Archive for holy spirit

God’s Creative Spirit Over the Atlantic Ocean

Posted in Franciscan Spirituality, Uncategorized with tags , , , , , on July 26, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

“In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters” (Gen 1:1-2).

The opening lines to the Bible, the first two verses of Genesis immediately came to mind as I sat last night on the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. I’m on the Jersey shore for a few days, invited to give a talk at the nearby Franciscan parish and community center that is run and staffed by the friars of my province. It is a welcoming community and it was so nice to catch up with friar friends that I haven’t seen in months. This is high tourist season around here, which means that there are throngs of people from a panoply of locales all converging here to enjoy the sun and sand. By day it’s a very busy little vacation town, by night the beach is much more quiet.

The weather took a turn last evening as the sun set. What began as a sunny and warm afternoon ended as a land awaiting a thunderstorm. Expectantly, the ocean was crashing ashore forcefully and the wind that accompanied the waves was pretty fierce. This is much different from the experience of the Pacific I had last month when I was living at Old Mission Santa Barbara in California. The seas never seemed to pick up quite as powerfully. But last night’s waves and the steady breeze in my face reminded me of God’s continued presence in the world, the God we call Spirit.

What a lot of people might not realize about the opening lines of Genesis is the important imagery that is being presented to us in order for us to better appreciate the intimacy of God’s relationship and closeness to the Created Order. The Ruach (spirit) of God is the “wind,” as the NRSV and many other translations suggest in English, that sweeps over the face of the Earth. But the waters described on the face of the Earth are not the calm aquatic images our poetic imagination likely conjures. The Hebrew word is tohuwabohu – pure and utter chaos. It evokes not a tranquil mountain lake amid verdant forests, but the darkened context of a nighttime thunderstorm above the violent and unsettled Atlantic Ocean. The Ruach does not come in a wispy form, but bellows with the power of the Atlantic winds.

As the salty spray of the ocean hit my face, I was reminded of the embodiment of God’s love in Creation. It is, as thinkers like St. Bonaventure suggest, God’s overflowing love that serves as the source of creation. Creation is an act of God’s Love that doesn’t begin at some remote time in the past to be forgotten or cataloged, but remains an ongoing reality that we might today call evolution, and what St. Paul and the Book of Revelation call “making all things new.”

Sometimes it takes the familiarity of the coast and ocean at which you feel most at home (no offense, Pacific Ocean) to make you recall God’s continued presence in the world around us. How awesome that reality is. I hope that I am able to continue to appreciate Creation’s beauty during my short stay here. May you too, wherever you find yourself, be attentive to the way God’s Spirit continues to move about the face of the Earth, and above the tohuwabohu of our world and of our lives.

Photo: dapixara.com

Leave A Comment »

The Politics of Insecurity: Forgetting the Holy Spirit

Posted in Solemn Vow Retreat with tags , , , , , , , on July 11, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

This reflection is now available in Daniel P. Horan, OFM’s book Franciscan Spirituality for the 21st Century: Selected Reflections from the Dating God Blog and Other Essays, Volume One (Koinonia Press, 2013).

1 Comment »

Finding Peace in the Eucharistic Prayer

Posted in Solemn Vow Retreat with tags , , , , , , , on July 7, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

Thursday 7 July 2011

While not used all that often, there are alternative Eucharistic prayers in the Roman Missal including settings categorized for Masses with Children and the, all-too-often underused, Masses for Reconciliation.

Given that our whole lives call for reconciliation, the acknowledgement of our individual and collective wrongdoings as well as the striving toward returning to right relationship with ourselves, others and God, it seems that the Eucharistic Prayer for Reconciliation (options one and two) should or at least could be used more often.

Last night I went to bed thinking about the Second Eucharistic Prayer for Reconciliation. I have found myself thinking about the various Eucharistic Prayers rather often lately. Perhaps this is because my friar classmate and I will be ordained – God willing – in just a few months. The structure of the prayer, an adaptation of the Jewish table prayers made new and different at the Last Supper, has especially caught my attention.

Our collective prayer of thanksgiving, through the prayer of the priest speaking on behalf of all those gathered (for the priest is the presider and principal celebrant, but the entire Body of Christ is who offers the prayer of the Eucharist, a prayer of thanksgiving), recalls the entirety of salvation history and all for which we are grateful.

The so-called Institution Narrative provides an opportunity for the community to enter into the memoria, the “calling to mind,” what happened that night before Jesus Christ was betrayed. What follows is the entire prayer of the Church, the intercessory offering of our desire to be in communion with God and one another, scattered as we are throughout the world (Lumen Gentium no. 13).

It is the setting of the Second Eucharistic Prayer for Reconciliation that I wish to share today. The words are to infrequently prayed, but the preface which I share with you below offers us much to consider. May we take the time to hear the words of the Eucharistic Preface anew, finding peace and the impetus for justice in the Eucharist we celebrate together.

Father, all powerful and ever living God, we praise and thank you through Jesus Christ our Lord for your presence and action in the world.

In the midst of conflict and division, we know it is you who turn our minds to thoughts of peace.

Your Spirit is at work when understanding puts an end to strife, when hatred is quenched by mercy, and vengeance gives way to forgiveness.

For this we should never cease to thank and praise you.

We join with all the choirs of heaven as they sing forever to your glory…

Each Eucharistic Prayer Preface includes this basic structure, but this particular setting highlights the pneumatology (the focus on the Holy Spirit) in a way that strikes me as particularly relevant for our day. May we indeed find ourselves working to end strife, end hatred with mercy and forgive: then we will be living as Christians, proclaiming with our words and deeds the Kingdom of God.

(FYI: Tomorrow Prince William and Kate Middleton will be less-than two miles away from where I’m staying for the month on retreat. I wonder how chaotic Santa Barbara will be because of their visit).

Photo: Stock

1 Comment »

The Spirit of Truth: Sometimes God Tells us What we Don’t Want to Hear

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , on May 29, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

This reflection is now available in Daniel P. Horan, OFM’s book Franciscan Spirituality for the 21st Century: Selected Reflections from the Dating God Blog and Other Essays, Volume One (Koinonia Press, 2013).

Leave A Comment »

My Recent Experience of ‘Sacramental Time’

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , on April 13, 2011 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

 

Shortly before the Bishop asks the confirmandi to profess their faith in the form of the renewal of baptismal promises (Do you believe in God the Father? I Do!), he introduces what is about to happen in terms of the completion of the Sacraments of Initiation, inviting those to be confirmed to recall how on the occasion of their baptism their parents and godparents professed this faith for them as they were initiated into a new relationship within the Church. It was then, last night, that I had a very clear experience of, what I will call, “Sacramental Time.”

I was Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Utica, NY, (my home parish), for the celebration of the Sacrament of Confirmation for my youngest brother, Ryan. He is a lot younger than I am, which might help explain how, in addition to being asked to be his Confirmation Sponsor, I was asked by our parents many years ago to be his godfather. It was in the same church, in the same sacred space that more than a decade ago I stood holding my baby brother and then the baptismal candle representing the Light of Christ, professing on his infant behalf the faith he now professed with his classmates.

I glanced over beyond where the confirmandi were standing to see the baptismal font where that took place so many years ago and the experience of grace, the liminality of both sacramental events, occurred to me in a way that transcends chronological time. We experience life so often as a series of events, engaged or confronted in sequential order. Yet, this was an experience of the transcendent of the liminal that was non-sequential, it was indeed sacramental.

The time marked by that moment of the Spirit was not something easily adjudicated by clocks and calendars, nor easily expressed by words (hence the difficulty with which I write this reflection), but instead was an experience of the sacred and a recognition of the way God’s Spirit is always already at work in the world. Augustine, Bonaventure and others understood Grace to mean — fundamentally — the Holy Spirit. The experience of Grace in the Sacraments, I would argue, is indeed a unique experience of the Holy Spirit, but not something temporally invoked or logically conceived. Instead, it is an experience of the reality of God’s love and work in our world.

The Sacramentality of this time has the power to snap us out of the quotidian ordinariness of daily life and allows us to see, to feel, to share in the baptismal relationship we celebrate as a community of faith and the Body of Christ.

When I walked up before the local Bishop to place my right hand on my brother’s shoulder, supporting him and providing witness to the experience of the completion of what began as an infant and now continues through his entire life, I was able to recognize the ways in which the Spirit bestows Her gifts to the world, not in the form of superpowers, but in the forms — as the Prophet Isaiah and St. Paul tell us — that God provides to live a life centered on community and charity (Caritas).

This is precisely what the celebration of the Sacraments of the Church are about: Sacramental Time. They are not excuses for parties, nor rites of passage, they are moments that call us beyond ourselves, beyond the everyday to experience the God who is always in relationship with us from the time we were in our mothers’ wombs through life until we pass into eternal life.

Photo: iStock

Leave A Comment »

Remember the Holy Spirit?

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , on November 9, 2010 by Daniel P. Horan, OFM

Just Checking.

Today in my theology class, we’re discussing the Holy Spirit and the emergence of the early ecclesia (or “Church”). Going over my lecture notes in preparation for today’s class, I was reminded of how often the Holy Spirit gets neglected in Christian theology. I should say, neglected in the West.

One of the things that Roman Catholics generally don’t speak about — that is, those who are aware at all — is the tradition of Theopoiesis — a Greek word which literally means: “becoming divine.”  This is one of the ways in which the Holy Spirit works in the world and within Creation.

Theopoiesis is intimately tied to the Incarnation of God, and, as it turns out, largely independent from the tradition of focusing on human sin as the cause for the Incarnation. Athanasius, the Third Century Christian thinker and Bishop most famous for his advocation of the creedal promulgations of the Council of Nicea, wrote “God became man so that we might become God.” This might initially sound odd to the Western Christian ear, likely because of its powerfully optimistic tone. It suggests that God’s plan from all eternity was to bring all of humanity (and subsequently, the rest of creation) to glory; to be like God. This is the work of the Holy Spirit – the indwelling of God as creative breath (ruach, pneuma) and life-giving Spirit.

Additionally, the Spirit is viewed as some to be the expression of the feminine qualities of the Divine. The Hebrew (Ruach) and the Greek (pneuma) are both feminine nouns, while the Latin (Spiritus) — the exception to the rule —  is masculine. I often hear people refer to the Holy Spirit in third person as “she,” and there is something rather comforting and refreshing about that.

Perhaps we could spend some time today to reflect on the presence of God in our world as Spirit and recall the centrality of this often overlooked dimension of our faith.

Leave A Comment »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 395 other followers

%d bloggers like this: