More to the Spirit

Theologians, writers and artists have sought to encapsulate the unknowable Trinity with three leafed clovers; ice, water and steam; daughter, mother and wife and many other images. The Rubliev icon of the three seated figures is a much loved and useful image of Trinity. Beautiful and evocative as it is, our religious art, both eastern and western, mostly reflects a static pyramidal structure with a male Father God at the top, perhaps alongside the other persons, and everything else beneath the clouds.

But there is more! Jesus tells the disciples in today’s gospel, “I still have many things to say to you but they would be too much for you now. But when the Spirit of truth comes he will lead you to the complete truth.” (John 16:12-15). Opening up fully to the Holy Spirit promised to us by Jesus; embracing a fully Trinitarian thinking (what Thomas Aquinas saw as God’s art) we find a more spiral, circle and flow than pyramid. (Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance).

Pope Francis passionately writes of the Spirit fully engaged with and in us and everything: “The Spirit of God has filled the universe with possibilities and therefore, from the very heart of things, something new can always emerge” (Laudate Si 80). The Pope quotes St Thomas Aquinas, “Nature is none other than a certain kind of art, God’s art, impressed upon things, whereby those things are moved to determinate end. It is as if a shipbuilder were able to give timbers the wherewithal to move themselves to take the form of a ship.” (St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae ). The Spirit of God is in the swirl of everything. “Throughout the vast sweep of cosmic and biological evolution, the Spirit embraces the material root of life and its endless potential, empowering the cosmic process from within.” (Daniel O’Leary, An Astonishing Secret).

Deacon Mark Kelly