Homilies

Back to Homilies menu

The holy spirit fell on those who heard the word, and they were all heard speaking in tongues and extolling God.
Acts 10:44.46

Some years ago I reviewed a book with the intriguing title Mystical Christianity:
A Psychological Commentary on the Gospel of John.  The author, John Sanford, is both a Jungian analyst and an Anglican priest, and he has written 16 books on psychology, religion, and inner growth.

His interest in the Fourth Gospel is understandable, since this gospel has been known from antiquity as “the spiritual gospel.”  Other New Testament texts continue the collective emphasis of the Old Testament by focusing on the church (the assembly of God) and the body of Christ, but the Fourth Gospel does not have a single occurrence of the word “church.”  Where Paul stresses the building up of the community through the labour, self-sacrifice, and example of its members, for John the only thing that bears fruit is remaining in Jesus, as the branch remains attached to the vine (chapter 15).

If it is true to say with G.K. Chesterton that heresy means taking one truth and pushing it to an extreme, then orthodoxy would consist in a proper balance of truths which are in tension with each other.  In the matter with which I am dealing, this would mean a proper balance between the individual and the collective, between personal salvation and community belief.

Unless I am very much mistaken, the tendency, not only in our own church but on the religious scene generally, is towards the collective, and where the collective takes control, the individual withers and dies.  For the drive of the collective is for power, whereas the role of the spirit is the empowerment of the individual.  When this is facilitated, the whole community is enriched.

Perhaps it is not inappropriate on Mother’s Day to suggest that the reason why the collective power drive is so prevalent in the church is because of the absence of the feminine.  The Christian Trinity has a Father and a Son, but where is the Mother?  To be sure, in Catholic Christianity Mary, the Mother of God, has a place of honour, and her gentle influence can soften the harsh authoritarianism of the hierarchical system.  But Mary, at least in orthodox thinking, is outside the Trinity, and it is precisely our God-image which needs an infusion of the feminine.

In Semitic languages the word for spirit, ruach, is feminine, and in Syriac Christianity, I understand, the feminine nature of the spirit is underscored , so that the Holy Trinity is also a holy family.  But in Latin the word for “spirit” is masculine (spiritus), and in Greek—worse yet!-- it is neuter ( pneuma).

The English Benedictine, Bede Griffiths, who spent most of his life in India, believed that the East would only embrace Christianity when the spirit came into her own, and that, for this to happen, Syriac Christianity (which settled in India centuries ago) would be the natural intermediary.

Jesus, as the child of God, has both mother and father, and his spirit-mother may be seen as the source both of his words of power and of his miraculous deeds.  For the spirit is the principle of spontaneity.  When the spirit fell upon those in Cornelius’ house, they all began to speak in tongues and to praise God.

What an embarrassment for us Anglicans, with our long tradition of ordered worship!  Yet order, which Paul himself enjoins, must never be allowed to quench the spirit (1 Thessalonians 5:19).  For the spirit, which blows where it will (John 3:8) is the source of life for both the individual and the community.

May 13, 2007

back to top