God within

The Rev Dr Richard Frazer considers the ‘subversive freedom of the spirit’.

HOW often does it happen to you that someone tells you what is good for you, and you seethe with indignation? I did not ask for that advice! What does she know about me, anyway?

People telling us what is good for us, even if the idea is an excellent one, can bring out the grumpy teenager in us, even in our mature years. If, however, the same idea is one that we feel we can own, as it comes from within, it can be liberating and empowering.

One of the dangers of seeking to ‘convert’ people to our faith is that it can go wrong if it comes from a person telling us what they think we need.

The Holy Spirit is at work in us and each one of us shares a part of that Divine nature. Our job as Christians is not to ‘convert’ people to Christianity. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. We Christians are mere conduits for the Spirit.

When I think of the Holy Spirit, I think of two things. One is a comment by the writer Muriel Spark, who declared that the Holy Spirit has been ‘seriously underestimated’. I think that is true. In the church, there is a tendency to focus on the first two persons of the Trinity and overlook the third.

The other is the story in John, Chapter 3, when Jesus meets with Nicodemus. In that encounter, Jesus invites Nicodemus to step outside his citadel of faith and listen to the wind of the Spirit. For, as he says, ‘the wind blows where it wills and you do not know where it comes from or where it is going’. Jesus points to the subversive freedom of the Spirit.

There is an ancient idea that the last place people will often look when seeking to find God is deep within. Instead, we look to books and institutions and can fail to look inside to discover who (and whose) we truly are. As people created in the image of God, why should we not look inside ourselves to discover the Spirit dwelling in our inmost being? The Spirit is free, like the wind, blowing where she wills. I often feel that, rather than taking the Spirit with us, we bump into the Spirit, already ahead of us.

A friend of mine once likened the church to a trellis you might install in your garden. The vine of the Spirit, he said, grows up the ‘culturally appropriate trellis of institutional religion’.

The great writer, economist and environmental activist, E F Schumacher likened his own spiritual awakening to the discovery of an entirely unexplored new world inside himself, something that, for years, he had no knowledge of, until he began to explore his interior life through prayer and meditation, the journey inward. If the Spirit is at work deep within us, then the glorious wonder of the Gospel is more likely to set us free if it emerges from within than if some well-meaning person or institution comes along and tells us what they think we need. The message is the same, ‘the glorious liberty of the children of God’, but the way it comes to us can make all the difference.

“ Our job as Christians is not to ‘convert’ people to Christianity. That is the work of the Holy Spirit. We Christians are mere conduits for the Spirit."

When my friend suggested the ‘Trellis’ of the institution must be ‘culturally appropriate’, I have often wondered if the trellis is in need of refashioning in order to be more ‘culturally appropriate’. I wonder too, if we in the church do not fully appreciate the difference between the trellis and the vine of the Spirit. ¤

The Rev Dr Richard Frazer is minister at Edinburgh: Greyfriars.