The Holy Spirit, Fire of Divine Love
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THE HOLY SPIRIT, FIRE OF DIVINE LOVE
WILFRID STINISSEN, O.C.D.
THE HOLY SPIRIT,
FIRE OF DIVINE LOVE
Translated by Sister Clare Marie, O.C.D.
IGNATIUS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO
Original Swedish edition:
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© 1989 Libris förlag, Örebro
Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations (except those within citations) have been taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible, Second Catholic Edition, © 2006. The Revised Standard Version of the Holy Bible: the Old Testament, © 1952, 2006; the Apocrypha, © 1957, 2006; the New Testament, © 1946, 2006; the Catholic Edition of the Old Testament, incorporating the Apocrypha, © 1966, 2006, the Catholic Edition of the New Testament, © 1965, 2006 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. All rights reserved. In all instances, italics present in Scripture quotations have been added by the author.
Cover photograph
© Oxana Bernatskaya/Shutterstock
Cover design by Roxanne Mei Lum
©2017 by Ignatius Press, San Francisco
All rights reserved
ISBN 978-1-62164-111-7 (PB)
ISBN 978-1-68149-738-9 (EB)
Library of Congress Control Number 2016931676
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
Preface
I
THE SPIRIT AND YOU
1. The Spirit, God’s Secret and Yours
The Ineffable God
The Spirit, the Hidden Treasure in Your Field
Walk in the Spirit
2. The Spirit of Love
Koinonia—Fellowship
“You Are the Body of Christ”
Love Fills the World
Love Is a Person
3. The Spirit of Truth
The Spirit of Jesus
Our Good Memory
The Spirit Lays Bare Sin
God’s Suffering
The Sin against the Holy Spirit
4. The Spirit, the Comforter
Blessed Are the Poor
A New Presence of Jesus
“How Beautiful You Are, My Beloved!”
The Way of Gratitude
As a Mother
Be Yourself a Comforter!
5. The Spirit, Your Spiritual Director
Director and “Companion”
True Freedom: To Be Bound by the Spirit
The Obvious Obedience
A Wholehearted Yes
Does God Really Speak?
6. Spiritual Discernment
Two Types of Inspirations
Basic Requirement: Detachment
A Confessional Attitude
Discerning the Spirits
The First Rule: Built on the Foundation of the Gospels
The Second Rule: The Inspirations of the Spirit Are Reasonable
The Third Rule: Peace
The Fourth Rule: No Excessive Demands
The Fifth Rule: The Spirit Speaks Concretely
The Sixth Rule: In the Church
Can God Be Mute?
Consulting the Bible
Casting Lots
7. The Spirit, the Giver of Life
The Spirit Creates Anew
The Spirit Gives Life to the Content of the Faith
Courage
The Spirit Himself Is Your Life
Practicing the New Life
8. Do You Hear the Wind Blowing?
Motovilov’s Story
The Meaning of Feelings and Experience
What Does the Gospel Say?
The Risks of Love
Why Do Only a Few Hear the Wind Blowing?
A Stunted Emotional Life
Peripheral and Deep Feelings
Growing Integration
II
THE SPIRIT AND THE CHURCH
1. The Church as Koinonia
The Spirit, the Co-founder of the Church
The Church as Koinonia
The Church, an Icon of the Trinity
How Does the Church Reveal the Trinity?
The Sacrament of Fellowship
In the Unity of the Holy Spirit
2. The Spirit of Unity and Ecumenism
How Does the Spirit Further Unity?
The Four Ways of Ecumenism
What Kind of Unity?
Reconciled Difference
The Problem of the Filioque
Come, Holy Spirit!
3. The Spirit of the Lord Fills the World
No One Is Completely without the Holy Spirit
The Spirit Works in the Whole Cosmos
Notes
Preface
Just today I was reading an article by the Lutheran Bishop Gunnar Weman entitled: “We Need the Renewal of the Holy Spirit”. In it he writes:
We were baptized to live, not a life on simmer, but a life of faith and obedience. That is why we need that spiritual deepening which makes us dare really to live out the powers of the kingdom of heaven on earth. . . . There is a great, pent-up longing and prayer today for the renewal of the Holy Spirit, and this needs the support of the Church’s united reflection and action.
I wholeheartedly agree.
If you are not content to live a life on “simmer” and wish to live a full and genuine life, you need the Spirit.
Do not imagine that he is far away. Since the very beginning, when the breath of God made man a living being, man has lived from God’s own life. The fact that you are alive at all is because the Living One has given you his Spirit.
But would you like to live consciously, would you like to live more?
The Spirit blows through you and through the Church, today just as in the first days of the Church.
But do you hear him blowing?
“O souls, created for these grandeurs and called to them! What are you doing? How are you spending your time? . . . You are. . . deaf to such loud voices” (Saint John of the Cross).1
This is not a book about the Charismatic Movement. If you wish to know if you have the gift of tongues or the gifts of prophecy or healing and hope to find an answer in this book, you will be seeking in vain.
This book is about “a still more excellent way” (1 Cor 12:31), about the fertile soil for all the gifts of grace—it is about love.
The Spirit is God’s own love, and he desires to be your love.
A friend wrote to me recently: “I am created to love. Not with some kind of ‘homemade’ love, but with His own love.” It sounds daring. But we may be so daring.
When you allow the Spirit to live in you, you love God and others with his own love.
Only this love is real love.
The Spirit is the great ecumenist.
If we let him live in and through us, we grow in unity, whether we will it or not. It is his “charism” to make all things one. He makes the Father and the Son one God. He wants to make all denominations into one holy Church and all people into one body.
He is seeking instruments for this. Instruments with a “willing spirit” (Ps 51:12).
WILFRID STINISSEN , O.C.D.
I
THE SPIRIT AND YOU
1
The Spirit, God’s Secret and Yours
The Spirit is God’s greatest gift. In giving us his Spirit, God gives us himself.
We ought never to be satisfied with anything less than God.
But who is he?
The Ineffable God
The Holy Spirit reminds us that God is mystery. The Son is “truth” (Greek alētheia: not hidden). He is God who i
s no longer hidden, he is the God who is revealed. The Spirit, however, is God who is still concealed. He is the unfathomable depth of God, which is unreachable and incomprehensible. Saint Paul associates the Spirit with the depths of God: “The Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God” (1 Cor 2:10).
The Spirit is the power that moves God to create, to reveal himself, and to become incarnate. He is the revealing power (in and through him the Son becomes man), but he himself is not revealed. He is and remains the “interior” of God. It is he who gives negative theology its reason to exist (raison d’être). Negative theology means, and rightly so, that everything we say about God is insufficient, that no words are suitable for him, that he is always greater, and that, therefore, man’s proper attitude before God is silent worship.
God is Word; therefore, it is fitting to speak about God. But God is also Spirit; therefore, it is fitting to be silent before him.
We can understand why Carmelites have a special love for the Holy Spirit. It is he who guides the development of prayer from that of considerations (that is, thinking and speaking) to contemplative, silent prayer. In contemplative prayer one becomes mute. What God has revealed of himself through his Son (the Word) allows us to perceive something of his mystery and leads us into it. It is the Holy Spirit who is God’s mystery par excellence. Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) dares to say that the Holy Spirit is beyond the Word.1 If I find myself in him, it is natural that words are left behind. He gives me a knowledge that is “too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain it” (Ps 139:6). Before this mystery it is appropriate to be silent.
Even his name reveals that the Holy Spirit is mysterious. The Hebrew ruah, the Greek pneuma, and the Latin spiritus mean both wind and breath. Jesus likens him to the wind: “The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes” (Jn 3:8). One cannot catch the wind or control it. There is something unpredictable about it. And the one who lets himself be captured by the Spirit (the wind) receives something of his mystery and unpredictability: “So it is with every one who is born of the Spirit” (ibid).
Even the other two great symbols of the Holy Spirit point to his mysterious character. Jesus speaks of living water. “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink. He who believes in me, as the Scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receive” (Jn 7:37–39). Living water is spring water, bubbling water, water that is moving, that gushes forth without restraint, and its quantity or power cannot be determined.
The Spirit is also fire. He descends as fire on the disciples at Pentecost. It is true that one can put out a fire in the beginning (cf. 1 Thess 5:19), but if it is left to itself, one loses all control over it. It sets everything on fire.
Just as we have no power over spring water or fire, so likewise, we have no power over the Spirit. We cannot describe him accurately or define him; we cannot lock him into a concept or analyze him. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Cor 3:17). No one can catch the Spirit, but the one who wishes can let himself be caught.
We say that the Holy Spirit is a Person, the third Person of the Holy Trinity. In this way he becomes more concrete. But we must not let ourselves be fooled! He is not a person as we are persons. A human person exists, for the most part, in himself. The Holy Spirit, however, is a person who exists in two others. A human being becomes more of a person in the measure that he opens himself and gives himself to others. But the Holy Spirit is openness itself, giving itself. There is such a great difference between the Spirit’s way of being a person and a human being’s way of being a person that both Scripture and the Church have intentionally chosen impersonal symbols to speak about the Holy Spirit.2
The Spirit is not the one who acts; rather, he is the act itself. He is the one through whom God reveals himself. It is not easy for us to imagine a person who is act. But that is what the Holy Spirit is. Everywhere the Spirit reveals himself, something happens. He is the event.
The New Testament never paints a portrait of the Holy Spirit. Nowhere can we read a description of him. We cannot look at the Holy Spirit in the same way that we look at Jesus. “You know him,” says Jesus, “for he dwells with you, and will be in you” (Jn 14:17). To know the Holy Spirit is, above all, to experience his action, to open oneself to his influence, to say Yes to his impulses, and to let him be the source of everything one does.
Everything that has to do with the Spirit is mysterious. He himself is the prayer within us, but a mysterious prayer that consists of “groanings that cannot be expressed in speech” and that God alone can interpret. When the Spirit moves a person to speak in tongues, he speaks secrets that no one can understand unless the word is interpreted by others who are inspired by the Spirit (1 Cor 14:2–5).
The Spirit, the Hidden Treasure in Your Field
The goal of the Incarnation, the Cross, and the Resurrection is Pentecost. If God has become man, if he has suffered and died for us and risen from the dead, it is in order finally to fill us with the Holy Spirit. Jesus says it with crystal clear words: “I came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled!” (Lk 12:49).
In one of the manuscripts of Luke’s Gospel, it says “May your Holy Spirit come”, instead of may “Your kingdom come” (Lk 11:2). God’s kingdom is identified with the Holy Spirit. When we are filled with him, God is truly Lord in us.
The theology of the West is sometimes criticized for its “mono-Christ-ism”. It seems that theologians have devoted themselves in a biased, almost exclusive way toward Christ. But we cannot understand Christ, the truth, if we are not led by the Spirit of truth, who leads us into all truth (Jn 16:13). Perhaps this is also the reason why the theology of the West is so cold, dry, and abstract. The flame is missing. We have needed the Charismatic Renewal to become aware that the Church is not only the Church of Christ but also the Church of the Holy Spirit.
There are three Persons in God. We may not omit or pass over any one of them. Each one of the three Persons has his own function and his own role. We miss out on something essential if we limit ourselves to one or two Persons.
In the beginning, God’s Spirit hovered over the waters (Gen 1:2). We could speak of a cosmic Pentecost, which prepared, and in some way even anticipated, the actual and definitive Pentecost. The Spirit is present from the beginning, and he sighs in creation and makes it sigh with him. “We know”, writes Saint Paul, “that the whole creation has been groaning with labor pains” (Rom 8:22). It begins already on the first day of creation, and this groaning is the work of the Spirit.
It is man’s calling to be a conscious pneumatoforos (Spirit bearer). What is unconscious in creation becomes conscious in man. It is his function to interpret the language of creation, to be in harmony with it and articulate it, so that it becomes a song of praise that not only God but even his fellowmen can understand.
Walk in the Spirit
To be a conscious pneumatoforos has far-reaching consequences. The Spirit is not a gem or a pearl, which, however precious it might be, does not transform a person. He is the Life Giver. He is dynamic and vitalizing. He is an inner compass, who also gives us the capacity and power to navigate according to that compass. Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) says he is the new law in person.3
The Christian ethic is not a collection of laws and commands; it is a Person. God has not given us a series of norms that we must follow. He has given us his own ethic. The same Spirit who moves and motivates God in his actions is now also in us and impels us to live in the same way as God. We cannot complain that God demands things of us that he does not do himself. We have the exact same ethic as he has, because he has given us his Spirit.
The law of Moses consisted of many commands. One could not see the forest for the trees. The new law is one, because it is a unique Person. In the new law, there is only one command: love (M
t 22:37–40), and love is identical with the Holy Spirit (see chapter 2). We have only to be filled with the Holy Spirit. All the rest will take care of itself. “But the anointing which you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that any one should teach you; as his anointing teaches you about everything. . . just as it has taught you, abide in him” (1 Jn 2:27). Could life be more simple than that? Do as the Spirit teaches you! And what does he teach you? Only this: Abide in me!
Human norms can easily have an alienating effect. We are forced to act in a way that is foreign to us. The norms can become a superego, which sets itself up as a tyrant and depersonalizes us. The Christian ethic, on the other hand, can never depersonalize or lead to alienation, because it is itself a Person, a divine Person, and a Person who is also in complete harmony with our being. For we are created in God’s image. This Person touches us in the very depths of our being, where we are most ourselves. There is a unity and harmony between the Spirit and our spirit: “It is the Spirit himself bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Rom 8:16).