Our People

“The Spirit of Truth will guide you into all truth" (WYD 2005)

Votive Mass of the Holy Spirit for World Youth Day Pilgrims at St Katharina, Buschhoven, Swisttal

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
17 August 2005

One of the great joys of my new life as a bishop is confirming children. Before doing so I try to visit the children and get to know them a bit. Recently I was visiting a primary school to meet the children to be confirmed and I was first taken to a rather younger group, the five year olds. As soon as I came through the door one little boy threw up his hand and asked: “Do bishops get good pay?”

“Not really,” I responded, “but—”. “I’m going to be a doctor,” the boy interrupted. “They get good pay.”

“Have you thought of being a priest?” I asked, “They do wonderful work.” “A priest?” he responded in his childish and exasperated innocence. “A priest? They don’t get good pay. Our family only puts one dollar on the collection plate!”

Well I can tell you that there is no pay in the world so good as that I receive when I see the faces of those children full of expectancy before and joy after I call down the Holy Spirit upon them and anoint them with chrism of salvation and promise them the gifts of wisdom and understanding, right judgment and courage, knowledge and reverence, wonder and awe in God’s presence. As their life stories unfold we hope to see in them all those fruits of the Holy Spirit working in their lives that St Paul listed in today’s First Reading and that they will be guided by that Spirit of Truth that Christ promised us in our Gospel.

But the Holy Spirit doesn’t always get a good rap in the Trinity stakes. We can easily relate to Jesus, a man like us. God the Father is harder, perhaps, to relate to, but there is the big, grey-bearded figure of Hollywood movies and there is our own experience of what a father is, or at least ought to be. But how are we to think of the Holy Spirit? We rarely move beyond the fluffy dove of Sacred Scripture. Being unacquainted with the world of the New Testament it is easy for us to see only the downy image, seemingly taken from a soft tissue-paper commercial, and miss the intention of the author. The dove was considered a sacred animal in the pagan world. The rabbis held that the dove’s cooing resembled the sound of the Divine Name. It was also a symbol of the people of Israel, of the covenant after the Flood, of the Divine Presence in the temple. It is no coincidence that St John’s Gospel describes the Heavenly Dove descending at the same time as the terrible Voice of God.

At the very beginning of the Holy Scriptures the Spirit of God hovers over the face of the waters at creation. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…and the Spirit of God hovered over the face of the deep.” The Spirit is not an added extra, something from outside us, but a reality already implicated in our very being as created by God. He hovers over the depths of our being. When the Father sends the Spirit at the request of His Son, when He descends upon His Church, the Spirit is returning to His habitation, like the Dove returning to Noah’s ark with the olive branch. He made us for Himself. He made us to be Temples for the Holy Spirit. When the Spirit comes to us, He is coming home. “Deep calls to deep in the roar of the mighty waters.”

There is no opposition, therefore, between ordinary human virtues and those bestowed by our acceptance of Christ. One is perfected by the other. St Paul’s list of vices today, the only way of life, of “fornication, impurity and licentiousness; new agery; strife, jealousy and anger; selfishness and dissension; drunkenness, carousing, and the like” could be a description of university life today! But the problems with such a pattern of life would be recognized by people of any age, place or religion, not just Christians. So too the fruits Paul praises—“love, joy and peace; patience, kindness and goodness; faithfulness, gentleness and self-control”—would have been understood and approved of even by the best pagan philosophers of his time. As St Thomas Aquinas said, “Truth, wherever it is found, was put there by the Holy Spirit”.

It is one thing to know what’s good for us. It is another thing to be it and do it. So we need Christ and His Holy Spirit. That grace raises up and heals our fallen nature. The Original Sin that is there deep in our nature and the personal sins of our choices mean our instincts have gone astray and our minds are clouded. The Holy Spirit hovers once more over the waters of creation, or of re-creation, in the font of Baptism, in which we are remade, recast, created anew. Like a thorough craftsman moving into an old house, He repairs it and makes it a fit habitation, even better than it was before. He doesn’t plaster over cracks, or put a fresh coat of paint on rotten beams. “Behold: I make all things new!”

The life of virtue is a work of the Holy Spirit. It’s not a list of rules to be adhered to with gritted teeth, but a free gift from God that draws us into the Resurrected life. Sometimes it may appear to us that God’s moral order is a bad joke to which we have forgotten the punch line. Our mind guesses what’s best for us but our desire can be for something else. St Paul recognizes that struggle. He describes it as a war between the Spirit and the Flesh. By “Flesh”—sarx in Greek—St Paul did not mean the human body, for the body like everything else God has created, is good. No, by capital-F flesh, or sarx, Paul meant unredeemed human nature, de-Spirited human nature, that part of us still liable to being swayed by evil. It is not as if our bodily impulses are sinful in themselves: we naturally want to eat, to feast our senses on what is beautiful, to be intimate with others, to marry and have children, to work and play, to rejoice in life. These are all honourable things when pursued according to God’s order and our own nature. It only when we remove God and His reason from our moral world and substitute our own order that the trouble starts. It’s like having a compass that no longer points North but somewhere else of our choosing. We can wander freely, unconstrained by considerations of true direction. We can wander freely—and become thoroughly lost in the process. Real freedom is never the result of idolatry, of dethroning God and substituting our passions, our selves. It is freely inviting the Holy Spirit to take possession of the house that is ourselves, to make us His own.

Today we have come to enter into the world of God’s Holy Spirit at the place where He is most active. The Holy Eucharist is the pre-eminent place of the Spirit. The solemn invocation of the Holy Spirit in the Mass brings together the Old Creation and the New. A natural food becomes a supernatural one. The created becomes the Creator. Bread of the earth becomes Bread from Heaven. And in the process that Spirit makes a natural man or woman like you into a supernatural one. A mere creature into the house of God. A child of the earth into a child of God.

St Leo the Great wrote in a Christmas Homily:

O Christian be aware of your dignity! It is God’s own nature that you share! Do not then by an ignoble life fall back into your former baseness. Think of the Head, think of the Body of which you are a member. Recall that you have been transferred to the light of God, the Kingdom of God. Through the Sacrament of Baptism you have been made a temple of the Holy Spirit: do not by evil deeds drive so great an indweller away from you, submitting once more to the slavery of the Devil. For you were bought at the price of Christ’s blood!