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| The Holy Spirit is like a dove, not a dove. |
Like I wrote earlier, think
and read imaginatively when you read this long-unauthorized quote from C.S.
Lewis in his book Mere Christianity:
“The union between the Father and the Son is such a live concrete thing
that this union itself is also a Person. I know this is almost
inconceivable, but look at it thus. You know that among human beings, when they
get together in a family, or a club, or a trade union, people talk about the ‘spirit’ of that family, or club, or
trade union. They talk about its ‘spirit’
because the individual members, when they are together, do really develop
particular ways of talking and behaving which they would not have if they were
apart. It is as if a sort of communal personality came into existence. Of
course, it is not a real person: it is only rather like a person.
But that is just one of the
differences between God and us. What
grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact
the Third of the three Persons who are God. This third Person is called, in
technical language, the Holy Ghost or the ‘spirit’
of God. Do not be worried or surprised if you find it (or Him) rather
vaguer or more shadowy in your mind than the other two. I think there is a
reason why that must be so.
In the Christian life you are
not usually looking at Him. He is always acting through you. If you think of
the Father as something ‘out there’,
in front of you, and of the Son as someone standing at your side, helping you
to pray, trying to turn you into another son, then you have to think of the
third Person as something inside you, or behind you.
Perhaps some people might
find it easier to begin with the third Person and work backwards. God is love,
and that love works through men – especially through the whole community of
Christians. But this spirit of love is,
from all eternity, a love going on between the Father and the Son.”
THINK
BIG. START SMALL. GO DEEP.
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