Trinity Tuesday: Rummaging Through the Toy Box of the Spirit

It's an extraordinary paradox, isn't it, that God as God meets us most immanently and intimately while being most indefinable and inscrutable. God is closer to us, Lady Julian says, than we are to our own souls. But when we attempt to speak of the God who is closer to us than we are to our own souls, God as Holy Spirit, we find ourselves groping about, rummaging through a bag of metaphors, symbols and images, like children rummaging through a toy box, picking up first this toy and then another, finding that none of them is really what we are looking for.


Indeed, the nature of the Spirit makes it difficult to get a clear picture of who the Holy Spirit is. The Spirit never points to the Spirit. Always the Spirit points to another, always away from the Spirit. The Spirit is consistently self-effacing, as someone as said. The Spirit is the self-emptying act of God. And the Spirit is so personally God in God's self-emptying that the Spirit is not simply an action but a divine person. But how do you visualize, comprehend, understand such a person?

The danger is always present in our theological discussions of reducing the mysterious Spirit of God to something "pale and shapeless, like an unmade bed" as Frederick Buechner so vividly put it. The very idea of Spirit baffles all attempts at formal analysis; that is, the Spirit compels us in our careful theological engagement of God in a dialogue of discovery. God demands of us a response that is not simply prerational or subrational but that involves us fully as persons, including our intellectual capacities. After all, the Spirit of God in the Old Testament is the Spirit of wisdom, and in the New Testament the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth.
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Michael Jinkins, Invitation to Theology, pp. 191-192.