Encountering the Spirit means experiencing positive joy and peace.  In short it means transformation into a balanced life, a Christ like life.  The Holy Spirit is always consistent with what Jesus lived and taught.  That is why I call Jesus a Spirit person.

The positive joy and peace of encountering the Spirit is found in hearing the Word of God as living, convicting word in your heart.  It is the joy of knowing it as your daily guiding norm and deriving your sense of security from that.

This joy and peace is also coming alive through honest prayer.  It is learning to listen with confidence and in silence with the expectation of hearing what you most need to hear to be transformed into the image of Christ.

Knowing the Spirit is progressing in freedom, freedom to give your life away in service without fear of ever losing it.  It is feeling an increasing solidarity with the poor, dirty suffering and oppressed.  I believe that it is feeling it also with the animal kingdom and asking prophetic questions such as,  “What does the crowding, stuffing for slaughter or production, and constant drugging  of animals on factory farms do to the human spirit.”  Is not “the righteous man still known by how he cares for his beasts?”  (Proverbs).  And is it not strange that in our mythical creation and origin stories of Genesis both man and animal were commanded to be vegetarians?  Also, there I find the bloodlust that led to the judgment of the flood seems to be connected in these stories to man’s lust for fresh butchered meat on the grill.  What is there in these stories to teach of our relation to non-human creatures?

Finally, my experience is that encountering the Spirit does lead us into maturity in thankfulness and joy.  How can one sense the presence of the Divine Spirit within and all around with all His beautiful Mystery and not be joyfully thankful for the privilege of participating in life.  I also find it true that joy of participating with others in the process of spiritual growth is renewed with the intaking of Christ in every Eucharist.

I certainly want to encounter the Spirit more deeply and more often in my life.  Jesus was above all a Spirit person.  I do not think he was God walking on earth as some Christians do.   He was a very real human being but he lived his life in full connection with the Spirit World that was all around him.  He seemed constantly aware of the dimension of the Spirit.  I believe that is is why there is such a transcendent peace about him and such a different way of seeing life that was so non-conventional and yet so deeply wise.

To live in the Spirit as he did is to see the kingdom of God and its justice and how it applies to the here and now and beckons us to enter into this ultimate reality here and now.  This fits in with Dr Jimmie Reese’s statement that that “where there is no vision or hope of justice or protest or discontent against injustice there is no presence of the Holy Spirit.”

This means that encountering and living in the Spirit often means having an anger, an agony and an action in facing the injustices of life.  One cannot escape this.  To be a follower of Jesus is to pick up your cross of dying to indifference, laziness, selfishness and littleness daily and come alive to the bigness and compassion of God.

There is a great resurgence of interest in the Holy Spirit today; it is a hot topic.  Why is this so?  Perhaps it is because most of our churches are ruled by bureaucracy and frozen by institutionalism.  This creates a sense of depersonalization throughout much of the structure of the church.  People yearn for a deeper faith.  Even the radical emotional expressions of the Spirit claimed by Pentecostalism appeal to many as an escape from the mundane forms of worship.

The world of our church is dominated by cerebral power and the lengthy education process of our leaders creates for many a world of distance between the Word of God and the hearer.  Both leaders and congregants yearn for more immediacy of the Spirit in the bringing of the Word.  Many are burned out because of participation in countless good causes without a depth of spirituality.

These factors have led to some interesting events such as the amazing growth of Pentecostals in South America in recent years, placing Catholics and Protestants in a defensive posture of decline.  Then even more amazing is the growth of Eastern Orthodoxy in our part of the world.  In some cases whole congregations of Pentecostals have exodused into the Eastern Orthodox Church.

It is quite possible for us to grow and help our people to grow in the Spirit of God.  The following are  suggestions.   We can mature as hearers of the Word of God.  Scripture is a norming agent and it needs to be focused on in the communal setting for it to form our life.  We can mature in prayer through honesty.  We need to listen in prayer with confidence.  This involves learning to be confident in silence.

We need to mature in freedom.  The Spirit does not crush us into slavery but empowers us to creative liberty.

We need maturing in a sense of solidarity with those outside our comfort zone.  This includes members of the animal kingdom.

We can and need to mature in thankfulness and joy.  This is not the same as artificial optimism.  We can do this through a proper, frequent use of the Eucharist.

(Most of the above thoughts were first related to me in a wonderful lecture by Dr. Jimmie Reese at SMU in the summer of 2009.)

In talking about the Holy Spirit one very important fact to remember is that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of God and of Christ.  This means that anything we claim for the Holy Spirit must be consistent with what Jesus the Christ did.  Anything contrary to the life and teachings of Jesus then is not the leading or work of the Holy Spirit.

The Holy Spirit is the agent of liberation in the transformation of life that occurs through one’s trusting in God as He is revealed in Christ.  This major fact we know but there is much we do not know or have articulated.  The doctrine of the work of the Holy Spirit is underdeveloped.

The Holy Spirit awakens hope.  He creates in us a restless yearning for God’s justice to prevail or be brought to bear in life.  For wherever God’s rule is, it is a rule in justice .  Thus where there is no hope for justice or vision for justice or protest or discontent against injustice there is no presence of the Holy Spirit.

There is much theological  work that could be done on the feminine aspect of the Holy Spirit.  The word for Spirit in Hebrew is feminine, in Greek it is neutral and in the New Testament book of James the Spirit is spoken of like a mother.

Much theological work could be done also on the question, “Should we speak of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of the Triune God?”  With the Jews the unity of God was concrete and personal.  I like that.  But Christian theologians using Greek philosophy made the unity of God an abstraction.

The Jews had God and the Spirit in the Hebrew scriptures and never spoke of God as a Duality.  The Spirit was simply the term used for God in action in the world.  Why can’t we just have Father, Son and Holy Spirit and never speak of them as Trinity? After all the New Testament never speaks of Father, Son and Holy Spirit as Trinity.  Trinity was first used by Tertullion in about 189 CE.

Trinity was never articulated clearly until the fourth and fifth centuries CE.  And even then it was not too clear.  It was an extremely sophisticated explanation whose purpose was to make the biblical stories about Jesus compatible with the prevailing philosophy of the current time which was Neoplatonism.  This doctrinal formulation continues to cause debate and confusion wherever its  explanation is required today.

Could my thoughts here be the prompting of the Holy Spirit to do away with our classical trinitarian concepts and simply declare that God is at work in our world as Spirit and God was at work in Jesus of Nazareth revealing His love and reconciling the world unto Himself?  This is the simple, straightforward declaration of the New Testament and we could proclaim this and leave it at that.

Celtic  spirituality, “How do I love thee?”

Let me count the ways.

For your love of nature and passion for the wild,

For blessing father, mother and child,

I love thee.

For your art, poetry and story telling,

For halls with music and dancing swelling,

I love thee.

For your concept and hope of soul friend,

For non-judging intimacy that need never end,

I love thee.

For love of learning and knowledge yearning,

For passing it on and no one spurning,

I love thee.

For reminding me of all the saints,

Of those passed and those yet wearing skirts and pants,

I love thee.

For my wife and I having gender equality,

For your circle of sharing on the cross of eternity,

I love the.

For most especially the infinite thin places,

For my viewing of God’s many faces,

I love thee.

Certainly today we need such a well rounded and earthly grounded spirituality.

Celtic Spirituality is so vibrant and alive with mystic power that I feel if I snubbed its words when reading of it they would arise from the page and strike me directly in the nose.   This is its pugnacious charm.

There is a homeliness, a lyricalness, a smell of the pasture and wood, the stock pen and the flower bed, the perfume and cologne of a Saturday night square dance, the freshness of a fresh bathed babe, and there is the softness of a mother’s breast and the hardness of claymore steel about it.  All this and much more is the rush I feel from the Celtic spiritual stream.

I think that this feeling is part of the great power of its spirituality.  Though its doctrine is good and pure and high, it is never dry.  It is never void of feeling.  It is always, it seems to me, incarnate in the full storm of human emotions and feeling and the feeling of joy cannot ever be completely suppressed.

No wonder St. Patrick chose to go back to Ireland as a missionary after he had escaped slavery there.  I think he must have sensed the potential for beauty underlying his captors’ demonic and warring elemental wildness.  I see the seedbed of developing Celtic spirituality in  his journal  when he wrote, “I baptized a 15 year old lass today.  She is so comely and beautiful that surely she shall break a score of young male hearts before she is wed.”  This is a snapshot for me of Celtic spirituality, the deeply spiritual entwined with the profoundly human.

I think the thing that most resonates for me from Celtic spirituality is its concept of thin places.  As I write this, my computer screen has become a thin place.  And just beyond it I see a mountain crag with a kilted highlander playing his pipes on it standing.  His pipes send forth a wail of pain, hurt and loneliness.  But as the wail rebounds off mountain walls I hear an underlying joyful refrain.  It says, “Though I hurt and weep, by the grace of God I am a free man and there is joy in life.  Destiny molded me in my mother’s womb and placed me here.  So much that surrounds me is of the hand of destiny but never the less I am a free man.  And a free man in my King’s service I shall be until my King who surrounds me here draws up my breath into Himself.”

I am that man.  His pain is mine.  His freedom and joy are mine also and so is his King.  I hurt but by God’s grace I sing.  All this, the Celtic emphasis frees me to feel and express.

The Celts had a love of nature; they were elemental with a passion for wild things and wilderness. This is the opposite of our take and take from nature while giving nothing back.  The saw Creation as God’s body which is panentheism.  Panentheism is God is present in everything.  It is not everything is God.  That is pantheism.  There is a universe of difference between the two.

Celtic theology gives us a love of art, poetry and story telling.  It gives us the concept of soul friends which is non-judgmental friendships where you can share all of the intimate aspects of your life safely and still be affirmed and loved.  John Wesley probably had this as the aim for his classes that he organized in the original Methodist movement.

Along with their love of learning they had a love of the saints and not just the beatified ones of the Roman Church but all heroic people of their acquaintance  who served as modes for living and devotion.  They worked at preserving their memory through ritual.

They strongly believed in gender equality and practiced it in church organizations until the Pope squelched it.  The Celtic cross’ circle is seen as a symbol of male, female equality.  They gave us the beautiful concept of thin places.  They lived in the presence of an all encompassing Spirit as expressed by Paul in Acts 17:28.  They saw two layers of reality, this world and the world of Spirit which encompassed it.  Their mysticism saw the world as transparent; if you looked right you could see through to something of God, for He shows Himself everywhere.  Thin places were places where the two layers of reality intersected and one experienced the Spirit transformatively.

Thin places could be geographic locations anywhere where our hearts are opened.  They mediate the sacred and it can be a secular place as well as a religious one.  Celtic theology made no difference between the sacred and the secular.  A thin place could be a person or the worship experience that brings reverence.  The end result of all thin places is an open heart which leads one to gratitude, compassion and justice.

I think the modern church could stand a strong dose of Celtic spirituality.  I am thankful to  Dr Jimmie Reese for most of the above thoughts which he brought to my attention in a lecture at SMU in 2009.

The Celts were migrating, warring, head hunting tribes who roved the European continent from Germany to Spain.  Their strongest influence remains today in Great Britain in Wales, Ireland, Isle of Magn and Cornwall.  One may be Celtic by descent but one must delight in Celtic heritage and things Celtic to be truly Celtic today.  In numerous ways John Wesley manifested his Celtic heritage and the influence of Celtic spirituality.

After centuries of oppression Celtic peoples migrated to the United States and to Canada in droves especially in the mid nineteenth century.  There is a great revival today in Celtic culture,music, arts, literature , worship and spirituality.  I think this is a good thing.

The pre-Christian Celts had deep mystical, psychic gifts and, shades of Merlin, they baptized these into their Christian faith to the glory of God.  After Ireland’s conversion to Christianity in the fifth century led by St. Patrick, she developed a tremendous monastic movement and out of her monasteries came multitudinous missionary monks with a burning love of learning and the Irish gift for language.  They spread all over Europe’s Western Continent and during Europe’s so called dark ages they with the gospel and their love of learning preserved and promulgated the classics of Rome and Greece shedding light upon the continent that according to Thomas Cahill helped save Europe and make the civilization that we have proudly inherited.  So one must not discount the major debt we owe to Celtic spirituality.

All Christian Theology is Incarnational.  That is, all our thinking and talking about what God is like is based upon what we can see  and experience of God in human life, all human life.  But particularly and especially, it is based upon what we see and experience of God reflected in the very human life of Jesus of Nazareth.

This is why Paul Tillich wisely  starts his systematic theology with man and not God.  All systematic theology is based upon man’s experience of  or with God.  And for the Christian the definitive theology is derived from the experience of Jesus of Nazareth with God.

Thus Christian theology is incarnational.  It comes from the experience of God incarnate in humanity and especially in the human Jesus.  Jesus was not God on earth but a wonderful human being who so incarnated and reflected and lived the will and way of God that after he was experienced as alive from the dead the church perceived Him as raised up into the meaning of Divinity forever.  Jesus becomes the Christ and Lord when he is raised and exalted up unto God’s right hand and not before.

To see Jesus as Divine after this exaltation is acceptable but to to teach Him as God walking on earth in history is harmful.  The church calls this error which has and does plague Christian thinking monophysiticism.  That is, it is a denial of Jesus’ very real and actual humanity.

Christian talk about God (theology) is incarnational.  That is it begins in man and not from God having dropped something down from Heaven in perfect form.

I feel that I can only see God to follow His way in a very real human being.  I cannot follow  a superman, which is what many’s view of Jesus is.  But the humble and humiliated Jesus of Nazareth I can follow.  For me God can only be seen in a truly human face for we would not discern Him in any other.

I really like the defining point that whatever we conclude theologically is tentative.  All of of life’s great successful decisions are made on the best tentative reaoning.  One cannot go to the moon or anything else with absolute certainty of thorough knowledge.  Whenever we feel that we have absolutely infallible theological knowledge we have exalted ourselves into the place of  God.  Theology is situational as is our ethics ultimately.

Holding onto the principle of tentativeness promotes humility and mercy towards others and that is the fruit of real religion and God knows we need that.  And theological tentativeness does not mean there cannot be certainty for faith and direction.  We can definitely follow Jesus without knowing all the details of the path we are taking.  This is inspiring to me.