Once we have understood the mysterious Personhood of the Holy Spirit and the daily involvement of that Presence in the intimacy of our souls, then we have to try to understand not just how to pray to this Presence but also how this Presence is involved in our daily pursuits and how we can collaborate with this Presence.
Notice the difficulty I have using pronouns, for the Presence is not masculine or feminine; nor is it neuter. Gender has little place in the Divinity, which is not limited by gender categories. So, I will continue to use the word ‘Presence’ to get away both from human categories as well as the earlier error we spoke about as looking at the Holy Spirit as a thing and not a person.
It is hard for us to admit that we may be ignoring a Mysterious Presence or Divine Visitor. This seems both the height of rudeness and a very stupid thing to do since this Presence brings along great gifts and advantages for us. Yet we must say that the growth of someone’s spiritual development will follow the trajectory of our awareness and working with this Spirit we call Holy.
This spiritual blindness is also very self-defeating since our whole eternal life is hanging in the balance of this primary relationship. To ignore or misunderstand this spiritual bond is to hurt our spiritual development irrevocably.
We then come up to a very imposing obstacle to our belief in the providence of God indwelling within us. This is the problem of sheer multiplicity. While we can imagine God intimately involved in our own lives, so that every moment is connected to God as a kind of personal power source, things get more complicated when we consider that He is doing the same with billions of my earthly fellow travelers—at the same time! And that is just this planet! In addition, we also believe that He is involved in all of creation. Again, we can imagine that with our pet at home who takes up so much of our time, but God is also intimately involved in every bird, bug and molecule of this earth and knows them all by name!
When we think of this, we confront the doctrine of the Omnipotence of God. What do we mean by that? How can that be? It is so beyond even our imaginings!
When we travel down that rabbit hole, we end up no longer believing in a God like that. Rather, we settle for a much smaller god who is there to assist us in life. This is only because our concept of omnipotence is so weak and meagre.
Think of St. Augustine walking on the beach thinking about writing a book explaining the Holy Trinity. An angel, disguised as a 5-year-old child, keeps going to the water and filling a bucket with it. He then pours it into a hole in the sand. When St. Augustine asks what he is doing, he responds by telling him that he wants to put the ocean in that little hole. St. Augustine laughs and tells him that it is impossible. The Apparition then says: “It is even more impossible for your small mind to encompass the vastness of the Trinity!”
Once we have this enhanced understanding of how truly omnipotent and all-powerful God is, then we can better understand the minute way He is involved in our lives. No movement of the soul is too small for God not to notice. No tear goes unheeded. No hope is ignored. Because we can only be aware of one thing at a time, we still wonder how God can be involved in so many trillion ways at any given moment. But He can. This requires an act of faith on our part. Once we make this act of faith, then the wondrous work of God stands before us in all its variety, splendor and magnificence.
God in His Holy Spirit is our constant companion, our eternal friend, our ever-ready confidante, our source of spiritual energy, our wisdom and our perseverance. The Spiritual World opens up as the only truly real place in existence. What we were so concerned about in this life gets set in its proper, humbled place.
Truly God is Great. It takes us time just to catch up to a small inking of how vast that greatness is!