“The Spirit Blows Where It Wills”
Fr. George Wertin
Sunday, May 15th, 2005

I like to think of this third millennium as the age of the Spirit. We name God as SPIRIT

• Naming God as Spirit is even more meaningful for us in our worldview today than naming God as Father or even God as Mother. It is metaphorical language: God is like a father and a mother and spirit
• Why is God like spirit? Because the Spirit is within us. The Spirit pervades all creation.
• The old cosmology envisioned God as out there - or up there – dealing with us as an external agent – and capable of manipulating the events in the world and in our lives.

• The obsolete view that saw God as out there forced Christianity into a sin/redemption model: we had broken our covenant with God. And God must punish us for our sins. We had to be redeemed. And Jesus expiated for our sins. He was the victor over death and sin.
• The new worldview is evolutionary and sees us human beings as a part of the unfolding of the world. We become the consciousness of matter. In this model we are now co-creators with God in the mystical unfolding of matter.

Psalm 104:

O God: “You give them all food in due season,

you feed everybody

If you give your breath

The world will live.

If you ever stop breathing

The world will die.”

In the old worldview, God spoke to a particular people in a particular place. We – and every other religion – saw itself as THE ONE AND ONLY authentic expression of God’s revelation and salvation.

How refreshing to recognize that God’s Spirit blows where she will! No one has a monopoly on God’s wisdom nor God’s spirit.

I look at the history of the Church. People insist that the teachings of the Church are absolute and cannot be changed. Every teaching is cast in stone and is considered irreformable . We hear people say: “Rome has spoken. The case is closed.” But then we start examining the history of the Church:

• Look at the Gospels. Scripture scholars tell us that many - if not most - of the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels are really the words of the early Christian community adapted to address the growing pains and struggles of the Christian community. They were convinced that Jesus’ Spirit – God’s Spirit moved through them to continue what Jesus had initiated.
• Read the Acts of the Apostles where Paul challenges the authority of Peter and insists that Gentiles do not have to become Jews in order to become members of the Christian community. That was radical!
• We all know about the condemnation of Galileo for teaching that the earth revolved around the sun. After all, this undermined a literal interpretation of the Scriptures. It was only retracted by Pope John Paul II.
• The Church not only tolerated slavery. It endorsed it and promoted it until the end of the Civil War. Where was the Church’s leadership in human rights?
• Up until Vatican II the way we understand religious freedom in the U.S. was an aberration. It was the American Jesuit John Courtenay Murray who led the way in recognizing that religious freedom for all human beings is a basic human right. Religion cannot be imposed on people because we know ours to be the right one!
• More recently the Church’s teachings regarding capitol punishment and the legitimacy of war have become considerably more restrictive
• And the perception of gays and lesbians has still to catch up with modern biology and psychology

• DeMello: I point toward the moon, and all people see is the tip of my finger! I talk about Florence Nightingale as an angel and all people can visualize is a creature with two wings!
• We read the Scriptures and see the words, not the ideas and vision behind them. Would that we could read the Scriptures and see that they are beautiful poetry, not tools to condemn and judge others.
• Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher had a great insight. He said: Every truth passes through three stages before it is recognized. In the first, it is ridiculed. In the second, it is opposed. In the third, it is regarded as self-evident.

1. a commitment to radical equality for all people
2. a genuine hospitality that reaches out to share God’s love
3. a commitment to prophetic ministry

   Let me take a few moments to clarify what I mean by Prophetic Ministry. Prophets are people of imagination who can dream of an alternative world – one without violence, one with justice, one where people seek the common good not just their own self-interest. Prophets create a dream. And then they build a foundation under that dream to make it become real. They create oases of hope.

4. a recognition of the need for a supporting/challenging community
5. a concern for people who are poor.