Catholic Outlook Magazine Ordinary Time Winter Edition 2022

Looking Deeper
This season of Pentecost, let’s remind ourselves
that nothing is more important than experiencing
the grace and beauty of the Holy Spirit of
the Risen Christ, who breathes on us every
day afresh.
Listen again to St John Paul II’s encouraging and
prophetic words about how the Spirit has been so
present in our ancient land. His words spoke so
powerfully to the indigenous people at Alice Springs
in 1986:
“For thousands of years you have lived in this land
and fashioned a culture that endures to this day.
And during all this time, the spirit of God has been
with you. Your ‘Dreaming’, which influences your
lives so strongly that, no matter what happens, you
remain forever people of your culture, is your only
way of touching the mystery of God’s spirit in you
and in creation. You must keep your striving for God
and hold on to it in your lives.”
Sadly, in our sceptical and pragmatic Australian
culture, we can, however, become agnostic about
the Holy Spirit.
Many of us often neglect or fear the life of the
Holy Spirit. But if there is a God, then certainly
experiencing the grace of the Holy Spirit is the
only realism.
That is why I treasure J.V. Taylor’s book on the Holy
Spirit, The Go-Between God. It is the best book I
have ever read on the Holy Spirit. For Taylor, the
Spirit is literally the ‘Go-Between God’, the bond
between the Father and the Son, and the One
through whom they are present to us.
Taylor makes the Spirit come alive through
describing how the Holy Spirit works in the ‘nittygritty’
of personal relationships in daily life. The
Spirit does this by helping people to see other
individuals as entirely ‘other’ from them; by helping
people to realise that the other persons they
encounter see the world through entirely different
lenses shaped by their own experiences.
Drawing heavily on Martin Buber’s I and Thou,
Taylor’s main point is that the Holy Spirit primarily
works as a ‘go-between’. In other words, when
individuals meet and converse, the Spirit is not
merely ‘in’ each of the individuals but is his own
personality working between them.
Taylor explains: “To live in prayer, therefore, is to
live in the Spirit; and to live in the Spirit is to live in
Christ … to live in Christ is to live in prayer. Prayer is
not something you do; it is a style of living.”
A ‘style of living’ that Taylor illustrates in one
ordinary but very beautiful experience of the
Holy Spirit.
He describes a West Indian woman in London,
who in her flat had just received the news that her
husband had been killed in a street accident. She
sat in the corner of the sofa, paralysed. Nobody
could get near to her; it was as if she were in a
trance. And then the teacher of one of her children
came in, saw the situation in a moment and sat
down beside her, and put her arm across her
shoulders and held her tightly. The white face was
pressed to the brown one. And as the intolerable
pain of this seeped through to the visitor, her
tears began to fall, onto their hands clasped in
the woman’s lap. This went on until the grieving
woman herself began to weep, and their tears were
mingled, and the healing began.
Taylor’s comments: “That is the embrace of God.
That is his kiss of life. That is the embrace of his
mission with our intercession. And the Holy Spirit
is the force in the straining muscles of an arm; the
Holy Spirit is in the thin film of perspiration between
a white cheek and a brown one. The Holy Spirit is
in those mingled tears falling onto those clasped
hands. He is as close and as unobtrusive as that,
and as irresistibly strong.”
The Holy Spirit, then, is the invisible third party
who stands between me and the other, making us
mutually aware. The Spirit opens our eyes to Christ
and also opens our eyes to our brothers and sisters
in Christ—especially the poor.
More than ever, inside and outside the Church, we
all need to be on the lookout for the presence of this
‘Go-Between God’.
Come Holy Spirit!
Br Mark O’Connor FMS is the Vicar for Communications
in the Diocese of Parramatta.
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