There is the rhythm of three in the Creed: I have faith in the God the Father, in Jesus our Lord, and in the Holy Spirit. You also saw it in the previous chapter in Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: there is one Spirit that distributes her gifts in our community, one Lord we serve each in our own way, and one God who works in all of us. But what then is this holy spirit? Who will tell us of her name? Does she have a story?

Is spirit female???

Perhaps you have noticed that I like to refer to ‘holy spirit’ as ‘she’ or ‘her’ and often without the article ‘the.’ Perhaps some of you may think it problematic or modernistic to do that, as it is customary to call God “he” – Father, Son and Holy Spirit -, and refer to the Holy Spirit as the third male person of the Trinity. But stranger things happen when you go back to the world of Jesus and his friends.

Around the year 400 CE, a man named Jerome (ca 400 CE) went to Palestine to study the Bible and make a better translation. In his Commentary on Isaiah (11.40.9) he writes about the use of feminine metaphors for the Holy Spirit. He points to Psalm 123:2, ‘like the eyes of a maid look to the hand of her mistress,’ and explains: “the maid is the soul and the mistress is the Holy Spirit.” Then he refers to the early and now lost Gospel according to the Hebrews. In this text, Jesus calls the Holy Spirit ‘my Mother.’ And Jerome reassures his readers: “Nobody should be offended by this, for among the Hebrews the Spirit is said to be of feminine gender, although in our language [Latin] it is called to be of masculine gender and in the Greek language neuter.”

Jews could refer to her as Lady Wisdom (see for example Proverbs 8 and 9). A poet in Alexandria imagined an ode to Wisdom (‘Sophia’ in Greek) in the mouth of the famously wise king Solomon. It is perhaps telling that the most explicit description of the spirit as Lady Wisdom did not make it into the Hebrew Bible, or into its Protestant translations. But if you read the words, you will see it is like a love-song to the most beautiful bride that the poet could ever desire. Yet he also sees that she is not to be grasped or acquired by learning or hard work. She is God’s to give out of grace, - he is the father of the bride. Paul explains that God’s Wisdom is not like the wisdom of the world, as she often seems counter-intuitive, foolish even, to people who wish to rely on their own logic rather than on God’s grace (1 Corinthians 1:18-25).

Spirit is everywhere

Even though few people know her - or know that they know her -, God’s holy spirit is everywhere. If you open up the Bible at Genesis 1:1-3, you see her mysteriously hovering over the waters of chaos, as a mighty storm or a tender breeze. God creates the universe through his spirit and his word. And as God forms humanity - male and female - in his image, he forms us from the dust of the earth (which is what the name Adam refers to). And then he breathes into our nostrils, to share his spirit of life with us, ‘and the Adam became a living soul.’ The spirit of God helped Joseph interpret the dream of Pharaoh, she gave Bezalel and the talents and ideas to craft the Arc and the Menorah as works of beauty. She fell upon Saul to prophesy in trance and urged David to share the songs of his heart with us. She descended upon Jesus from above, as he came up out of the water of Jordan in which he was baptized, so that he heard the words of God: “You are my son, my beloved one.” It is this holy spirit with which Jesus cleaned the sick and desperate from the ‘unclean spirits’ within them. It is the spirit that he offered up to God as he breathed his last on the cross, and the spirit that the disciples experienced as a comforter and exhorter as their risen Lord had left them in the body but stayed with them in the spirit. This is the spirit that even newcomers came to experience in their communities of followers of Jesus.

So what is spirit?

Spirit, Jesus explains in John 3:8, is wind blowing from places we don’t know to people we have never met before. She connects the earth with the heavens, she connects all living beings upon the earth. If you let go, she can make you be born again from above, moved by inspiration. The image of healing is that ‘holy spirit’ can fill your lungs, your body, soul and mind with pure and healthy, or ‘holy,’ spirit. It drives out the polluted spirit that produce fever, mental illnesses and destructive ideologies. Today we could add that the airwaves are able to carry information from radio, tv or internet, provided we are attuned to it. The message we hear depends on the station we are tuned into.

Jesus does not imagine God as an individual being on a cloud. In the Gospel according to John, he bluntly tells a Samaritan woman that the religious boundaries between her people and the Jews will end when both acknowledge that God is spirit (John 4:23-24):

"Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth.”

The spirit of Jesus

As Jesus promises the holy spirit to his friends as their comforter after his death, he says “On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you” (John 14:20). Paul sees how this complements the creation of Adam: “As it is written: ‘The first man Adam became a living being’; so the last Adam now becomes a life-giving spirit” (I Corinthians 15:45), he exclaims. From now on, the majesty of the universe, the story of God’s faithfulness to Israel, and the story of Jesus’ love together formed the message that inspired their experience of God. That is why Paul can speak of the spirit of God or the spirit of Jesus without distinction (Romans 8:9). In a spiritual sense, they have become one and the same holy spirit that is given to those who are no longer slaves to rules of the dust from which they were formed (Romans 8:14-16):

For those who are led by the Spirit of God are the children of God. The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by her we cry, “Abba, Father.” The Spirit herself testifies with our spirit that we are God’s children.

You could ask whether the Father is ‘more God’ than the other two: the Son and the Spirit. But that would be a misunderstanding of the true nature of God as understood in the first Letter of John (4:8), when he writes ‘God is love.’ God is not the supreme individual nor a set of three distinct divine beings. Rather, God is the in- and outflowing of love that characterizes, connects and unifies God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. And it is love that invites us to the dance.

The spirituality of Jesus' friends

But back to friends of Jesus: they felt that Jesus had revealed to them true character of Israel’s God, as a loving Father. His life story had become part of the story of God’s faithfulness to his people. Jesus’ friends also felt that the holy spirit within and among them was leading them and was revealing Jesus’ true spiritual meaning to them. Through an interplay of their memories, scriptures, visions, and prophecies, Jesus became the eternally beloved Son of God, worshipped with the Father in one breath, in one spirit. They could no longer envisage God, without seeing the human face of their friend. They could no longer remember their friend without seeing the character of God shining through him. Yet Jesus of Nazareth for all his remarkable personality, never became some demi-god walking the earth while they were alive to share their memories: they knew his powers of healing were limited (Mark 6:5), and that he had to learn through his suffering and fear (Hebrew 5:7-8). According to the song that Paul quotes in his letter to the Philippians, he was ‘emptied’ of the divine attributes he had before his birth (2:7).

The one divine presence within Jesus of Nazareth was his union with the Father through the spirit. That is why he can say that “whoever has faith in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. … But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you,” (John 14:12,26). The story of the spirit did not end with the destruction of the Jewish temple or the crucifixion of Jesus. It continues with the gifts and fruits of holy spirit within and among the children of God. It is the sum of their own life-stories and the life of their community that reveals to the world what or who holy spirit truly is.

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Suggestions for dialogue

A moderator can explain the dialogue steps and invite people to contribute:

• Check in with yourself. Share with each other how you are in this moment. Then take a moment again to seek stillness, humility and openness. 
• First round: Share something from the text or image(s) that stood out to you and that you would like to explore with the group, briefly indicating the thoughts and feelings that it evoked within you. Listen to the others do the same: what resonates with you? Responses in this round should be limited to questions for clarification.
• Second round: Name one or two things that resonated with you from the things that others just shared. 
• Third round: Having heard the group, the moderator names the main topics for exploration. The moderator may also propose a common thread that emerged in several topics. The exploration normally starts with asking the person(s) who brought up the topic to expand on it.
• Leave room for silence and contemplation. 
• Check out by sharing what you take home from this dialogue.

These suggestions are an adaptation of the Estuary protocol. Look for more at https://www.estuaryhub.com