“A child is born to us.” Why a child? Why would God choose to come into this world as a baby? Why not as some superman or superwoman? Why not as someone who could simply overpower evil with a superior strength? The world is in desperate need of help and God’s response is to send a child. What is the logic?

Sometimes we make to simplistic a judgment here. We look at the sweetness and innocence of a baby and conclude that it makes sense for God to be born into our world in this way. That is not entirely wrong, there is indeed a godliness in innocence and sweetness, but that is not the point. What God’s birth as a baby underlines is not so much the sweetness of love and the virtue of innocence as the power of vulnerability and helplessness to put us on the road to life. In that sense, the manger and the cross say the same thing, namely, that vulnerability, not power, is what brings life.

Thus, when Jesus says that little children enter the kingdom effortlessly, he is not idealizing so much the innocence of children as he is their helplessness. Children enter the kingdom of God easily because they are helpless and have no power. A child cannot even feed itself, let alone earn the food it eats. In such helplessness, one can only cry out and it is this precise poverty that is the opening where life can be given.

What precisely is meant here? How are vulnerability and powerlessness the keys to life? Sometimes a thing can be understood better by seeing it against its opposite. With this in mind, allow me to present the antithesis of the Christmas scene.

When one looks at a Christmas crèche, one sees a baby surrounded by a woman (Mary), a man (Joseph), a few shepherds and kings, some angels, and an assortment of animals (sheep and camels). Everything in the scene speaks of peace, of joy, of healing, and of calm. Moreover the scene suggests that it is something flowing out of the baby, a silence and a helplessness, that lies at the root of all this peace and joy. What might its opposite look like?

In a recent novel entitled, Our Father, Marilyn French tells the story of four half­ sisters who are attending to their father who has recently been incapacitated by a stroke. He, their father, had been a man out of whom power flowed.  Gifted with a great intelligence, a handsome appearance, a vigorous health, a rich family inheritance, an excellent education, a very prestigious job, and a natural arrogance, he had been a man whom everyone met with a mixture of respect, fear, and envy. He was now eight-two years old and for all of his life he had always had wealth, power, attention, health, sex, an important job, and the respect of his peers. What he had wanted from life he had simply taken. In fact, during the prime of his life, he didn’t even have to take what he wanted; it was simply given to him by those around him. As one of the daughters described it: “He never even rang for a servant when my mother was alive – they had the bells then. She did it. He was so powerful things just appeared before him when he wanted them, everyone around him made sure of that.” (Marilyn French, Our Father, Penguin Books, London, p.304)

His four daughters, each from a different mother, are now attending to him. None of them has had a happy experience of him. His power has deeply wounded each of them, abused each of them, and helped alienate them from each other. One daughter is frigid and angry; the second is spoiled and unable to care for herself; the third is well meaning but insecure; and the last is lesbian and bitter. As they keep vigil together around his sickbed, an interesting thing happens: Whenever they feel his power (his money, his influence in history, his status with others, his power over their mothers, his capacity to control others, and his indifference to and abuse of them when they were children) they fill with bitterness, hurt, and jealousy of each other. His power is a poison, the opposite of a Christmas crèche.

Conversely, however, whenever they sense his helplessness and vulnerability a certain silent healing flows out and they begin to feel a certain calm, peace, and healing. His power had wounded them, his helplessness helps heal them; his power had brought death, jealousy, and bitterness, his helplessness finally helps bring some life.

That is why God chose to be born as a baby. Helplessness and vulnerability are where life enters. Had God sent a superman or superwoman to clean up the world things would have ended up in even more of a mess. So God sent a baby. In that powerlessness our healing can begin.

Is the world getting better or worse? Are we making moral and spiritual progress on this planet or are we sliding ever further into a moral and spiritual abyss?

This is not an easy question to answer. It is easy, too easy in fact, to look at our world today and condemn it. Certainly there are many things that, from a moral or spiritual point of view, seem to be regressing. Globalization is creating even a further gap between the rich and the poor; greed and self-interest have been elevated to the level of virtue; family and community are breaking down at every level; there is little in the way of sexual responsibility to be seen anywhere; and our everyday consciousness is becoming daily more agnostic. Things, it would seem, are beginning to slide.

And yet, this is too simple a judgment. No doubt, in comparison to our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, we have lost some ground morally and spiritually, liberal protests notwithstanding. However we have also gained some moral and spiritual ground, conservative protests notwithstanding. What are the moral and spiritual gains of our generation?

Some years ago, Carol Gilligan wrote a particularly insightful book entitled, In a Different Voice. In this book, she offers a critique of the patriarchy and hierarchy, which she sees as having propped up the power structures of most of the world up to now. In that system of patriarchy and hierarchy, somebody invariably had power over somebody else and life was not as fair to the person on the bottom of this as it was to the person on top. Thus, for the most part, in terms of power and privilege, the men were over the women, the rich were over the poor, the healthy were over the sick, the historically privileged were over those with less historical privilege, those with white skin were over those with coloured skin, those without physical handicaps were over those with physical handicaps, and humanity itself was over nature. In effect, someone was always over somebody else.

Former generations, for all their superiority to us in terms of family life, fidelity, sacrifice, duty, sexual responsibility, and worship of God, were far from perfect. Theirs was no golden age. Life was a lot fairer, filled with freedom, and filled with opportunity for some more than for others. Crassly put, in former generations you did a lot better if you were male, healthy, rich, white, historically privileged, and physically without handicap. You did not do as well if you were female, poor,  coloured, sick, handicapped, or born into  the world without connections. As Carol Gilligan would put it, one set of voices dominated over the others and life was a lot fairer for some than for others.

None of this, of course, denies the real goodness, faith, and moral fiber that existed then. In some areas of morality and spirituality, clearly those generations were superior to our own. But, and this is the point, while they were superior to us in some areas, there are other areas, important moral and spiritual ones, within which they clearly stand second to today’s generation. They had a sense of God, of family, of community, of neighbourhood, of sacrifice, of fidelity, of chastity, and of service that our generation for the most part lacks.

But they were also more racist, more sexist, more intolerant, more rigid, more imperialistic, and more given over to historical privilege than this present generation. These are not small, incidental moral things. I suspect that how we answer the question of whether we are progressing or regressing morally and spiritually is coloured considerably by our gender, race, health, place in history, and access to education, power, and money.

Not everyone would agree with this, but, whatever the moral   failings of our generation, and they are many, we have also moved the needle on the moral and spiritual compass perceptibly in the direction of progress. In what way? Today, in comparison to former generations, we are less racist, less sexist, less bigoted, less timid, and more open to ecumenism. As well, and this is a real irony since we often have trouble believing in God, we have made some real strides in purifying some of the unhealthy elements within our practical theology   of   God.   Moreover, for   all their   negative aspects, globalization   and the communications industry have helped make information available to the poor as never before and have helped bring the world together as never before. They are helping create a global village.

In philosophy there is a dictum that says that something is gained when something is lost (and vice versa). This is true too regarding morality and spirituality. Our generation has lost some ground, but it has also made some extraordinary progress.

Some years ago, I was visiting a Benedictine monastery in Belgium when an episode occurred that still haunts me. What happened? Well, you need to picture a scene to get the full impact:

It was April, but still very cold and the chapel where we had just celebrated the Eucharist and the cafeteria to which we had retired for coffee lacked somewhat both for heat and light. There were about a hundred of us present, monks and seminarians mostly, along with a few lay people. All of us were somberly drinking coffee and making small talk, except for one child, a little girl of four. She, dressed in a smart, bright little coat, was skipping smack down the middle of the cafeteria, singing to herself, letting off steam after having been forcibly silenced during the long liturgy that had just preceded.

Maybe it was the cold and bad light or maybe it was the heavy monastic dress so much in evidence, but if the best Hollywood director in the world, or the devil himself, had choreographed the thing, it could not have been set up better. Everything about that little girl spoke of life, while everything about the rest of us spoke of soberness, lack of colour, lack of life, age, and dram duty. If God were running a public relations campaign, this would not be the film to show by which to draw anyone to church. At that moment, for all the world, it looked like there was more real life in one little girl, who had just been released from church, than in all the rest of us, God-fearing, duty-driven, church-going, wisdom-filled persons, none of whom could skip publicly if our lives depended on it.

I walked out of that cafeteria not knowing exactly what to make of this, given that I have some empathy for both sides of the equation, and I have noticed a lot of similar contrasts since. We all have. How often does it appear as though what is happening in our churches is dead, duty-driven and sterile, in comparison to that powerful pulse of life that literally surges out of our youth, our rock stars, our athletes, our secular comedians, our raunchy sitcoms, and so much else in our world that seems a lot freer and full of life precisely because, like that little girl, it has been released from church?

Time and time again, it seems that life, colour, and energy take their source elsewhere, not in the faith or in the church. For example, the very talented, powerful, young artist, Alanis Morissette, is, in effect, this little girl, grown up and with an attitude. A bitter, ex­ Catholic, Morissette complains of the “loveless priests” who run the faith and who stifle love and energy. Well, I’m one of those priests, stung by such criticism, even as I recognize some of its truth. A lot of the real energy that drives our world – and not just negatively in terms of greed and lust – does not emanate from the churches. A lot of joy, love, zest, and colour take their origins elsewhere.

There is a lot that needs to be reflected upon here, although in the end it is a considerably more complex than what is spontaneously suggested when we see a little girl happily skipping among sombre monks or hear Alanis Morissette whining about how erotically stifling was her Catholic upbringing. What this suggests is that we misunderstand the connection between life and wisdom and especially misunderstand how, lately, much of life is uninitiated by wisdom and much of wisdom is disconnected from life. What am I saying?

Too often today we confuse life and wisdom, or simply fail to distinguish between them. For example, we see a lot of life – raw energy, eroticism, colour, wit, intelligence, beauty, and health – simply divorced from wisdom, cut off from that which holds the community together at its heart. That is why something can be brilliant, funny, beautiful, healthy, and full of real energy and yet of itself be unable to deal with the real issues of meaning, community, family, suffering, death, wound, and forgiveness .You watch Seinfeld for fun, not for wisdom.

But the reverse is just as true. We often see a wisdom that is disconnected from life that precisely lacks any real connection to energy, eroticism, colour, wit, intelligence, beauty, and raw health. That is why sometimes someone can deal with the issues of meaning, pain, death, and forgiveness and yet be unable to radiate any real energy or health. You go to church for wisdom, not for fun.

It can be very helpful to know this. One should never confuse Alanis Morissette with Mother Theresa, nor Jerry Seinfeld with John of the Cross. In one, we see more the raw beauty and pulse of God’s life; in the other we see the maturity of God’s wisdom. Part of our task is to bring them together.

In her masterful book, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, Ruth Burrows has a section within which she lists the faults of those who are beyond initial conversion. What are these faults?

Burrows has her own list, what I offer here is the perspective that Henri Nouwen gives in his spiritual masterpiece, The Return of the Prodigal Son. Among many things in that book, Nouwen tells us that as persons who understand ourselves as already committed, we still need to make a three-fold conversion movement: i) We need to move from being a bystander to being a participant; ii) from being a judge to being a repentant sinner; and iii) from speaking about love to actually letting ourselves be loved. What is involved in each of these?

From being a bystander to being a participant: In essence, what we need to do here is to move from studying life, speaking about it, teaching about it, writing about it, and perhaps even at times mimicking it, to actually living it. I know this sounds very much like a cliché devoid of substance, but a lot of what is wrong in the world, the church, and within our personal lives today is precisely the fact that we study things, talk about them, strongly voice our convictions about them, but often, in fact, do little or nothing about them. For example, we do not lack for literature, moral rhetoric, or good analysis on social justice. But there is, in fact, very, very little being done. This is not so much because our passion for justice is insincere, but because at the end of the day we are bystanders not participants.

The same holds true for prayer. There is no shortage of literature in this area (and no shortage of workshops either). We talk enough about prayer. We just don’t pray a lot. In terms of deep private prayer, we pray very little. Again, we are much more in the position of the bystander than participant. Therese of Lisieux once wrote: “I always preferred to pray rather than to have spiritual conversations about prayer.” For most of us, the opposite is true.

Robert Moore suggests that this failure to move from bystander to participant is a disease that particularly afflicts those among us who do any kind of ministry or are in any teaching or healing profession. Invariably we end up studying life and speaking about it rather than living it. It is no accident that those of us in these vocations frequently feel anger towards anyone who actually does anything. It will also be no accident that when the last tree on the planet has been cut down there will have been libraries of studies written about the ill-effect of cutting down trees, but very little will have been done by a way of action by those who wrote all those books. We generally respond to the issue of violence against children and women in the same way – with yet another study. We are too much bystanders, not participants.

We must also move from being judge to being repentant sinner. What is meant by this? All of us pray the prayer of the Pharisee –  Thank God that I’m not like that other person! ” We are all self-righteous, it is only a question of what we are self-righteous about.

We used to stereotype self-righteousness in one phrase: “Holier-than-thou”. We are all “holier-than-thou”, except we each define holiness according to our own idiosyncratic preference, that is, as “more–sensitive-than-thou” ”brighter-than-thou“, “less­ hypocritical-than-thou“, “more-experienced-than–thou”,  “less-bigoted– than–thou”,  “less­ rigid–than-thou”,  or “more-of-a-victim-than-thou”. In subtle and not so subtle ways, each of us is more judge than repentant sinner.

We stop being a judge only when we claim our proper place among the broken, among God’s little ones, the unfaithful, sinners. Only when we watch the news at night and recognize that every pathology, every act of violence, and every sin we see on our television screen is also inside of us will we lose all interest in making comparisons and be content to let God’s grace simply work in us.

Finally, we must move from speaking about love to actually letting ourselves be loved. Nouwen uses his own life as an example. For years, he went all over the world giving talks about love, even while not letting those around him really love him. Only after moving in with the physically handicapped, with people who were not interested in what he had to say about love, did he actually allow himself to be loved. What was true for him is true for most of us. It is far easier for us to speak about love than to let ourselves actually be loved.

Those around us, family and friends, already know all these things about us. It’s time we recognized them too.

Contrast clarifies vision. To set two things in opposition to each other is to see both more clearly.

With that in mind, it is interesting to contrast two views on God, religion, and the human soul. One is the perspective of Albert Camus, a Nobel Prize winning writer and an avowed atheist; the other is that of Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft (computer-software}, the richest man in the world, and someone who appears to be rather indifferent religiously.

Albert Camus, who died in an auto crash in 1960, was a very complex man. After one of his plays opened in Paris, some of the audience, knowing him to be an atheist but surprised by the religious tone of his play, asked him about his religious beliefs. He replied: “It’s true that I don’t believe in God, but that doesn’t mean I’m an atheist, and I would agree with Benjamin Constant, who thought a lack of religion was vulgar and even hackneyed” Meeting groups of students in Stockholm, after receiving the Nobel Prize, he engaged frequently in dialogues about God and Christ , telling them: “I have Christian concerns, but my nature is pagan.” (Quoted by o. Todd , Albert Camus,A Life, Alfr ed Knopf, 1997, pp. 356 & 380)

Bill Gates, in an interview with Time magazine last year, was also questioned about his religious concerns. His answers stand in sharp contrast to those of Camus. Asked whether there was anything special, perhaps even divine, about the human soul, he replied: “I don’t have any evidence on that” Earlier in the interview, he had stated: “I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence. All the neurons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion. We can someday replicate that on a machine. Earthly life is carbon based and computers are silicon based and that is not a major distinction. Eventually we’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.” Asked if he goes to church, he replied that his wife is Catholic and she goes, but, for himself: “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.”  (Time, January 13, 1997, pp. 33 & 37)

An interesting contrast! Two very different men – Albert Camus, an atheist , but with a chronic , anxious itch for religious questions; Bill Gates, a believer, but seemingly indifferent to religious issues! Which is healthier?

My bias is clearly for Camus. But why? Is an anxious, neurotic, atheism really preferable to a calm, benign, religious indifference? Is a philosophical temperament and the interests that this engenders somehow morally superior to a more one-sided interest in technology and what it can do? Is it better to settle into your chair at night with the latest novel by AS. Byatt or Toni Morrison than with the latest manual on computer software?

Different people will answer those questions differently, but my vote is for Camus. However, my rap against Bill Gates is not about the value of technology, computers, or the Internet, nor indeed about the merit of the software he produces (which I both use and like). My knock on him is my censure against our culture in general (which so rewards Bill Gates because in many ways he is its prime analogate). What’s wrong with our culture, in terms of wisdom and depth, is not that it sometimes rejects God, soul, and religion, although I do see that as a fault. What is more serious is that our culture, like Bill Gates, too often treats questions of deeper meaning only in terms of empirical data, efficiency , and what can be found on the internet. The end result is that it often does not find religious questions even worth asking. This leads to a one-dimensional soul, dead of wonder, flat enough to think that if God is to be found it will be on the internet, cost-accounting the merits of spending an hour at church on a Sunday morning.

Bias or not, give me Camus’ atheism any time! For all its technical success, computer software is hardly the theory of relativity, let alone the theology of redemption. And Bill Gates? A very bright man indeed, but Albert Einstein he is not; at least not until, like Einstein, he begins to speak of realities and meanings that can’t be replicated in computer software.

There is an interesting twist in the answer Camus gave his audience in Stockholm: “I have Christian concerns, but my nature is pagan.” What’s wrong in our culture is that too often we have neither of these, Christian concerns nor a pagan nature. Nor do we realize that the two are inextricably linked. A true pagan might not believe in God, but that doesn’t mean that he or she is an atheist.

The culture of Microsoft, our culture, is the opposite. It might well believe in God, but it is atheistic because too much within it militates against believing in fire. We are too absorbed with the proper functioning of mechanics – and there is nothing wild, fiery, and divine inside a machine!

William Blake once said that should a fool persist in his folly eventually that folly would turn to wisdom. 

The same might be said about the agnosticism of our time. Our problem is not that we question too much but that we question too little, especially about the things of God. In the end, we struggle religiously not because we are enlightened and courageous enough to ask the hard questions but because we are afraid to face the hardest question of all, namely, the one about God’s holiness and otherness. In the end, we are not very open-minded at all and this constitutes our real problem in terms of believing in God. We do not have trouble believing in God because we are finally courageous enough to look reality square in the face, but for the opposite reason, we do not persist far enough in our courage and questioning.

What is implied here?

Many  of us today, for all kinds  of reasons, are uncomfortable with God’s holiness as Scripture defines  it when it tells us that God is totally beyond our imaginations, concepts, language, and feelings: “God’s ways are not our ways.” If the Scriptures are to be believed then God can never be figured out or second-guessed. You can shake your fist at God or you can bend your knee in worship of God, but you can never understand God.   Thus, at the end of the day, whether you are staring at blessing or curse, graciousness or suffering, love or hate, life or death, you can only say this of God: “Holy, Holy, Holy! … Other,  Other, Other! Totally beyond anything I can say, think, imagine, or feel is God.  God’s ways are not my ways!”

That notion, however, is easily lost.  Like Job’s friends,  we like to compare God’s ways to our ways and, on that basis, find God unacceptable. We do this in all kinds of sincere and well-intentioned ways; for example, we say things like: “If there  were an all­ loving and all-powerful God,  this suffering would not exist!” “God could never  permit this!” “This cannot make sense!” “An all-powerful God  would do something about this!”

These expressions, and the attitudes that go with them, seem enlightened, sympathetic, and courageous; certainly most people would say that of Harold Kushner’s book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, which says precisely those things. Religiously, however, this is problematic. Why?

Because when we think like this, in effect, we are creating God in our own image and likeness. We are using the same set of categories to understand God as to understand ourselves. By doing that we are shrinking an infinite God to fit our finite, human understanding. While that might see enlightened, courageous, and a way of making God more sympathetic to our human plight, it has devastating underside. It eventually leads to atheism because whenever the full holiness (the otherness) of God is reduced, be it for whatever reason, we are ultimately left with an impoverished deity who is not  worth believing in.

Simply put, a God whose thoughts are our thoughts and whose ways are our ways, a God who can be understood, is eventually not an object for reverence or worship. Such a God is too small, too ordinary, and too impotent to be an object of faith.  Likewise such a God can neither be fully Creator nor  Redeemer and will be seen as an opium for those who lack real intellectual courage. If God is no holier than the way he or she is thought-of by many people today, then  Karl Marx is right. God is a projection of the human mind and mystery is simply another word for ignorance.

Small wonder we struggle with faith and belief in God  – we think of understanding as faith and already know the limits of understanding! To truly believe in God,  we must have a sense of awe and that is predicated on God as being conceived of as so awe-filled and holy that we want spontaneously, like Isaiah, to purge ourselves with burning coals before approaching such mystery. 

Our problem is that we do not contemplate because we are convinced that there is nothing worth contemplating. We’ve already had a look and we know what’s there! And so God becomes for us not so much a holy fire as a complex equation that we have more or less understood.

Because of this we are often fixated at a  certain level of agnosticism, of questioning. We wonder, seek, and courageously ask questions, up to a point – that point where God’s ways are no longer our ways, that point where understanding runs dry and faith has to take over, and that point where mystery enters and we are asked to take off our shoes before it. There we stop questioning.

But faith never demands that we stop asking hard questions. It demands the opposite, namely, that we persist in our questioning (beyond the limits set by intellectual fashion and the empiricism of our age) until our folly turns to wisdom.

It is hard to believe that God still loves this world and smiles upon it as does a mother upon her child. Our spontaneous impulse is rather to protest, condemn, and point out the world’s faults, its sin, its injustice, and its indifference to God.

But the world is still God’s creation, still lives under God’s primal blessing, and (post-modern or not) is still loved by God. Like the original chaos, so full of both life and potential, our world today is still spinning and creating itself under the influence of God’s breath. Its marvelous achievements reflect both God’s greatness and human cooperation with God’s power. The world still honours both God and humanity.

But it also as a very mixed reality. On the one hand, the world is full of goodness, generosity, sincerity, creativity, imagination, and ingenuity. Daily we see real advancement in moral sensitivity, knowledge, art, and technology. On the other hand, it is also full of infidelity, sin, injustice, greed, individualism, and many other rampant forces that constitute a virtual conspiracy against the poor, the family, sexual integrity, and compassion. It is a world within which progress itself often comes at the expense of the poor and progress itself causes us to be blind to those who fall through its cracks. 

All of this notwithstanding, too often we tend to see the world only negatively. Irrespective of whether we are liberal or conservative, whether we are into piety or justice, we do not “weep over” the world in sympathy as Jesus wept over Jerusalem. Rather we tend to stand in blanket judgment against it, refusing to recognize and bless its goodness. Our attitude towards globalization is a good example of this. Within church circles globalization is almost always viewed as negative, given that we are looking mainly at its economic component where we see it generating a new poor even as it makes the rich still richer. However, there too are positive aspects to globalization, especially as regards communications, information, education, a growing universality, and a growing awareness of injustice in the world. Ironically, even as it is helping make the rich richer and generating a new poor, globalization is making the world aware of injustice in a way that has never been possible before. Thus, despite its obvious negative aspects, globalization is also helping create an interdependence which is making us, for the first time ever, truly a global community. The same might be said, in a slightly different way, about the media and its effect on our world. 

And the world is not blind to our negative judgment. For the most part, it views us, the churches, with suspicion, as precisely standing in narrow and naive judgment of it, simplistic and fundamentalistic, the enemy of its life and creativity. The world does not believe in our sympathy and looks to us neither for comfort nor guidance.

What then is to be our response? Through what prism are we to see the world? First of all, we must let ourselves be purified by its critique of us. Its anger, accusations, anti-clericalism, and indifference constitute for us an important road to purification and humility. Next, our attitude must mirror God’s attitude. Accordingly we must comfort and bless the world’s life and goodness even as we disturb and challenge its injustice and infidelities. We must comfort it in its pain, affirm its goodness, and help it direct its powerful life forces and energy towards the transcendent, towards God, towards community, towards justice, and towards compassion. We must bless the world by letting it know that God still looks at it and says: ‘You are my beloved Child in whom I am well pleased”; even as we prophetically challenge it to see the poverty of its practical atheism, its lack of community, its consumerism, its greed, its obsession with comfort and the things of this world, and especially with its failure to see the poor. 

Ultimately, what we must do is to show the world the cross of Christ, to make it aware that the one whom it commonly rejects, the one whom it crucifies, the poor one, the helpless one, the unnoticed one, the insignificant one, is the cornerstone for its final progress. Within all the goodness and sin of this world, our task is to stand with the poor and bring the expertise of the poor, which is the wisdom of the cross, to all the dialogue and planning that goes into helping shape our planet. 

But we can do this only if we view the world through a prism of hope within which we bless its goodness and challenge its sin, even as we trust that God still deeply loves this post-modern planet and that, in the end, all will be well and all will be well and every manner of being will be well.

Someone once said that the law of gravity and the law of love ultimately have the same source and are both driven by the same spirit, the Holy Spirit. 

Would that we realized the truth of that! If we recognized how the Holy Spirit is present in everything – physical creation, love, human creativity, and morality – perhaps we could hold more things together in a fruitful tension rather than so often opposing them and having the different gifts of the Holy Spirit fight each other within our lives. What does this mean? 

We have too many unhealthy dichotomies in our lives. Too often we find ourselves choosing between things that should not be in opposition to one another and we are in the unhappy position of having to pick between two things which are both, in themselves , good . Thus, we live in a world within which, generally speaking, the spiritual is set against the physical, certain moral precepts are set against creativity, wisdom is set against education, commitment against sex, conscience against pleasure, and personal fidelity against creative and professional success. 

But obviously there is something wrong here. If one force, the person of the Holy Spirit, is the single source that animates all of these things then clearly we should not be in the position where we have to choose between them. Ideally we should be choosing both because the one, same Spirit undergirds both. 

Is this true? Is the Holy Spirit both the force of gravity and the source of love? Yes. At least if the Scriptures are to be believed. They tell us that the Holy Spirit is both a physical and a spiritual force, the source of all creativity and all morality all at the same time. 

We first meet the person of the Holy Spirit in the opening line of the bible: “In the beginning there was a formlesss void and the Spirit of God hovered over the waters … ” In the early chapters of the scripture, the Holy Spirit is presented as a physical force, a wind that comes from the very mouth of God and not only shapes and orders physical creation but is in fact the energy the lies at the base of everything, animate and inanimate alike: “Take away our breath, and everything returns to dust.” 

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.