Spirit

When the Spirit of Truth comes, she will guide you into all the truth;

For she will not speak on her own, but will speak whatever she hears,

And will declare to you the things that are to come.

-John 16: 13

Yes, I changed the pronouns.  Deal with it. Referring to the Holy Spirit as male is every bit as presumptuous, and probably flat wrong.  It's important to get past it anyway, because the message is clear: we don't get to be done.  The Spirit is the neglected and often ignored part of the Trinity, and that has been a problem for the Church since the beginning.  The seeming chaos of the Pentecost event, always makes people nervous.  The idea that revelation is on-going means that things never get to be completely set and finalized.  That's problematic for an institution.  C.S. Lewis referred to God as "the Great Iconoclast," the one who constantly tears down our perceptions and presumptions.

We see this reflected in Jesus' ministry, he never attacks individual sinners, he reserves his sharpest words for the "brood of vipers," the priests and scribes, the representatives of "organized religion."  We see this dynamic in the Prophets as well.  They comfort those who are in exile, or living under calamity, but they warn those who are rich, comfortable and in control.  The Spirit is intimately involved in that dynamic.  Jesus says, "The wind blows where it chooses, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes.  So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." (John 3: 8)

If you look at the totality of what the Spirit does in Scripture, and there's a lot, you will notice that there is a lot of living and a lot of moving. The Spirit is not a static being, which gives a lot of traditional theological schemes that insist on an unchanging God, and even an all powerful, all knowing God, these actually tend to be qualities that we almost subconsciously associate with being male.

Recovering the feminine aspects of God involves a lot more than just using she/her pronouns for the Spirit, but it's a start, and it's actually fairly sensible if you think about the generative, creative work that the Spirit does.  Beyond that, our tendency to neglect the Spirit, reflects our marginalizing of women in general.  We would not be without women, and yet most of the world's cultures treat them as subordinate.

"Good theology," most often holds certain things in tension, and creates at least some level of discomfort, rather than absolute resolution and certainty.  Our level of discomfort can be as mild as a slight shrug at hearing a different set of pronouns or as pronounced as declaring the divine feminine to be a heresy.  The former is a nudge and a challenge to enlarge your mind, the latter is a reactionary (and I would offer evil) fear response that insists that God stay within the boundaries of what you can accept.  Insisting that God color inside your lines is actually the true path to blasphemy.  It is presumption of the highest order and idolatry to insist that God is exactly what you think God is.

The doctrine of the Trinity enfolds a certain amount of mystery, and mystery is a good thing, despite the fact that we don't always like it.  People have tried for centuries to understand the Trinity, most of the scholastic attempts, also consequently male attempts, have failed to really grasp it.  The subset of theology called mysticism is the only place where we get to hear the contributions of women like Julian of Norwich and Theresa of Avila, until very recent times.

What Jesus said about the Spirit of Truth, indicates that there is room for, and indeed a need for growth and the ability to see and bear new things.  I have this formative idea that our attempt to cling too tightly to old things, static ideas and frankly dead theology, is why the Church is experiencing so much failure.  We have invested in holding on to the way things were, being angry about the way things are, and failing to see where the Spirit is leading us.

The Apostle Paul, not generally attributed with being a sensitive new age guy, speaks of this work with viscerally feminine language: "We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for the redemption of our bodies." (Romans 8: 22-23)  It is birthing!  It is being born!  The creation is not a sterile exercise in omniscient power and the Spirit is not some ethereal disembodied idea, it is breath and life that comes linked to our physical bodies.

Imagine if we recovered even a little bit of this awareness: we are not alone and isolated, what we are is a part of a divine breath, male and female, made in the image of God.  How much healthier would we be as church, indeed as a species, if we made room for the Spirit to do her work?