THROUGH UNTRUE

By FR. ROLANDO V. DELA ROSA, OP

A friend who was once a student of the College of the Holy Spirit (formerly Holy Ghost College), told me that she used to call the Holy Spirit “Holy Mamaw.” That’s understandable. For many people,the word“ghost”conjures up pictures of haunted houses and stories of dead persons spreading terror among the living.

But the Bible teaches us that the Holy Spirit is the third Person of the Holy Trinity. A common way of thinking about the Trinity is identifying the Father as the lover, the Son as the beloved, and the Holy Spirit as the mutual love between the two.

Being by nature self-effusive,thismutual love between the Father and the Sonpours itself outward, bringing creation into existence, empowering Jesus tofulfill His mission of redemption, and giving birth to theChurch. St. Thomas Aquinas puts it thus: “The Holy Spirit brings everything to existence, initiates and completes the building of the Church,transforms the baptized into His image, unites them in love, sanctifies them, and empowers them to do the work of Jesus.”

While we can understand all that,we find it difficult to grasp how such a self-effusive love can be thought of as a “PERSON.”We do not have a word in Filipino that corresponds to this difficult concept which Latin philosophers define as “an individual substance of a rational nature.” The Greek word for it is hypostasis.

Whenever we think of a person, we invariably mean a human being. We thus imagine God as much like us, ascribing to Him human qualities maximized to absolute perfection. While this helps us relate and communicate with Him, we must remember what God says in Isaiah 55:8-9: "My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways. For, as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts higher than your thoughts."

The great Dominican theologian, Yves Congar, writes that due to our desire to have a personal relationship with the Holy Spirit, whom we find difficult to name, we have tended to transfer many functions of the Holy Spirit unto the Blessed Virgin Mary. For instance, Mary has been called helper, advocate, defender, protector, comforter, and counselor — functions that Biblically belong to the Holy Spirit, the Paraclete (John 14:16, 26; 15:36; 16:7). This is so, not because Mary has become a substitute for the Holy Spirit, but because in her, the actions of the Holy Spirit, are most manifest.

Mary is the perfect model of someone fully possessed by the Holy Spirit because of her unconditional obedience to God’s will in her life.  She can thus teach us how to be like her, and abide with the same docility to the Holy Spirit’s action in our soul.As she proclaims in her Magnificat: “All generations will call me blessed, because the Almighty has done great things for me, Holy is his name.”

On this Pentecost day, let us allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the power of this divine Person whom we address as the Holy Spirit, to relish this experience so valuable that all other experiences appear empty and worthless in comparison to it.  And may this experience inspire us to make a total surrender of our life to God, who promises total fulfillment of our deepest longing and aspiration.