The Holy Spirit is the third part of the trinity and is maybe the most difficult part to understand. Many times the Holy Spirit is overlooked, as it can be hard to explain. The Holy Spirit is not a physical being that we can touch, smell, taste, see, or hear, and that can be a hard fact to conceptualize. The Holy Spirit completes the trinity and ties the Father and Son together.
The Holy Spirit is the Word, which is love. Jesus Christ was the Word infused with the spirit upon earth. In dying, Jesus breathes out the Spirit and lets it live within creation on earth. The Holy Spirit, although it cannot be seen, gives itself with you, and ultimately brings you back to the father. Ratzinger states, “The Church of the Spirit is the Church that recalls and understands more deeply, penetrates farther into the Word, and thus becomes richer and more alive. True selflessness, pointing away from oneself into the totality, is thus the mark of the Spirit, the image of his Trinitarian Being.”
The Holy Spirit is active and interactive. It lives within us. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger states, “One cannot display the Spirit of God as one displays goods for sale in a shop. He can be seen only by the one who bears him within himself. Seeing and coming, seeing and dwelling belong inseparably together here. The Holy Spirit dwells in Jesus’ Word, and one possesses this Word, not through mere talking, but by keeping it, by living it. He who is the life of the Word lives in the lived Word.”
With a deeper understanding of the Holy Spirit, there is a healing of the modern imagination. Many times the Holy Spirit is sort of “lost” in that it just becomes that third part of the trinity with no full understanding. The Holy Spirit is hardly mentioned, or given a physical aspect for our human minds to grasp. But the Holy Spirit calls us to see the beauty of every day and brings us closer to God. The Spirit helps us draw the final connection between God the Father and Jesus Christ is Holy Son. I found class today very interesting when we ourselves tried to explain the Holy Spirit to a group of people. It was very difficult! In the end, we realized that the best way to explain it was through peoples’ own personal experiences. The holy Spirit can be seen in so many things.
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