The ancients believed that there was a soul in everything and that soul, which was God’s breath, held everything together and gave it meaning. They did not understand, as we do today, the workings of the infra-atomic world, how the tiniest particles and energy waves themselves possess erotic, electrical charges, how hydrogen seeks out oxygen, and how at its most elemental level physical reality is bursting with energies that attract and repulse each other just as people do. They could not explain these things scientifically the way we can, but they recognized, just as we do, that there is already some form of love inside all things, however inanimate. They attributed all of this to God’s breath, the wind that comes from God’s mouth and ultimately animates rocks, water, animals, and human beings.
But they also understood that this same breath that animates and orders physical creation is also the source of all wisdom, harmony, peace, creativity, morality , and fidelity . God’s breath, was understood to be as moral as it is physical , as harmonious as it is creative, and as wise as it is fertile. For them, the breath of God was one force and it did not contradict itself. The physical and the spiritual world were not set against each other. One spirit was understood to be the source of both. We need to understand things in that same way. We need to let the Holy Spirit, in all his and her fullness, animate our lives. What this means concretely is that we must not let ourselves be energized and driven too much by one part of the Spirit to the detriment of other parts of that same Spirit.
Thus, there should not be in our lives creativity in the absence of morality, education in the absence of wisdom, sex in the absence of commitment, pleasure in the absence of conscience, and artistic or professional achievement in the absence of personal fidelity. Especially there should not be a good life for us in the absence of justice for everyone. Conversely though we should be suspicious of ourselves when we have morality without creativity, when our wisdom spurns education, when our commitments are sterile, when our conscience has a problem with pleasure, and when our personal fidelity is defensive in the face of art and achievement. One Spirit is the author of all of these. Hence there must be equal attention paid to each of them.
Someone once said that a heresy is something that is nine-tenths true. That is also our problem with the Holy Spirit. We tend to be heretics, living out some truths to the detriment of others. [Except from Ron Rolheiser’s “One Spirit – One Source of All” September 1998]
