The Holy Spirit is Being Unleashed Today
The Most Holy Trinity wants to unleash supernatural power in our lives through the Holy Spirit. Do we truly believe this? For the longest time, I didn’t. I thought the spiritual life was going to Mass, praying, and serving, but that God would not show up in ways that defy my pre-conceived notions about Him. I believed that miracles are only for those few holy saints God chooses. The Sacraments are the ordinary means of grace, but I didn’t truly believe that they unleashed power in any tangible way that I could experience except for the occasional consolations after receiving Holy Communion and Confession. I thought that the Faith needed to be reasonable and rational. I placed the Holy Spirit in a box of my own making and spent much of my life essentially living as an agnostic without realizing it. I think that a lot of Catholics live this way today.
When I was in middle school and high school, all of my friends were born-again evangelicals. The Catholics seemed to be at church only because their parents forced them to go through preparation for sacraments they didn’t want to receive. Not much has changed in 30 years, unfortunately. At school, they were the kids who partied and got into trouble. I wasn’t interested in being a part of that group, so I became friends with the evangelicals.
I attended their youth groups, retreats, and camps. We debated theology. I would argue with their parents about the Real Presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist and papal authority. They were deeply committed to their Christian faith, even though I knew it lacked completeness. I often attended their praise and worship nights and prayer sessions. I enjoyed the music, but I was suspicious of what I perceived as emotionalism. The laying of hands was foreign to me.
I knew it is much too easy to reduce God to our emotional experiences. I think this is a very real danger in these settings, but I also think we have a tendency to downplay when the Holy Spirit does show up in powerful ways. Some of this is not grounded in truth, but rather, fear and a lose of control. The Holy Spirit’s workings aren’t neat, contained, and lacking in emotion. The Holy Spirit reaches us in our full humanity, and He shows up in ways that take us far outside our comfort zones.
I spent decades developing a hyper-intellectual faith. I relied on Thomistic principles to keep me from any sense of emotionalism or experience of God that I thought was sentimental or emotional. This fear-based way of living and my desire to control God through a rational Faith did me tremendous harm. I knew a lot about God, but my heart was not on fire in love with Him. I created a god of my own making. I didn’t realize how cold my heart became in this hyper-intellectual faith. Anything that didn’t fit my idea of God was quickly jettisoned.
This is a danger that is very prevalent in the Church today as we seek to seem overly reasonable to the culture. We have jettisoned the supernatural in order to fit in with a world that only sees the natural. This is to take the very heart out of a life with the Most Holy Trinity. It is to make our all loving and powerful Triune God very small.