Holy Spirit (alias The Holy Ghost)

We used to call Him the “Holy Ghost”.  That was the end of His name – Fathersonanholyghost.  We knew about father; we had one.  He went to work, brought us magazines from the office when they got old, played catch with us, fixed up the house, taped us up when we broke, brought home the money we needed to survive.  He was strong, he was powerful.  We knew about “son”.  We were sons.  Two of us, then three, then four.  When our father was not around, we did what he wanted us to do.  We sanded the drywall seams and dug out the bushes and pulled the weeds and cleaned the garage.  So the father-son part of God we could maybe get, kind of understand, of course, except bigger.  But the Holy Ghost; hmmm.  Casper the Friendly Ghost was not much help.  He was a kind of wimp, afraid of his own shadow - if he could cast one.  Too much like me to be God.  And then there were the three ghosts in the Scrooge story – past, present, and future.  They were all pretty scary.  The one thing that they had in common is that they would kind of fade into the scene and fade out.  We thought it was cool to be able to come through walls, though.  But mostly, the Holy Ghost was just the part of God that made Him a mystery, something that was beyond us, beyond explaining.

Then when I was an adolescent, the third person of the Trinity got a name change, kind of like Cassius Clay becoming Mohammed Ali.  Now He’d be known as the Holy Spirit.  It was about the time we went from glass bottles to aluminum cans for pop, and cars got too long to fit in garages.  It was about the time when we weren’t sure if we were supposed to say AY-men or AH-men in church.  I’m glad all of this happened when I was an adolescent, when change was something that was welcome, when the idea of God changing was welcome, rather than unsettling.

Now that I am – what, - old? – I think differently about who God is, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  I know that a father is not merely powerful, but also powerless, too, especially in the light of the freedom of others, and the overwhelming forces of nature.  I know that sons are not merely clones of their fathers, but something more, something called beyond their fathers, to reach, to strive, to explore.  But just as when I was a kid, the Spirit, aka Holy Ghost, is still a trick to describe.  I think that the word spirit gives better clues than the word ghost did, though. 

Spirit is something that shows through, not like a ghost that shows up; the Holy Spirit is the person of God that needs us in order to be.  Holy smokes!  Can God need us in order to be?  A lover cannot be a lover without the beloved.  A father cannot be a father without the child.  Above cannot be above except that there is a below.  Perhaps in this regard, the Holy Spirit is still that part of God that makes Him a mystery, something beyond us, beyond explaining. 

Our granddaughters are a precocious ten and six.  When they were younger, and there was a question that they asked that our daughter could not answer (like why the wind blows sometimes, but not others) they’d accept her shrugging, head-tilting “It’s a mystery” as an answer.  Now they are old enough and clever enough to revisit some of those questions, to apply their experience and yes, Google, to reconsider these mysteries, to follow their curiosity in the hope of understanding.  The notice that the wind wakens with the warmth of the sun, and sleeps with its setting most of the time.  I wonder if they will discover that God is like the wind, that we see in the movement of the trees that surround their little house, and on the surface of the water on their little lake. 

I wonder if we will see the Holy Spirit as they see the wind, that remarkable gift of the who-ness of God that needs our face to show kindness or our bodies to lift, or feed, or comfort.  Perhaps the greatest gift of this third person of the Trinity is that just as Nadia and Sonja discover that the invisible is understood by seeing its effect on the visible, we have the instinct to explore the nature of God by looking at the spirit that shows in the way we move in it, the way our surface is changed by it.  It is to our visible selves we look to know the invisible God.

“Blow, blow, blow ‘til I be

but breath of the Spirit, blowing in me.”

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.