm and was evil, was the enemy of the Soul. Nowhere in scripture is the body the enemy of the Soul. It is the flesh that is the enemy of the Soul. The body in Greek is som, the flesh is SARS. That is the evil principle. Scripture that does not describe man in terms of body and soul.
So let us get back to biblical truth and find out who man is. Man is composed of Body, Soul and Spirit, not a spirit with a capital S. When we come to mention the Holy Spirit with the capital S, we will call attention to that fact. For example, just to take one of the many passages from scripture, St. Paul writes, "May God himself, the God of Peace, make you holy in every part and keep you sound in spirit, soul and body without fault until our Lord Jesus Christ comes." The word spirit is here spelled with a small S, as it should be in the New English Bible. Then again, Paul tells us that the word of God is as a sword dividing the soul from the spirit. In The Magnificat, our Lady makes the distinction, Magnificat and ex Spirit.
Now, what is the difference between Body, Soul and Spirit? The body relates us to the universe, thanks to the senses, we absorb the cosm. The soul, the [Music] Mind, communicates to us the rational Universe, the Arts, The Sciences, philosophy. The spirit gives us God Consciousness. So we have three kinds of Consciousness. We have sense or world Consciousness, we have rational Consciousness, and we have Spirit Consciousness. Every person in the world has these three. When Man was created, his Spirit was elevated. When he fell, the spirit sank down, as it were, into his soul or mind. It did not disappear. The closest analogy that I can think of is that of alcoholism or addiction. An alcoholic, in virtue of that addiction, has his reason, as it were, sink down into his senses. He cannot think as well under the impact of alcohol as he can without it. Now, sin blurred our God Consciousness, and it sank down, as it were, into our into our soul or mind. But every person in the world has has this potency for God. Everyone, children for example, we know immediately have this capacity for God. Atheism and agnosticism and the like are required. When the spirit has some expression of its own, in the language of Wordsworth, it trails Clouds Of Glory. Some of us lose this Spirit Consciousness very much as time goes on.
What the Incarnation did was to lay hold of this capacity. St. Thomas calls it a potencia obed. A dry stick has a greater capacity for burning than a wet stick. Man, because he has the spirit, has within himself a potency for the Holy Spirit. Why did not our Lord remain on Earth? There would have been many advantages. Mothers could have brought their children to him to be blessed. We could have been awed by the Majesty of his being. And yet, he said, "It is better for you that I go." If he remained, he always would have been outside of us, never any closer than an Embrace. But if he left and sent his spirit, then he would not be an example to be copied. Then he would be a veritable life to be lived, so that he would be in us, he would abide in us, and we would abide in him. The ideal of the spiritual life is not the imitation of Christ, it's the participation of Christ, so that he possesses our spirit, our soul, our body. This is the great advantage of his leaving. How grateful we would be if someone had the power, for example, to infuse into us the spirit of Shakespeare or Dy or Michelangelo. And yet, what is that in comparison to the infusion of the spirit of Christ?
Now, when the Holy Spirit, the spirit of Christ, comes into our [Music] spirit, it does many things, but it has to be developed. It would take a dozen conferences to speak of the work of the Holy Spirit, and I'm only going to speak about, well, very important elements in the life of the spirit of Christ. First, what the spirit of Christ does is to unify our being. It pulls us together so that we no longer have problems of identity. Can you imagine a man 25 years of age, say, "I'm troubled with a problem of identity"? Glory be to God, lives 25 years, and he doesn't know who he is. And why is there a problem of identity? Very often, simply because there are no limits. How do we know the identity of the state of Missouri? By its boundaries. How do we know the identity of a basketball court? By its foul lines. How do we know our identity? By law. Well, just as soon as you repudiate law, boundary limits, sure, you're troubled with a problem of identity. But what it does, the spirit does, first of all, is to unify us.
The best psychological treatise in the scripture is found in the seventh chapter of Romans. Here is psychology at its best. In chapter 7, St. Paul, in many translations, uses the word "I," "me," "my," "myself" 30 times. Now, when a man is constantly using the word "I," he's no longer unified. Despite that affirmation, so that St. Paul, maybe he's writing his own autobiography here, it certainly is ours. "I know nothing good lodges in me, in my unspiritual nature, for though the will to do good is there, the deed is not. The good which I want to do, I fail to do. But what I do is the wrong which is is against my will. And if what I do is against my will, clearly it is no longer I who am the agent, but sin that has its lodging in me. I discover this principle then, that when I want to do right, only the wrong is within my reach. In my inmost self, I delight in the law of God, but I perceive that there is in my bodily members a different law fighting against the law that my reason approves and making me a prisoner. That I am miserable creature, who will rescue me?" When doomed to death, that through chapter 7, then in chapter 8, you find the word "I," "me," "my," "myself" only three times. And that is because he ends up up chapter 7 by saying, "Thanks be to God." "I myself, subject to God's law as a rational being, I'm yet in my unspiritual nature a slave to sin. But there's no condemnation for those who are united in Christ Jesus, because in Christ Jesus, the lifegiving law of the spirit has set us free from the law of sin and the law of death."
The holy spirit gives us peace and unity. This analogy might help. In a family, there was a boy who never combed his hair, washed his hands, never clean behind his ears, had no manners at table, and whenever he went out the door, he slammed it. The parents begged, pleaded, coaxed, cajoled, threatened, bribed, without avail. One day, he came down neat, clean, and when he went out the door, he closed it gently. He had met Susie. There was a new love principle introduced into his life, and that is precisely what the spirit of Christ does in us, a love principle. There is talk of a generation gap. It is not a gap between young and old, because the gap exists in the old, among the old themselves, and among the young. The only gap is the spirit gap. It is those who have the spirit of Christ and those who have it not. That's the gap. It does no more good to talk to them than it does to talk colors to a blind man. Do you think when a dog is vaccinated that that dog has any understanding of what the scientist is doing? A mouse who is eating the keys of a piano cannot understand why any skilled pianist should sit down and play Tchaikovsky, because the mind of a mouse, the brain of a mouse, cannot understand the mind, mind of man. But that divergence is not as great as between those who have the spirit of Christ and those who have it not. That is why our blessed Lord said, "Throw not pearls before swine." Sometimes you just have to let them go to allow the mercy or the justice of God to work on them.
But what the spirit of Christ does is to introduce then the love principle, so that we love. Now, we have to therefore keep close to Christ and his Spirit in order that this may grow, and we might speak of the advantages of apostolicity and the like. But I want to take an opposite course here and speak of the holy spirit in relationship to sin. How do we know what sin is? Sin is not the breaking of a law. There is not a priest in the world who has not exceeded the speed limits, and there never was a priest who, after he exceeded the speed limits, at the end of the trip, leaned over the steering wheel and said an act of contrition. None of us are sorry for breaking a law. That is one of the reasons why immorality based just upon the Commandments is not the kind that will keep people faithful.
So we are told in the in scripture, as regards the Holy Spirit, our Lord, the night of the Last Supper, said, "I will send the Spirit who will convince you of sin." The Spirit convinces us of sin. Then our Lord went on, "Because of your unbelief." What did unbelief do to our blessed Lord? Unbelief crucified our Lord. What then is sin? Sin is not just the breaking of a law. Sin is hurting someone we love. That is sin. And there's a great deal of difference in the reaction of those who have faith and love of Christ and those who do something wrong and lack it. Those who lack the spirit of Christ fear a judgment. They fear being caught. With us, we are not just so fearful of judgment as we are ashamed at hurting someone we love. That is why real sorrow is always before the crucifix. "This is what I have done." The crucifix is my autobiography. My life has been written. His skin, the parchment; the nails, the pen; his blood, the ink. And in every part of his body, I can read one of my excesses. This is sin, and it is the holy spirit that gives us this understanding. And as we get away from the spirit of Christ, then we develop situation ethics and queer morality of the of the pagan world. And as we stay close, we are not just so much concerned about doing the things that we ought to do. It's rather loving, and simply because we do love, when we sin, we throw ourselves immediately back in the arms of the Blessed Lord.
Just imagine two men who married two old shrews, impossible shrews. One of the men was married before to a beautiful, lovely woman who died. The other was never married before. Which of the two suffers the more in marriage? Evidently, the one who had the better love. And that's the reason we suffer more than the pagans. Sin bothers us. And St. Paul tells us, "Therefore, grieve not the Spirit, sadden not the Spirit." You and I, as priests, have have not had in our lives perhaps over five times a deep, profound, overwhelming consciousness of the presence of God. I'm not speaking of emotional presences like a first Mass where there's been greater claim, but rather something alone that we would hardly ever talk about. Not over five, though we have not felt his presence, how many times have we felt his absence? Countless times. So there's white grace, which is his presence. There is black grace, which is his absence. And when we sin, we suffer more because because the Finger of God is stirring the soul, and he is saying to us, "This is not the way. I'm making you unhappy." So we never quite escape. Just think of the terrific psychosis and neurosis that women are going to have in 20 years as a result of abortions, the terrible tortures of soul when the honey treasure of the body is spent and no new life to show. Of the priests who have left, and the black grace begins to work on them, it will be God's mercy. It will be a torture only when it is rejected, but not otherwise.
The spirit, then, not only unifies our soul, the spirit convicts and convinces us of sin. That is why we do not need in confession to bark and shriek at others. A woman who had been been away from confession 30 years came to a priest and began, "Father, it's been 30 years since I've been away from the church and since I went to confession." And he started to shout and shriek at her and said, "Why have you been away for 30 years?" She said, "Because 30 years ago, Father, I met a priest just like you." Remember that the people who come to confession to us already have sorrow. They're on their knees there, and it's hard for them, just as it's hard for us, and we are supposed to be Christ in the confession, to lift them up and never be curious about their sin, never. The most humble group of people that I ever met were prisoners in one large [Music] prison. I interviewed the prisoners, or they came to see me from 8:30 in the morning until 10:00 at night, every day for a week, Catholic and non-Catholic alike. And their introduction was always the same: "John Jones, number 2834, 20 years, life, two murders. We have curtains before our lives." They were like window panes, transparent, and one felt therefore that they were very receptive to God's grace. In fact, everyone is, in a certain sense, inasmuch as he has the spirit with the small s.
And for the sake of brevity, although we haven't too much of that, did you ever hear about the Irish couple that moved to Boston and raised a family, and one of the sons lived in Chicago, and the father died in Boston? The son in Chicago wired his brother and said, "What were Father's last words?" Telegram came back: "Father had no last words. Mother was with him to the [Music] end."
But we will speak of just one other aspect of the spirit, and that is Zeal. Light has two qualities, or rather fire: light and heat. Light is truth, heat is love. The two should go together, as the Son and the Holy Spirit are equal in the Trinity. We have the truth, but the enemy has the Zeal, and this is our problem. Zeal is only love, and that is what the holy spirit is. Love by its very nature is diffusive and giving. If there's any characteristic I would say that is needed today in the priesthood, it is that a Zeal for it all, for the church, for one another, for our people, for the unlovable. It is easy enough to love the lovable. We need, in other words, a little bit of waste in our lives. We're too saving of ourselves, too careful. We measure out what we will do. We think when we've done this or that, like the Elder son, that we have done enough. The word "enough" does not exist in the spirit foolishness, an [Music] easy against the cold reasonableness which turns into mediocrity. That will come through living close to Christ.
In an hour, remember a time our blessed Lord multiplied the loaves and the fishes, and he was afraid that his apostles were going to become engaged in politics because they wanted to make our Lord a king, and they were caught up in this idea. So he said, "You go over the other side of the lake." He went up in the mountain to pray. Storm came up. He watched them from the mountain. Lord is watching us, even in our storms, we do not know it. And they saw the Lord coming. They saw a spectre coming. In one of the gospels, we learn why they did not see that it was Christ: because they had not understood the mystery of the bread, said Mark, the Eucharist. So it was a spectre. Now, we have a man who's got some Zeal, a little bit of ecstasy, was ready to to follow the Lord. And when he sees that it is the Lord, he said, "Lord," he said, "bid me come to [Music] you. Let me walk on the [Music] waters." Now, can you imagine what the other Apostles in that boat must have said? "Here is this stupid individual who's going to do the unreasonable thing of getting out of the boat and walking on the water." Judas must have said, "What are you going to do? Going to kill himself?" Philip, "Listen, we've made 200 sociological surveys, nobody's ever walked on water." Thomas said, "What are you trying to do? Kill yourself? Is this a death wish?" Andrew, his brother, said, "You damn fool, get back." But what did our Lord say? "Come. Come." The Lord said, "Come." Peter, you're right, be ecstatic. And Peter walked upon the waters, and then he began and to sink. Peter, who could swim, because we know that he swam 400 yards the Sunday after Easter, even our natural powers fail us sometimes. Why did Peter sink? The gospel says he took his eyes off Jesus. He took account of the wind. Winds, took account of the winds. So what's the wind of public opinion? The currents of surveys? Or there priest leaving? Oh, maybe I better leave. Old nuns are leaving? Oh, maybe I better throw off the habit. What's the movement of the wind today? Let's follow everything. And Peter took account of all of the $400,000 Episcopal surveys, and he sank. He took his eyes off Christ.
Now, I'm asking you, recover your Zeal and your fire. Do not measure out your love and your service to the Lord. And that [Music] means spending an hour every day, not including the Mass part of it. It can be made the hour part of the hour can be made before Mass, part after the Mass, then it would be considered continuous. But the Mass is not to be included in the holy hour. Everything else. Spend that hour. Keep your eye on Christ for an hour, and you'll never sink. There's never has been a priest in this country who made the daily holy hour, whoever left the church. Then we will begin to discover really what the spirit of Christ is.